Local Editor

French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said Sunday that 600 people have already left France to join Daesh [the Arabic acronym for the terrorist "ISIS" group] and approximately 800 more want to do so in the future despite the fact that the group has suffered battlefield defeats in recent months.

"We are in a battle on our soil," Valls told a gathering of his Socialist party supporters in a speech. "Each day [we] ... trace networks, locate cells, arrest individuals. Today 2,029 French citizens of residents are implicated in "terrorist" networks."

"Almost 800 would today like to go to these war zones [Iraq and Syria]," he added citing intelligence sources."

Valls also noted that 1,000 people are currently being monitored closely by the French authorities who suspect them of seeking to leave France to join Daesh.

Out of the 600 Valls believes to have left to join the terrorist group, 170 have been killed in fighting to date while another 300 have returned to France.

Separately, the lawyer of Salah Abdeslam, the ringleader of the Paris terrorist attacks that killed 130 people, said that Abdeslam would sue a French prosecutor for revealing that he had planned to blow himself up, but then changed his mind.

Relatively, Abdeslam objected being extradited to France, to stand trial for his crimes and he would oppose the European Arrest Warrant requesting he is transferred to Paris.

Abdeslam, who was caught by police in Brussels after an intense, four-month manhunt, spent his first night in a high security prison in the northwestern Belgian city of Bruges.

Source: News Agencies, Edited by website team