Article snippet: The Danish government has been inadvertently paying benefits to citizens fighting for the Islamic State in Syria, Danish officials said Tuesday, as outrage grows that militants are manipulating the country’s generous welfare system. About 145 Danes have traveled to Syria or Iraq to fight for militant groups since 2012, according to the Danish security and intelligence services. Officials said this week that they had identified a number of citizens who, while receiving government disability pensions, had traveled to Syria to join the Islamic State, also known as ISIS. “It is huge scandal that we are paying out money from the welfare funds in Denmark to people who are going to Syria and elsewhere in the world to undermine democracy that we have been fighting for for hundreds of years,” the country’s minister of labor, Troels Lund Poulsen, said. Last year, the news media reported that more than two dozen Danish citizens receiving unemployment benefits had traveled to Syria to fight for ISIS, even though the law requires recipients to live in Denmark. Senior labor ministry officials said Tuesday that the center-right government of Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen was planning to pass legislation to plug loopholes and prevent what they called an egregious misuse of public funds. Officials said that since last year, municipal and state authorities had been trying to collect about $95,000 in welfare benefits that had been wrongly paid to 29 citizens who had gone to S... Link to the full article to read more