About 11,000 foreign fighters – plus many times more women and children – are held at Al-Hol camp
LONDON, July 25 (NNN-AGENCIES) — The latent danger posed by thousands of defeated and captured fighters who joined the Daesh group is festering and growing in the squalid, overcrowded prison camps of north-east Syria, where riots and attempted breakouts are becoming commonplace.
Daesh has vowed to liberate them, along with their wives and dependants, while a people-smuggling network is reportedly being put together using bribery to secure covert releases.
The ruling this month by Britain’s Court of Appeal that the British-born former schoolgirl Shamima Begum, stripped of her UK nationality, had a right to return to the UK to face justice has also thrown a spotlight on the issue. As has the recent death in Kurdish custody of a British Daesh fighter.
When Daesh lost the last of its self-declared caliphate at Baghuz in Syria in March 2019 thousands of its surviving members were rounded up and interned indefinitely in camps run by the Syrian Kurds who had fought them.
This, say critics, is unfinished business that risks developing into a renewed security problem for the world.
Research published by Kings College London Defence Studies this month warned that escaping Daesh fighters were regrouping in other parts of the world and that there was now a risk Daesh could regroup.
“If we are committed to defeating Daesh,” says the chairman of Britain’s Parliamentary Defence Committee Tobias Elwood MP, “that doesn’t mean just packing up after the air campaign is over.
“There are tens of thousands of extremists, hardliners’ families and other supporters of Daesh that remain in Iraq and Syria. And we have to make a decision as to whether we are committed to make sure that we defeat Daesh completely or the ideology will live on as they’re able to regroup.”
Around 40,000 foreign fighters are believed to have flocked to Syria to join
Daesh between 2014-19. Estimates of those so-called Foreign Terrorist Fighters who have survived – some in prison, some at large – range between 10,000-20,000.
A few have been processed through the court system in neighbouring Iraq but most are languishing in camps that the Daesh fugitive leadership has vowed to liberate, including women, whom they call “the chaste women” and “the brides of the caliphate”.
The UN estimated earlier this year that there were around 8,000 children of Foreign Terrorist Fighters held in Kurdish-run prison camps.
Of these, over 700 children are believed to be from Europe, from countries – including the UK – that have so far been reluctant to take them back.
One country that has made a point of taking back its nationals who are dependants of Daesh fighters is Russia, from where a large number of fighters went to join the group from its troubled north Caucasus region.
“[Russian President] Vladimir Putin supported the idea of repatriating women and children,” says Ekaterina Sokirianskaya, Director of the Conflict Analysis and Prevention Centre in St Petersburg.
“He made a clear statement that children were not responsible for what their parents did and that Russia could not leave them behind in the war zone.”
Broadly speaking, from a legal perspective the issue of the abandoned jihadists of IS breaks down into three strands: legal, humanitarian and security.
From the legal aspect it is indefensible to leave thousands of people – especially children – stranded in limbo in these camps with no trial in sight.
Many fighters and their dependants say they are prepared to come home and face justice and even do their time in prison.
The problem is that Western governments fear bringing them home – a deeply unpopular measure domestically – in case there is insufficient evidence to convict them and they are then obliged to release them into the population.
They also worry what effect it would have on already overcrowded prisons should there be an influx of hardened, radical fighters who have spent years fighting for their cause in Syria and Iraq.
On the humanitarian side, there is mounting criticism from aid agencies and others about the poor conditions in the overcrowded prison camps.
Here there is little public sympathy anywhere in the world for followers of a death cult that inflicted unspeakable torture and cruelty on so many, enslaving and raping girls as young as nine.
But the West lost much of its moral authority in the Middle East after 2001 when the US carried out “extraordinary renditions” and flew hundreds of suspects to a remote naval base in Cuba, Guantanamo Bay, to be imprisoned there without trial.
For European countries, which themselves condemned Guantanamo Bay, to now ignore the problem of its abandoned citizens simply because it is too difficult lays them open to a charge of hypocrisy.
Finally, there is the security aspect. Ultimately this comes down to a choice for governments as to which is more dangerous: bringing their nationals home to face justice or leaving them out there.
So far, more than 400 Britons have returned from the Syrian battle space to the UK and they have presented very few security challenges.
But those were mostly people who went out in the early years of the Syrian uprising.
Today, MI5 (the UK’s domestic intelligence agency) and the police worry that some of those still in the camps are far more radicalised, having been exposed to extreme violence over a period of years.
The Home Office in London says it would like to see those suspected of crimes prosecuted in Iraq and Syria.
The Syrian Kurds, who fought Daesh and who now guard the camps, have their own problems to worry about.
President Trump’s partial withdrawal of US Special Forces from Syria has left them exposed to attack by encroaching Turkish forces.
The Kurds’ position on all these Daesh prisoners from Europe is simple: “They came from your countries. We cannot guard them for much longer. You need to take them back.” — NNN-AGENCIES
