The Dangerous Dregs of ISIS

[riversedge]

Now what to do with these people who have surrounded or have been captured is the question!

Dispatch
The Dangerous Dregs of ISIS


https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/the-dangerous-dregs-of-isis?utm_source=pocket-newtab

By Robin Wright

April 16, 2019

Citizens of more than eighty nations have joined ISIS, but, after five years of conflict, few of their governments have stepped up to take them back.
Photograph by Bulent Kilic / AFP / Getty

A few days before the collapse of the Islamic State’s caliphate, I visited one of the new “pop-up prisons” that had been hastily converted to hold thousands of surrendering ISIS fighters in Syria. The numbers wildly exceeded all expectations, including estimates by U.S. intelligence. The most striking sight at the prison entrance was a mound of human hair lying on the raw concrete floor. Clumps of it—some brown, some graying, most of it greasy or matted—had been shaved off the heads and faces of fighters before they were taken to group cells. “Lice,” one of the guards told me.....................................


..........Citizens of more than eighty nations have joined ISIS, but few of their governments have stepped up to take them back. “The United States will continue to repatriate and, when appropriate, prosecute its citizens, as we have done in the past,” a State Department official told me. Kazakhstan, Macedonia, and Morocco announced repatriations of some of their citizens. Iraq has pledged to eventually take back its citizens, although at least thirty-one thousand are in Syria. Twenty thousand ISIS suspects were already detained during a parallel military campaign there. Iraq has also been widely criticized for summary justice of ISIS fighters and supporters. Last year, the Times reported on the trial of a forty-two-year-old Turkish housewife who had travelled to the Islamic State with her husband. It lasted ten minutes; she was sentenced to death by hanging. In the course of the next two hours, thirteen other women were sentenced to die.

Most other countries are reluctant. The German Foreign Minister, Heiko Maas, said that the Germans in ISIS could be repatriated only if it was certain that they could be tried. Gathering sufficient evidence to detain, try, or imprison any of the ISIS fighters is an enormous challenge—unless, as one Western official told me, they were depicted in social-media videos actually beheading people. Britain stripped citizenship from some ISIS members rather than take them back. Other countries aren’t ready to take them in. “We may not be in a position, as each and every one of them comes back to Canada, that we’re at that stage where we can arrest them,” Gilles Michaud, of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, said, in February, in an interview with Global News. France could have a problem repatriating the wives of fighters. Under French law, the women could accuse the government of abducting them from Syria against their will; a judge could be compelled to free them, a French official told me. Some countries, notably Libya and Yemen, have their own wars; there’s no reliable government to take, much less try, their citizens. They also have their own ISIS branches. Other ISIS followers, such as the Uighurs from China and the Chechens from Russia, are persecuted minorities at home—and don’t want to return to their homeland, even if they were offered repatriation.

Some governments are even reluctant to lock them up at home, for fear that ISIS ideology would infect others in their jails. Richard Reid converted to Islam in a British prison. In 2001, he tried to ignite an explosive hidden in his sneaker on an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami. The so-called shoe bomber is now in a maximum-security prison in Colorado, where he is prohibited from praying with other inmates.

As governments balked at repatriation, the S.D.F. appealed last month for the creation of an international tribunal “for justice to take its course.” So far, there’s been little interest in that option, either. A week before the S.D.F. ousted ISIS fighters from Syrian territory, Mazloum was thinking more about the unintended consequences of the war. “All of those people spent five years of their life serving in the ISIS caliphate,” he told me, at his forward operating base, near the Iraqi border. “All of these people still believe in the ISIS ideology. We are forced to solve this problem with the countries that they belong to. If we don’t, it’s going to be dangerous for all of our futures.”



https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5cb50da73adeca2db6bf280e/master/w_774,c_limit/Wright-ISIS_03.jpg


Family members of ISIS fighters—wives enveloped in black niqabs and bedraggled young children—are held separately, most in tents, at a dusty, malodorous camp in al-Hawl.