Syria Support Movement solidarity with the Syrian people
from the News Desk at The Cradle, June 11, 2023
The Kurdish-led administration governing northeast Syria announced on 10 June that it will put on trial foreign ISIS militants currently detained in its prisons. Rudaw reported that the Autonomous Administration in North and East Syria (AANES) announced the move following the international community’s failure to repatriate and prosecute foreign ISIS members years after the defeat of the extremist group.
Starting in 2011, the US, Britain, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkiye supported al-Qaeda militants from Iraq and Lebanon with funding and weapons to topple the Syrian government led by Bashar al-Assad. ISIS emerged from these groups in 2013 and enjoyed strong support from both Saudi Arabia and Turkiye.
Between 2013 and 2019, thousands of militants from around the world, including Britain, France, Saudi Arabia, and Tunisia, joined ISIS in Syria and Iraq.
British ISIS members were among the most notorious, having orchestrated the kidnapping and murder of numerous western hostages. British ISIS member Muhammad Emzawi first traveled to Syria in 2012 to join a militant group supported by British intelligence. He kidnapped US journalist James Foley two months later and executed him on video in August 2014.
After US policy pivoted away from supporting ISIS in 2015, the US military partnered with Kurdish militias to form the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) to fight ISIS. SDF fighters captured over 10,000 ISIS militants plus their families in the war to defeat the group that ended with the battle in Baghouz in 2019.
The fighters are kept in detention centers while the families, including children, are kept in camps, most notably the Al-Hawl camp in northeast Syria.
Many Yazidi women and girls who were kidnapped and sold into sex slavery by ISIS in 2014 remain captive with these families in Al-Hawl. Yazidi calls for military operations to rescue these women have been ignored by the international community, though the Yazidi community occasionally succeeds in freeing them.
The US Department of State estimated that the captive ISIS fighters include approximately 5,000 Syrians, 3,000 Iraqis, and 2,000 from other countries.
“Since the first days following the battle of Baghouz, the Autonomous Administration called on the international community to fulfill its duties regarding finding a solution for the captured ISIS militants,” reads the AANES statement.
“The failure to bring those militants in front of a court is against international laws and conventions,” the statement added.
Repatriation of foreign fighters has been slow, with western governments claiming they cannot bring their citizens who joined ISIS home amid security concerns and doubts they have sufficient evidence to obtain convictions.
However, prosecution of these fighters in European courts would be difficult given the past support ISIS and other extremist groups in Syria enjoyed from US, British, French, and Turkish intelligence agencies.
Several Europeans were able to avoid prosecution for terrorist activities in the UK following revelations the British intelligence had supported the groups the men had fought for in Syria. Though Emzawi, Foley’s murderer, was killed in an airstrike, two other British ISIS members involved in Foley’s kidnapping and killing, known as the Beatles, could not be tried in British courts for this reason.
The two were extradited to the United States, where they were tried and convicted instead. One of the two, Alexenda Kotey, disappeared from the US prison system earlier this year without explanation from the US government.
In contrast, the Iraqi government has returned around 3,000 Iraqi ISIS fighters detained in Syria and tried most of them.
