Thousands of Islamic State prisoners are poised to escape their Kurdish captors while Turkey assaults northern Syria.
The Syrian Democratic Forces hold about 11,000 ISIS prisoners spread across more than 30 detention centers, many located close to the Turkish border and in the assault path. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan launched “Operation Peace Spring” on Wednesday, reporting the news himself on Twitter.
The White House pulled United States forces from northeast Syria on Sunday, saying Turkey would be responsible “for all ISIS fighters in the area captured over the past two years.”
President Trump suggested Monday where the captives should go.
“I said I want them to go back to Germany. To France. To the different European countries from where they came,” Trump said. “And I said to the European countries, I said to all of them, take the people back. And they said, ‘No, no, no, we don’t want them back.’ I said they came from Germany. They came from France. Take them back.”
“So I told President Erdoğan it’s gonna be your responsibility,” Trump said. “So who is responsible? It’s really Russia. It’s Turkey. It’s Iran. It’s Iraq. And it’s Syria.”
But no agreement seems to be in place for a prisoner transfer between Turkey and the YPG. Turkey considers the YPG an offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers’ party, or PKK, a separatist movement that battled the Turkish government for decades. An expected clash between the YPG and Turkey would create an opportunity for ISIS, observers said.
“I think it’s nearly impossible for an orderly transfer of these ISIS detention facilities from the SDF to Turkey,” Aykan Erdemir, a former Turkish lawmaker told the Washington Examiner. “Some of these detention centers are deep south, so it wouldn’t be possible for Turkish forces to reach there. Second, the more the fighting between SDF and Turkish troops and proxies intensifies, the less these detention facilities will be a priority for either of the actors involved.”
Some SDF forces already have abandoned the detention centers, creating a “recipe for disaster,” said Erdemir, a fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
Recruiters for ISIS have targeted the detention centers, bribing guards to release prisoners, who frequently have rioted. The prison camps are temporary, “pop up” facilities — from which captives have tried to escape.
“We’ve seen a number of attempted jailbreaks,” State Department official Nathan Sales said in August. “The risk that they could get out is not trivial.”
Analysts with the Institute for the Study of War believe ISIS may have a larger plan to free detainees.
“Local ISIS fighters with knowledge of the area could rejoin and be effective in ramping up the current insurgency in Eastern Syria,” John Dunford, an analyst with the Institute for the Study of War, told the Washington Examiner.
The sprawling al-Hawl refugee camp, holding 70,000 ISIS family members and supporters, also poses a serious risk. James Jeffrey, the State Department’s special envoy to the coalition to defeat ISIS, estimated 10,000 in the camp are foreigners with connections to the 2,000 foreign ISIS prisoners in Syria.
A Pentagon inspector general report in August warned ISIS is “likely working to enlist new members from the camp’s large population” and that “minimal security” at the camp “created conditions for ISIS’s ideology to spread uncontested.” As referenced in the report, United States Central Command urged moving ISIS family members to Syrian “guarantors” or Iraqi custody if the refugees are Syrian or Iraqi natives, and told countries to take foreign citizens back, calling this “critical to reducing ISIS’s recruiting pool.”
Remnants of ISIS’s physical caliphate returned to insurgent roots following their defeat this year. These cells sporadically attacked adversaries, extorted local communities, and burned crops.
But the threat posed by the prisoners could spread beyond the Middle East.
“Foreign ISIS detainees may return to their home countries, including in Europe,” Dunford said. “Those returnees would pose a real terror threat at home and would be an immediate U.S. national security problem.”
A State Department representative told the Washington Examiner in August that two adult female ISIS members and 13 children were repatriated to the U.S., and said that the department is aware of a “very small number of detainees” claiming U.S. citizenship and was handling those claims. When asked for an update this week, the State Department referred the Washington Examiner “to the White House and the President’s tweets.”
The Justice Department told the Washington Examiner it repatriated eight ISIS members and charged six.
“When supported by the facts and the law, the Department of Justice will pursue criminal charges against such individuals,” DOJ spokesman Marc Raimondi said. “The United States believes that every country should take responsibility for its citizens who have tried or succeeded in joining ISIS.”
Western European and other nations refused to bring ISIS fighters home to stand trial — a strategy that could benefit ISIS. The decision to let ISIS-joining citizens avoid justice left approximately 800 Europeans among the 2,000 foreign ISIS fighters from 50 countries in limbo in the Syrian camps.
Although Trump has repeatedly urged countries to take back homegrown militants to “put them on trial,” few have complied. As of August, only seven countries — the U.S., Bosnia and Herzegovina, Italy, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Morocco, and North Macedonia — announced they would bring back fighters to face charges. France complained about death sentences in Iraq against a dozen French ISIS members, and the United Kingdom stripped citizenship from fighters. Outside Europe, the rest are mainly from former Soviet republics, the Middle East and North Africa, and South and Southeast Asia.
In 2018, the London-based International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation reported that 41,490 fighters from 80 countries traveled to Iraq and Syria to join ISIS.
