A report has revealed huge differences between US officials, mainly the White House and the Pentagon, and between Washington and European countries on the fate of ISIS detainees in Syria.
“Seventeen years after 9/11, we still haven’t figured this out,” the report quoted Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee, as saying.
Today, of the roughly 780 men who were brought to the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, only 40 remain.
“But it proved to be tremendously difficult, bureaucratically and politically, to let captives go: Any transfer creates some risk and the opportunity for blame,” the report said.
The Pentagon opposes getting more deeply back into long-term detention. This is why the Trump administration has yet to bring any new detainees to, for all its rhetoric about filling it back up, according to the report.
There is generally a European view that terrorism suspects should be prosecuted or released, it said. Yet many European nations are now in effect using wartime detention to solve their ISIS citizens problem.
Some European governments are reluctant to take their (ISIS) citizens back from Syria. In part, it is because they fear they will not be able to successfully prosecute them all or win sufficiently lengthy sentences under their legal systems.
“Could there be an international war-crimes tribunal?” the report asked. There would be many obstacles to setting one up.
“Could Iraq take them? Its government is dealing with ISIS suspects arrested on its soil by handing down death sentences after 10-minute trials, but it appears to have neither the desire nor the legal ability to prosecute non-Iraqis captured in Syria.”
Referring to the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces that have detained the ISIS suspects, the report said: “If it (SDF) holds onto its territory, perhaps other countries would end up paying it to continue imprisoning their citizens.”
But the fate of the ISIS detainees would be unclear if the SDF falls in the next phase of the war. “And what if the Kurds make a deal with the Assad regime? Would it take over the prisoners, and murder them all?” the report asked.
