Trump Wants to Send Captured ISIS ‘Beatles’ to Gitmo

Hopes to relocate several other 'high profile' captives to prison

Large numbers of ISIS fighters are held by Syrian Kurdish forces and the Iraqi government. Many of them are foreign born, and many people aren’t particularly clear what is going to happen to them, or even who will decide. A lot of the detainees’ nations of origin don’t really want them back.

Alexanda Amon Kotey and El Shafee Elsheikh

The Trump Administration is looking to make some substantial unilateral decisions with those detainees held by the Kurdish YPG, sending up to 600 of them to a jail in Iraq, while taking a number of high-profile ones into US custody.

Several ISIS detainees, including two of the British citizens known as the ISIS “Beatles,” are to be kept by the US. The intention is to send them to Guantanamo Bay for detention. The two are urging the British government to take them instead.

President Trump has long made it clear he wants to add more detainees to Guantanamo Bay, and while he’s always been vague about who that is going to be, the ISIS detainees seem to be among the least controversial possibilities for the next influx into the long controversial prison.

Author: Jason Ditz

Jason Ditz is Senior Editor for Antiwar.com. He has 20 years of experience in foreign policy research and his work has appeared in The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, Forbes, Toronto Star, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Providence Journal, Washington Times, and the Detroit Free Press.