Iraq Could Take Reins in Handling Foreign ISIS Detainees

Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi suggested during his weekly press conference on Tuesday that Iraq is willing to take the lead in efforts to handle the large number of foreign ISIS detainees caught in the course of the war.

Abdul-Mahdi said Iraq was intending to charge any ISIS detainees involved in attacks on Iraqi territory, but was also willing to take non-Iraqi ISIS detainees from Syria and would also help repatriate those foreign citizens to their countries of origin, if those countries are willing.

This could be the most straightforward solution to the question of ISIS detainees, as the Syrian Kurds are holding a lot of them, and clearly don’t want to be the long-term solution to that. The US probably wouldn’t be happy with the Assad government getting involved, given their hostility to Assad, but the Iraqi government could be a more palatable alternative.

Most of the international community also has ties with the Iraqi government, which might make repatriation more simple from them than from either Assad or the Kurdish YPG. The biggest downside is that a lot of European countries seem not to want the detainees back, so Iraq may be setting itself up to get stuck with a lot of detainees to manage.