In comments to reporters this weekend, President Trump focused on the thousands of ISIS prisoners currently being held in Syria, complaining that France and Germany are refusing to take any of their own citizens back among them.
Trump declared “I defeated the Caliphate,” and complaining that “now we
have thousands of prisoners of war,” though the US involvement in
holding them appears minimal, and the Kurdish YPG are the ones actually
managing this major detention camp.
Neither France nor Germany has expressed a lot of interest in
repatriating hundreds or thousands of citizens, though Trump’s anger in
that is difficult to justify, since the US is also trying to weasel its
way out of taking back detainees by stripping them of citizenship.
Trump says ultimately he won’t spend billions and billions of dollars
holding all the prisoners of war, and instead “we’re going to probably
put them at the border and then they’ll have to capture them again.”
French nationals were always believed to be one of the largest sources
of ISIS fighters. Large numbers of ISIS-linked citizens has been a fear
for France for when the war was over, and they seem to prefer to pretend
those fighters don’t exist, instead of them all being herded into a
single camp in the Syrian desert.
Trump Threatens to Release ISIS Prisoners to Europe’s Border
Says US won't keep thousands of ISIS at Guantanamo Bay
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.
Join the Discussion!
We welcome thoughtful and respectful comments. Hateful language, illegal content, or attacks against Antiwar.com will be removed.
For more details, please see our Comment Policy.
