Fighting between the Kurdish SDF and the Syrian military just became Iraq’s problem in a big way, with the announcement that the US intends to send some 7,000 ISIS detainees that the Kurds had previously been holding to Iraq.
With massive battles over the control of northeast Syria in the period between 2015 and 2019, the SDF claimed vast amounts of territory that had previously been part of the “ISIS caliphate” and captured enormous numbers of ISIS fighters and their families. Efforts to get the international community to repatriate people died out pretty quickly, and the Kurds were effectively stuck holding all of them, including a large number of women and children who got swept up in the process as ISIS sympathizers.
The camps have been an enormous challenge for the Kurds, which were keeping an entire populace more or less contained within forever. Children have been born in the camps since the fall of the caliphate, and there has never been an exit strategy for what happens to anyone being held there.
Women and young girls held in the Kurdish ISIS camps | Image from Reuters
Now that the Syrian central government is taking over Kurdish-territory, they’re also seizing the prisons therein, and the US has decided to relocate many of the detainees into Iraq. This has led Iraq to announce three new prisons will be opened. What happens from there remains to be seen.
It’s not clear from CENTCOM’s statement if the US will be sending mostly men from the SDF prisons or if the transfers will include substantial numbers of the civilian detainees who got classified as terrorists for going to the caliphate during the war, effectively transplanting the camps from Syrian Kurdistan into Iraq.
The Iraqi Supreme Judicial Council says that their intention is to prosecute the ISIS detainees once they are transferred to their custody. Those prosecutions have always been a challenge, and how much legal review those detainees have ever seen in their years in prison varies wildly. Iraq is also urging Europe to agree to repatriate their citizens who ran off to join ISIS and are still being held in those prisons, which does suggest that non-violent civilian detainees may be among those Iraq is expecting.
The Kurds were long trying to get Europe to take the detainees back, but the complexity involved in prosecutions for many of them meant many nations just as soon left them stashed abroad to avoid having to deal with it at all. Now that years have passed, the prosecutions are likely to be even harder, Iraq may struggle to convince the nations to actually the take back their citizenry.
Being saddled with thousands of ISIS detainees not only raises challenges for Iraq’s legal system, it raises substantial concerns about Iraq’s security situation, as those prisons will be new targets for attack by ISIS remnants looking to break their allies out. This is more than just opening three new prisons, it’s building security infrastructure to defend those high-value targets.
Iraqi cleric Moqtada al-Sadr has called on the government to substantially increase their security presence along the Syrian border over fear of an ISIS resurgence. While ISIS had been relatively quiet within Iraq in recent years, their remnant forces are believed to be clustered in Syria, and that porous border region would make it rather easy for ISIS to relocate its presence into western Iraq, which it once controlled.
