ISTANBUL—A German woman suspected of supporting the Islamic State was repatriated from Syria along with her three children last month, in the first case of an adult European ISIS member brought home through official channels. On Nov. 22, the family was released from the overcrowded detention camp in northern Syria where they’d lived for almost a year and transferred to the Iraqi city of Erbil, where they boarded a Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt.
The mother, known only as Laura H., had her passport confiscated upon arrival. She cannot leave Germany, as she is being investigated for belonging to a terrorist group.
Cases like this one are notable but rare, as most European countries resist taking back their citizens who joined the Islamic State, concerned about potential security risks and a political backlash. As a result, hundreds of Europeans remain in detention in Kurdish-controlled camps in northern Syria and in Iraqi jails, where many European officials would prefer they stay. Whether such a policy is consistent with international law is questionable, especially given the deplorable conditions in those Syrian and Iraqi detention facilities. From a security standpoint, too, the camps are hotbeds of radicalization that are creating fertile conditions for the growth of another international terrorist movement.
I have seen these problems firsthand in interviews conducted with detainees in Syria and Iraq. They have grown particularly acute over the past two years, as Syrian Kurdish militias liberated territory held by the Islamic State, taking prisoners along the way, including many foreign fighters. At the same time, a surge in support for populist parties in Europe, many of which openly espouse anti-immigrant or Islamophobic views, led governments across the continent to stop repatriating their citizens from former battlefields in the Middle East. Because of those two factors, the ranks of European jihadi prisoners have swelled. In Syria alone, at least 400 French nationals, 262 Germans, 140 Dutch, 126 Belgians, 88 Swedes and 44 Finns are currently languishing in Kurdish-controlled detention camps, according to the Egmont Institute, a Brussels-based think tank.
Until last month, Laura H. was held at one such facility, the al-Hol detention camp in northeastern Syria. When I visited last summer, I found 70,000 former residents of the Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliphate living under appalling circumstances. More than 9,000 women and children were living in cramped tents within a locked enclosure separated from the rest of the camp, with little respite from the oppressive heat. Health and sanitation conditions were so bad that children were dying on a weekly basis, from entirely preventable causes like malnutrition or cholera.
At the time, Laura H. was desperately trying to transfer custody of her children to her parents so that they could be deported to Germany. “This is all about them,” she explained tearfully. For the lawyers and human rights advocates who assisted her in her quest, her repatriation sends an important message: that allowing European captives, particularly non-combatants, to return home is easier and safer than its opponents make it out to be. Arguments against repatriation are simply “a pretext to leave people to rot in terrible conditions,” Clive Stafford Smith, founder of the British human rights NGO Reprieve, told WPR.
As European countries slow-walk or refuse the return of their citizens from Iraq and Syria, they risk undermining global human rights norms that they claim to promote.
The situation has been complicated by Turkey’s military offensive into Kurdish-held territory in Syria, which is putting intense pressure on the Kurdish militia known as the People’s Protection Units, or YPG, which operates many of the detention camps for former ISIS members. In October, at least 750 suspected ISIS detainees escaped from the Ain Issa camp in northern Syria after Turkish shells landed nearby. “A smuggler has come to pick us up but I don’t know where we are heading to,” one French jihadi woman wrote to me in a text message shortly after her escape. She eventually crossed into Turkish territory, where she was apprehended by authorities and subsequently deported to France.
France has repatriated some of its minors from the region, but it has mostly preferred to leave its citizens who fought for the Islamic State in the custody of local authorities, where their treatment diverges from what they would experience back home. Eleven French ISIS detainees are on death row in Iraq after being transferred from Syria to stand trial. In a statement, the United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, Agnes Callamard, said she was “particularly disturbed by allegations that France may have had a role in this transfer,” despite the French government’s official opposition to the death penalty. Journalists and human rights groups have identified myriad problems with transitional justice in Iraq, including a lack of due process, rushed trials and the admission of evidence gained from torturing suspects.
Cases where former ISIS fighters have been extradited or deported back to Europe face their own challenges. Prosecutors are stymied by a lack of admissible evidence, so returnees usually only serve three-to-five-year jail terms before they are back on the streets. The prison environment can promote inmates’ radicalization, so some judges in France and Belgium are commuting jail sentences in favor of de-radicalization programs. But these programs can be costly and time-consuming, and monitoring returnees requires extra resources from the state.
This is why many European countries prefer to leave their citizens incarcerated overseas, in many cases even taking additional steps to ensure that jihadis are not allowed to return home. Belgium, which in 2016 had the highest per-capita number of European ISIS fighters, changed its laws in 2018 to specify that diplomats were no longer required to provide consular assistance to citizens who had traveled to an area where “an armed conflict is ongoing” and “did not follow the recommendations to leave.” The United Kingdom has taken an even harsher stance, as evidenced by the case of Shamima Begum, a British teenager who was stripped of her citizenship after leaving to join the Islamic State.
So far, Germany is the only country that has taken a more active interest in bringing its citizens back on a case-by-case basis. In Laura H.’s case, the fact that she was a mother with three children likely played an important role. Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government is apparently also considering an extradition treaty with Iraq so that its citizens detained there could be brought home to face justice. According to one Iraqi judge I spoke with in Baghdad, German diplomats had approached him to gain information about what such a pact might entail.
The reticence of most European countries to take back their citizens who fought for the Islamic State is already having consequences. Abandoning European men and women in decrepit prisons abroad can facilitate international terrorist networking, while leaving them to die in Iraq creates a sense of victimization among some Muslims that feeds into jihadi rhetoric. Many Europeans currently stuck in camps also have young children who are at risk of early radicalization. Already, many detention camps in northern Syria are at risk of turning into a kind of caliphate 2.0. Earlier this year, I visited Tarik Jadaoun, a Belgian ISIS member on death row in Baghdad. He was being held in the same prison with former Iraqi ISIS members, and he told me it was possible to “maintain contact with the ISIS high ranks” behind bars.
As European countries continue to slow-walk or refuse the return of their citizens from Iraq and Syria, they also risk undermining global human rights norms that they claim to promote. The presence of young children in detention camps overseas, without any education or health care facilities, contravenes the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child. The rendition of male ISIS members to Iraq, where they are subjected to torture, unfair trials and the death penalty, goes against the European Convention on Human Rights. The European Union has long been a leading actor in the fight against the death penalty and a defender of human rights around the world. Europe’s abandonment of its own citizens creates a dangerous precedent that could stymie its attempts to counter the spread of terrorism in the future.
This story was supported by a grant from the BBVA Foundation.
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