In 2019, my colleagues and I uncovered a British Islamic State affiliate held in a Syrian refugee camp. Tooba Gondal, the so-called “ISIS matchmaker” known for grooming and recruiting young women online, while publicly exulting in IS’s worst acts of violence, was being guarded by Syrian Kurdish forces. Yet when I returned to the camp, six months later, it was a smoking ruin. Initially captured by the Kurds during the bloody defeat of the IS, Gondal and hundreds of other foreign affiliates had seized their chance to flee, exploiting the chaos of a Turkish invasion to disappear into the desert.
Amid fresh chaos in Syria, history risks repeating itself. Turkey has again unleashed its militias against the Kurdish enclave, and thousands more IS members could yet escape. That includes dozens of British citizens, from young children to Shamima Begum to violent male killers. No wonder Sebastian Gorka, Donald Trump’s counter-terrorism pick, is urging London to follow the American lead and repatriate its militants, hoping they can be tried and punished back home.
The British public and Government are dead set against any such repatriations. Yet it’s exactly this policy of abandoning both the detainees, and their Kurdish jailers, which endangers British lives — and risks blowback of terrifying proportions.
The end of the Assad regime has transformed Syria, including the multi-ethnic polity led by the Kurds in North and East Syria (NES). Emboldened by the collapse of Baathism, Turkey is conducting fresh military operations against the Kurds, just like those that enabled Gondal’s escape five years ago. At the same time, the change of government in Washington could bring its own challenges. Trump is currently weighing up withdrawing from the country altogether, leaving the Kurds, and their prisoners, to their fate.
All the while, IS remains a threat years after their physical caliphate was eradicated. Attacks in Syria nearly tripled in 2024, while the top Syrian Kurdish commander has warned that Turkish attacks on their territory are further strengthening the organisation. The group’s ideology is still potent too. Just last week, a lone-wolf IS-linked extremist killed 15 in New Orleans, underscoring the diverse threat still posed.
Any breakout would strengthen the organisation’s resilient transnational networks, encouraging further attacks across Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia. Even before Assad’s fall, the head of MI5 used a rare public address to warn that IS were the number one security threat facing the country, a danger that would increase exponentially if thousands of radicalised loyalists went loose.
Given all this, it’s unsurprising that Trump should push the UK to take back its own militants, ensuring they can’t fade into the wilderness, but finally face criminal justice at last. Nor is the incoming president alone. The Biden administration, the UK’s own terrorism tsar, and the Kurds themselves have all reiterated the same message: there are urgent security reasons for Britain to secure its IS members.
Yet though Khaled Issa, co-chair for foreign affairs in NES, warns that defeating the threat is “the responsibility of the international community as a whole”, David Lammy has poured cold water on any chance of a policy rethink. Rather, the UK looks set to leave its erstwhile Kurdish allies to guard prisoners alone.
As hardly needs restating, the establishment of anything resembling a new caliphate would be a disaster: not just for Britain, but also ordinary people throughout the Middle East. Exploiting civil war in Iraq and Syria, the Salafist organisation rose to rule 10 million people back in 2014, drawing thousands of volunteers from over 80 countries. While Assad was responsible for the bulk of the deaths in his country’s bloodbath, IS’s crimes were particularly heinous. They perpetuated a genocide against the Yazidis; slaughtered Shia Muslims and Christians; burned and beheaded prisoners; paraded crucified corpses; raped gay men and threw them off buildings.
Amid this nightmare, the Syrian Kurds found themselves in an unexpected alliance. Kurdish fighters rapidly proved themselves the only force capable of defeating IS on the battlefield, winning global sympathy and ultimately direct support from the USA, UK and other Western powers. Turkey — which fields Nato’s second-largest army — had long fought a violent war against Kurdish guerillas battling for autonomy. President Erdoğan, for his part, was unsurprisingly enraged as the US chose to partner with Kurdish ground forces. But Washington trusted their Kurdish partners, and ignored protests from Ankara to offer “temporary and transactional” support to a multiethnic anti-IS coalition spearheaded by Kurdish units. By 2017, this coalition had liberated Raqqa, the IS capital, capturing thousands of jihadis as they went.
Yet these battle-hardened volunteers didn’t simply vanish alongside their caliphate. As Issa notes, over 10,000 male combatants remain in Kurdish custody, all guarded on a minuscule budget and amid war, geopolitical isolation and economic collapse. Male militants are held dozens to a room in former schools, crudely repurposed as detention centres. These are places where disease and radicalisation spread with equal ease.
Meanwhile, thousands of highly radicalised female members and their children are held alongside innocent, internally-displaced Syrians and Iraqis in a shabby camp-cum-detention centre called al-Hol. Among the endless rows of tents, female loyalists run a clandestine “mini-caliphate” — where they intimidate other residents through beatings, arson, and murder. Some even hold Yazidi women in secret slavery to this day. More than half of the camp’s population is under 12, with female militants grooming and training young boys to continue the jihad. When I visited al-Hol, primary-aged children threw stones as we walked among the tents, raising their index fingers in salute to Allah.
While these conditions might seem a fitting punishment, in truth they only create the perfect conditions for the organisation to regroup and rebuild: an ongoing sleeper-cell campaign outside the camps and prisons has killed hundreds of locals. At the same time, Assad’s fall has brought fresh opportunities for IS, benefiting in particular from Turkey’s manipulation of the Syrian crisis to launch fresh attacks against NES. Notwithstanding its claims to oppose IS, the Erdoğan government has happily indulged extremists elsewhere, allowing many thousands of militants to cross its territory into Syria. Today, Ankara bankrolls dozens of Islamist militias for the purposes of targeting the Kurds, including those sanctioned by the USA for sheltering members of IS, while top jihadi commanders have long hidden in Turkish-occupied territory.
Combined with the eagerness of IS members themselves to escape their rackety Kurdish prisons, the arguments in favour of repatriation are clear — not least when the numbers, for Britain anyway, are so manageable. With no more than 10 male British fighters left in Syria, alongside 20 women and 40 minors, it wouldn’t be hard for the UK criminal justice system to process them. As UK terrorism commissioner Jonathan Hall KC has rightly noted, a country of the UK’s stature could easily manage the repatriation of a few dozen ISIS affiliates.
Why, then, has Britain been so slow to take action? Part of the answer again involves Turkey, which is bitterly opposed to any form of political or diplomatic recognition of NES. Domestic opposition clearly matters too. Liberal commentators are doubtless too quick to paint British IS affiliates as mere victims rather than potential culprits who need to be brought to trial, whether in the UK or elsewhere. But at the same time, conservative voices are too hasty in demanding that IS detainees in Syria are left to rot, ignoring the reality that this places an unjustifiable security and humanitarian burden on the Kurds.
What’s missing in all this is the voice of the UK’s own Kurdish partners. As Issa puts it: “ISIS committed crimes against our people, war crimes, crimes against humanity, yet there was no international court or criminal justice procedure.” He and his colleagues have therefore been appealing for the West to repatriate its own nationals; to set up a proper international court or tribunal to process those thousands of global IS fighters; and to provide proper financial, political and diplomatic support to their beleaguered administration.
A senior Syrian Kurdish delegation will shortly visit the UK, where the security threat posed by IS detainees in NES will be high on the agenda. But while these officials have met with Trump and Emmanuel Macron, British authorities once again seem terrified of upsetting President Erdoğan, the new kingmaker in Syria — and a key British trade partner. And with Turkey clamouring to finish the destruction it began back in 2019, time is running out for the UK to prevent a catastrophe whose fallout will reach far beyond the windblown camps of northern Syria, with fanatics far worse than Shamima Begum free to spread terror once more.
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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/