The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
U.S. is detaining IS fighters in Kurd-run Syrian camps
Pentagon’s funding of operation pulls it deep into war zone.
WASHINGTON — The U.S. military is spending about $1 million to help detain thousands of Islamic State fighters and their family members in makeshift camps run by Kurdish militias in northern Syria, pulling the Pentagon deeper into the war zone detention operations it has sought to avoid.
The dilemma is unfolding even as President Donald Trump has pledged to withdraw the 2,000 remaining U.S. troops in Syria, many of whom are vetting the most dangerous detainees, and suspend more than $200 million in State Department recovery funds for the country.
Defense Department and Kurdish officials said several thousand detainees — including at least 400 fighters from more than three dozen countries and their families, as well as other Syrian militants — were being held in several camps. The U.S. funding is paying to erect fencing, put bars on windows and otherwise secure schools and other buildings being used as temporary jails for fighters who were captured or surrendered after last year’s collapse of Raqqa, the Islamic State’s self-proclaimed capital.
Military officials insist U.S. personnel are not strengthening the buildings or guarding the detainees themselves, just paying for it.
Critics fear the facilities could become breeding grounds for extremists and repeat a key security miscue of the Iraq War. But without the U.S. assistance, the camps lack sufficient security to prevent jailbreaks of battle-hardened militants who could reinvigorate pockets of Islamic State fighters near Abu Kamal, a town in eastern Syria along the Iraqi border.
Syrian Kurdish officials said the camps were straining their capacity to oversee the dangerous fighters and rapidly depleting their budgets to pay for operations at the half-dozen sites in and around Raqqa.
One senior U.S. official said as many as 50 to 60 fighters were detained in a single room.
“The process has been tedious,” Kino Gabriel, a spokesman for the Kurdish-led militia known as the Syrian Democratic Forces, said by WhatsApp from Qamishli, Syria. “The interrogation is taking time, and filtering the prisoners has not been an easy task. We need all kinds of support from the international coalition.”
U.S. diplomats and Pentagon officials are frantically trying to persuade countries to repatriate their citizen fighters who have been detained, but so far have had few takers.
“It is critical that countries take their citizens back and prosecute them in a timely manner commensurate with their crimes,” Nathan Sales, the State Department’s counterterrorism coordinator, said in an email. “We call on our partners to take responsibility for their citizens.”
The Islamic State has lost nearly all the territory it seized in Iraq and Syria in 2014. But U.S. intelligence and military officials warn that the extremist group has pivoted to a deadly insurgency in areas it formerly controlled, and still holds sway with a potent appeal on social media for adherents from Europe to the Philippines to carry out attacks wherever they are.
Two commandos — one U.S. soldier, one British — were killed in a roadside bombing last week in Manbij, a contested city in northern Syria.
Unlike suspected Islamic State militants seized in neighboring Iraq — mostly from the northern city of Mosul and surrounding areas — the detainees fall into a legal gray area and face an uncertain long-term fate.
Kurdish authorities are parceling out justice in ad hoc courts, but the region is still part of Syria, and Kurdish control is not internationally recognized.