US wants to return American ISIS suspect to Syria

WASHINGTON — A U.S. citizen detained by the military in Iraq as a suspected Islamic State member will be released back into Syria, the Trump administration has told a judge, a plan that his attorneys called “a death warrant.”

The move would avoid a fight in court over the highstakes question of whether the government has the legal authority to put Islamic State suspects in indefinite wartime detention as enemy combatants. If a judge were to rule against the government on that question in the detention case, it would jeopardize the underpinnings of the entire war effort against the Islamic State.

But attorneys for the man, whose name has not been made public, vowed to fight the planned transfer in court.

The plan was the latest twist in a case that has raised novel legal issues about the rights of individual Americans and the government’s wartime powers.

In its filing late Wednesday disclosing the government’s Syria release plan, the Justice Department said the military intended to release the man in an unidentified Syrian city after at least 72 hours had passed, giving him $4,210 — the amount he had when detained —and a new cellphone.

The Pentagon, it said, had decided that releasing the man in Syria would be consistent with traditional military practice and with the department’s obligations under the law of war. It had given the man two options — release “either in a town or outside an internally displaced person camp” — but he balked at both, so the Pentagon picked the town option for him.

U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan in Washington, who is overseeing the case, has made clear that she does not think he has a right to be brought back to the United States.

The man is a dual citizen of the United States, where he was born, and Saudi Arabia, where he was raised. He was captured by a militia in Syria in September and turned over to the U.S. military, which has been holding him at a base in Iraq as an enemy combatant for nearly nine months.

The man said he went to Syria to be a journalist and was arrested by the Islamic State, then worked for the group as a condition of being freed from prison.

The government has said that Islamic State records show he registered with the group as a fighter, and his social-media postings indicate he sympathized with the group. It has not accused him of fighting for the group.