It’s time to deal with the jihadis

We can’t keep ignoring terror prisoners of war

Eighteen years after Sept. 11, Western governments are still grappling with how to handle prisoners captured during the various battles we have waged against terror groups around the world. This is as inexplicable as it is inexcusable ... and it’s back in the news again precisely because of our collective failure to handle this problem at any point over the last two decades.

“Jihadi Jack,” legal name Jack Abraham Letts, was born in Britain to a British mother and Canadian father in 1995. He was raised in Britain, and is, by all meaningful metrics, a Brit. But he has Canadian citizenship via his Canadian father. This week, it was announced that Letts, who left Britain to join the Islamic State in 2014 and was captured by Kurdish forces in 2017, has been stripped of his British citizenship by the U.K.

This makes him Canada’s problem. Under international law, nations cannot render people stateless by stripping them of their only remaining citizenship.

Britain was able to excommunicate Letts because of his Canadian citizenship — the Brits didn’t make Letts stateless, they made him an unhyphenated Canadian.

But we shouldn’t still be dealing with problems like Jihadi Jack and his citizenship( s) in the first place. The fact that we are reflects a major failure of Western governments to adapt to the grim realities of asymmetric warfare — a failure that seems absurd today, mere weeks before 9/ 11’s 18th anniversary.

As complicated as prisoners are to handle, you want to have them. Every prisoner of war we take is an enemy soldier we didn’t have to expend lives and ammunition killing. And as emotionally satisfying as it would be to dispatch every ISIL barbarian by putting them against the nearest wall, there is military utility in allowing the enemy to surrender. In war, you want the other side’s soldiers to know they can throw down their guns and give up. An enemy that can’t surrender will necessarily fight to the last man and bullet. That puts our forces in greater danger. This is why nations have long established traditions and procedures for the treatment of prisoners of war, and their eventual repatriation. Though military history is full of instances where they were horrifically violated, the rules exist to benefit all sides.

This self- interested calculus applies to asymmetric terror groups and uniformed, organized armed forces alike. It doesn’t matter who’s shooting at you, you want him to stop and come on out with his hands up. But terror groups do pose problems that national military forces do not. After a military conflict between nation- states ends, prisoners of war can be exchanged and repatriated. Even if a conflict drags on between nation- states, neutral third parties or the United Nations can work on the behalf of the conflict’s POWS.

But a war against a terror group is different. Terror groups are composed of citizens of many nations; many of those nations are probably quietly glad their most- dangerous fanatics left to go do crazy stuff somewhere else. In other cases, even if a government is willing to take their jihadist citizens back, we in the West may not have faith in that government’s ability to properly handle them. Sending a captured enemy back may be as good as handing him a rifle and wishing him better luck against us next time.

This is why there are still prisoners held at the U. S. naval facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, almost five years after the new 1 World Trade Center tower officially opened. That’s why Kurdish militias are currently struggling to deal with tens of thousands of captured ISIL terrorists and their families in areas once claimed by the now- defeated caliphate. Indeed, as Josh Rogin reported last week in the Washington Post, more than 70,000 men, women and children are held at a single camp, overseen by a few dozen Kurdish guards. Inside the camp, the Islamic State has essentially regrouped and asserted control. These camps, Rogin quotes U.S. officials warning, are the breeding ground for the next ISIL.

I don’t pretend that there are going to be easy solutions. Even stable Western countries that could handle the return of captured terrorists often face enormous domestic political problems. Canada is no exception; consider the partisan bickering over the now amended Harper- era citizenship law that previously included provisions specifically targeting Canadian citizens who fought with terrorist groups abroad, the Omar Khadr settlement or even this week’s sniping between the Conservatives and Liberals. Since there is no domestic consensus on how best to deal with the problem, all parties have a vested interest in just ignoring it and hoping the Kurds figure something out before a new caliphate emerges that we have to destroy, again.

If national-level solutions are out, that leaves us with local or international ones. Right now, the preference, in theory, is local — the allies provide some minimal support for the Kurds to operate the prison camps, and do occasionally repatriate their citizens in small numbers. That’s the status quo; no one thinks it’s good enough. An international solution could be some kind of coherent, properly staffed and funded system of prisoner of war camps, perhaps under the UN flag. The immediate problem we run into there is that the UN is, sadly, a bit of a joke, and any such effort would undoubtedly run into the same kind of political, financial and personnel challenges UN peacekeeping missions do. That being said, there isn’t a better alternative than the bad one offered by the UN.

This is why many Western governments chose, quietly but deliberately, to go out of their way to kill their citizens who were fighting with ISIL. Blowing up a Brit or Yankee fighting with ISIL with a Hellfire missile sure saves a lot of paperwork.

I have no objections to that — the purpose of war is to destroy the enemy’s ability and willingness to fight, and if we can destroy them in a targeted way that makes our lives easier after, so much the better.

But that doesn’t help us with the wives and children of ISIL soldiers, non-combatants who through bad decisions or bad luck ended up in ISIL- controlled areas, or simply those enemy fighters who didn’t do us the courtesy of cleaning dying in battle.

Those are the ones that remain a challenge. And almost 18 years after 9/ 11, the best we’ve yet come up with is either targeted air strikes or one ally dumping an awkward little problem onto another. There’s little reason to believe we’ll do much better over the next 18 years, but even less reason to believe we’ve seen the last of this problem. There will be more Jihadi Jacks. And someone, in the end, will have to deal with them.

the preference, in theory,

is local.