Europe rebuts Trump request to take back ex-IS citizens from Syria
BRUSSELS — European leaders expressed skepticism Monday about their willingness to cooperate with a request by President Donald Trump to bring home citizens who went to fight with the Islamic State terrorist group, underlining a security dilemma as the U.S. military prepares to pull out of Syria following the collapse of the caliphate.
Many European nations have been content to leave citizens who may sympathize with IS in Syria, gambling that their societies will be safer if radicalized citizens are kept far from their borders. But the Kurdish fighters who have kept many of the former caliphate residents under lock and key worry that with the U.S. pullout, they may need to shift resources elsewhere, disbanding camps and allowing the residents to disburse.
Amid these woes, the U.S.backed and Kurdish-led force fighting IS is asking the U.S. and its coalition partners to provide air support and keep up to 1,500 troops in Syria as part of an effort to stabilize the country.
Mr. Trump over the weekend told EU allies on Twitter that if they did not repatriate their citizens, the United States would simply let them go, warning that Europe could face a surge in terrorist attacks as a result.
But his tactic sparked anger at a Monday gathering of EU foreign ministers, where leaders said that they would make no plans under threat from Washington and that counterterrorism policy shouldn’t be made by tweet.
“It is surely not as easy as imagined in America,” said German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, who said Germany is discussing the issue with France, Britain and other European countries. The U.S. request is “difficult to implement” right now, he said, because Germany cannot yet guarantee that all returning fighters would be taken into custody immediately while cases were prepared against them.
Hundreds of captured IS fighters have been imprisoned by Kurdish forces in the parts of northeast Syria that the Kurds control with U.S. support. Thousands more women and children who lived in the caliphate but did not take part in the fighting are living under tight control inside Kurdish-run camps. Many are European citizens.
“There is a problem. We are aware of that in Europe,” Luxembourg Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn said. “If we want to find a reasonable solution, then we have to discuss this, not send tweets back and forth. That doesn’t make sense.”
French radicals made up the largest contingent of European recruits. French officials are concerned because in 2015 and 2016, an IS cell of French and Belgian fighters crossed from Syria into Turkey, eventually launching deadly attacks on Paris and Brussels.
“The last territorial bastions of [IS] are falling, which doesn’t mean that the action of Daesh is finished. On the contrary,” said French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian.
Among the challenges EU nations face is that it is often difficult to gather evidence of participation in violence by their citizens in IS, forcing prosecutors to try them on lesser charges that carry penalties of only a few years in prison. Politicians are hesitant to take the risk of a returnee plotting an attack.
But some security services believe that it would be safer to have potentially dangerous citizens inside their home countries, where they can more easily be monitored, than to have them float free in the tumult of the Middle East, analysts say.