Leaked Document Reveals EU in Talks with Syrian Democratic Forces About the Fate of EU ISIS Detainees

Anne Speckhard

As published in Homeland Security Today:

Last week ICSVE researchers were
in Brussels to discuss our work concerning issues of repatriations of European
ISIS members to face justice at home. In that regard, ICSVE has been working
with EU member states over the past year passing research interview notes from
detainees who wish to have them shared with their EU home justice ministries.
ICSVE has worked the most on this initiative with the German Justice Ministry,
namely the federal prosecutors and police who have been readying German cases
for prosecutions, should their detained ISIS members be returned home. ICSVE
has also worked in this regard with the UK, Australia, Belgium, Netherlands,
Ireland, the U.S. and Montenegro, although to a lesser degree. It’s part of a
growing effort to find solutions to the thorny issues surrounding ISIS detainees,
particularly those held in the custody of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF)
where there is a great deal of instability – particularly in light of the
recent Turkish invasion of North East Syria and the hundreds of prison escapes that occurred and the concerns that engendered among the detainees as well as worldwide.

The ICSVE view is that by
providing research interview notes at the detainees’ request and with full
permission, along with a preliminary psychological assessment, including
ratings on 288 variables that are asked about in our in-depth interviews, and
our observations of levels of radicalization at three different time points
(before leaving to ISIS, peak commitment to ISIS and presently), EU and other
countries’ Justice Ministries can make better-informed choices about those who
may be repatriated and whether or not they will be able to make a successful
prosecution. Lisa Smith’s case is a positive example in that
regard in which ICSVE
researchers were also involved, as her child was brought to safety while Lisa
is facing criminal charges and will stand trial.

At present many of the EU member
states vehemently argue against repatriations, even of ISIS women and children;
particularly France and Sweden fall in this category. Norway and Finland both
faced dire political crises of late as well when one or more ISIS women were to
be repatriated. The reluctance by EU member states to take responsibility for
those who left from their territories to join ISIS is due to concerns about ISIS returnees
constituting a danger to European society, inability to prosecute and imprison
them, and concerns that they will seed themselves in prisons and fail to ever
rehabilitate and reintegrate back into society. These are not unfounded fears
given that ICSVE has already
found over 10 ISIS interviewees who reverted back to
the group after denouncing it for some time.

In our meeting with the EU
officials we repeated our offer to work with EU member states, sharing notes
when detainees wish them to be shared and supporting repatriations for those
countries who wish to prosecute their ISIS members at home.

In the same time frame the SDF
announced that agreements are being made to begin to hold trials of ISIS
members who left from EU member states in Kurdish Syria, i.e. Rojava. The
details of how this would play out were revealed this past week by Belgian journalist Guy Van Vlierden who obtained a copy of the Syrian Kurdish
self-administration’s draft proposal agreement with the EU. (See it in
translation below.)

The Syrian Kurdish
self-administration in Rojava draft agreement with the European Union on ISIS
members and families. The project is to be implemented in several stages. The
first stage: Divide the camp into several sections:

• This
  was done by sorting certain citizens of the countries in batches according to
  their ease of transport, so that we started with the simplest and the
  priorities of the orphans, then the young and their mothers. They are sorted
  according to their background/origins and the degree of radicalization.
• Build
  schools or an orphanage so that the children are brought up and present as long
  as possible during the day, far from their mother to keep them away from
  fanatic thinking. Schools can be boarding schools.
• Carry
  out rehabilitation programs for women.
• Support
  the Center for Extremism Studies to provide a database on ISIS which support
  rehabilitation programs.
• Recreational
  and sports centers.
• Health
  centers.
• To
  continue to communicate with their country so that orphans are delivered
  without father or without mother or family.

Second step:

• Surrender
  of women, who have nothing to do with crimes, of sick women (their percentage
  is not more than 7%), and those who were dragged but who turned out be
  innocent, in coordination with their country.
• Prepare
  local courts to try ISIS women, in accordance with the mechanisms that will be
  adopted to try all ISIS members. We are looking for international support for
  the creation of special international courts within the jurisdiction of
  self-administration.
• Extradition
  of convicts after having spent some time in self-administration prisons + those
  who have good behavior towards their country to complete their sentences in
  coordination between the administration and their countries.
• Start
  the trial of those who participated with ISIS in the commission of average
  crimes (by law to 4 to 10 years of imprisonment).
• It
  must be worked from the start, and it understands the dangerous ISIS fighters
  who committed the atrocities, and their number must not exceed more than 100,
  which is about 30. This is the ideal number. They should be tried for crimes
  against humanity and war crimes. Penalties should go up to 15 years and for
  life.

Financial funding:

• Each
  country provides funding.
• The
  European Union creates a fund to finance the transportation of prisoners, the
  construction of new camps, the payment of salaries, legal costs, work teams and
• build
  new prisons when needed, and perhaps participate in surveillance
• and
  many other things that require long and serious discussions and teams for joint
  work.

The second part of the agreement:

• Opening
  of official diplomatic channels with these countries to support the
  administration in all discussions for the solution in Syria and press to
  participate in constitutional commissions, for example.
• Partnership
  with the local Kurdish Red Crescent, local organizations or Save the Children.
• Support
  self-governing institutions with experience and financially as well as.
• Build
  a strategic partnership with self-government institutions to fight against
  extremism around the world.
• SDF
  participates in meetings of the international coalition against terrorism in a
  way.
• Courts
  created for this purpose must obtain legal recognition.Signing of detailed and
  separate agreements: 1- Tests 2- Rehabilitation 3-
• Support
  for self-administration.
• Court
  projects should be private and independent to try all those who are affiliated
  with ISIS, including women. It’s a project that needs financial resources and
  international legal support and the creation and rehabilitation of
  infrastructure.

The agreement appears very
coherent and logical and will support many of the EU concerns about those ISIS
members who left from the EU, but who member states do not wish to repatriate,
including what to do with their children. The problems lie in whether the
Kurdish self-administration can be seen by the EU member states as a legitimate
actor for carrying out these trials as the UN will not be running a tribunal
(given Assad and the Russians would veto it and such a tribunal would also have
to try Assad for his war crimes). Some international lawyers argue that given
the self-administration is legitimately governing they can carry out such
trials and that quickly pressing charges and doing so is appropriate.

The other problem lies in
financing and support for the project. Trials are costly, as is building and
staffing adequate prisons. Currently ISIS detainees are held in difficult and
crowded conditions and the SDF is deeply stressed by attacks from violent
prisoners, particularly in the
women’s camps where ISIS enforcers still committed to ISIS punish those who speak out against the group.

EU member states have long avoided
recognition and interaction with the SDF, fearing that they are dealing with
the PKK, a designated terrorist group. Thus it is highly important and
illuminating that the EU and EU member states are now in talks with the
self-administration and SDF and that positive steps toward finally pressing
charges against the ISIS detainees held by the SDF and bringing them to
prosecution, either at home or in Rojava, may seriously begin.

About the author:

Anne Speckhard, Ph.D., is Director of the
International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism (ICSVE) and serves as an Adjunct
Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Georgetown University School of Medicine.
She has interviewed over 700 terrorists, their family members and supporters in
various parts of the world including in Western Europe, the Balkans, Central
Asia, the Former Soviet Union and the Middle East. In the past three years, she
and ICSVE staff have been collecting interviews (n=220 and counting) with ISIS
defectors, returnees and prisoners as well as al Shabaab cadres (n=16 and
counting) and their family members (n=25) as well as ideologues (n=2), studying
their trajectories into and out of terrorism, their experiences inside ISIS
(and al Shabaab), as well as developing the Breaking the ISIS Brand Counter
Narrative Project materials
from these interviews. She has also been training key stakeholders in law
enforcement, intelligence, educators, and other countering violent extremism
professionals on the use of counter-narrative messaging materials produced by
ICSVE both locally and internationally as well as studying the use of children
as violent actors by groups such as ISIS and consulting on how to rehabilitate
them. In 2007, she was responsible for designing the psychological and Islamic
challenge aspects of the Detainee Rehabilitation Program in Iraq to be applied
to 20,000 + detainees and 800 juveniles. She is a sought after counterterrorism
experts and has consulted to NATO, OSCE, foreign governments and to the U.S.
Senate & House, Departments of State, Defense, Justice, Homeland Security,
Health & Human Services, CIA and FBI and CNN, BBC, NPR, Fox News, MSNBC,
CTV, and in Time, The New York Times, The Washington Post, London Times and
many other publications. She regularly speaks and publishes on the topics of
the psychology of radicalization and terrorism and is the author of several
books, including Talking to Terrorists, Bride of ISIS, Undercover Jihadi and ISIS Defectors: Inside Stories of the Terrorist Caliphate.
Her publications are found here:
https://georgetown.academia.edu/AnneSpeckhardWebsite: and on the ICSVE
website http://www.icsve.org

Follow @AnneSpeckhard

Reference for this
article: Speckhard, Anne (March 2, 2020). Leaked Document Reveals EU in
Talks with Syrian Democratic Forces About the Fate of EU ISIS Detainees. Homeland Security Today