Europe is ‘terrified’ ISIS fighters will go free if repatriated

Anne Speckhard: I’ve interviewed 211 ISIS fighters, most of them in prisons in Iraq and Syria. Most have given their permission to have their interview shared with their home government because they’re hoping that their government will take them home and they know they’re going to face prosecution. I’ve been working with a number of EU governments directly, and Australia, as well, to try to get these people repatriated. No country wants to take them back, particularly the male fighters, if they’re not prosecuted and if they don’t spend time in prison because they’re afraid. They’re afraid that they’ll take them back and they’ll end up in the streets and that they’ll be a danger.

Well, most of the EU countries don’t want to take their ISIS prisoners back. They’re worried that they can’t successfully prosecute them. You know, it’s hard to get evidence that will hold up in court from an active war zone. So, if they can’t prosecute them and they’re not confident that they can put them in prison and hopefully in some kind of rehabilitation program, they’re terrified. Each country has their own concerns. France is really worried about the prison radicalization problem. Sweden has a problem because they don’t have good counter-terrorism laws to be able to prosecute these people.

No, we’re really lucky that we haven’t had so many people resonate to the ISIS call. We can also be really proud that we have a robust legal system. So, we’ve taken everybody back. They are charged and they go through a legal proceeding.

They don’t express remorse as much as regret. A lot of them feel sorry for themselves. They bought into the utopian ISIS dream and they believed that ISIS was going to deliver something for them. So, they’re a bit self-centered. They complain about themselves and they feel that ISIS already punished them, that they were un-Islamic, corrupt and brutal. When they understood that, they tried to get out. And some of them did. They paid smugglers and got turned over to the SDF or they got caught by ISIS and put in ISIS prison. We talked to women that were raped after they tried to escape. It’s horrific. But they’d have to go through a rehabilitation program to get to that place where they also think about their victims and that they take responsibility that they were part of something, even if they were just a cog in a giant wheel.

I think that the timing is really interesting. I think Turkey is flexing their muscles, telling Europe, “I’ve got these people and I can send them back anytime I want.” Turkey has immense power over Europe because if Turkey wants to, they can allow all the refugees in Turkey to stream into Europe. The EU understands this and they’ll probably play ball with whatever [Turkish President Recep Tayyip] Erdoğan demands. In The Guardian, it says there’s 2,500 people to go back to Europe from Turkey. So this is a huge number of people for Europeans to suddenly have to deal with, and they’re not ready.

In the case of the UK, they’ve only stripped citizenship from people that had a second citizenship or that were eligible. EU countries shouldn’t be stripping people and making them stateless, because if they are doing that, they’re violating international law.

I don’t know. It may just be bluster for this week. Erdoğan’s coming to meet with [US President Donald] Trump and this is a bonding point with Trump: “Look, I’m parroting your words. I’m saying the same thing to Europe. I’m standing up to Europe.” But will he actually do mass deportations for 2,500 people, most of whom Turkey is claiming are from the EU? I don’t know. And if he does, I imagine a country can refuse to land a plane. It remains to be seen.