Member of the Syrian Kurdish security guards Islamic State ISIS fighters in Gweran prison in Hasaka province, Syrian Kurdistan, 2019. Photo: Kurdistan24
QAMISHLO, Syrian Kurdistan,— Syria’s Kurds on Sunday renewed their appeal for international aid to put on trial thousands of captured members of the Islamic State group, including Western nationals.
Almost a year since the March 2019 fall of the last IS bastion in Syria, the victorious US-backed and Kurdish-led forces still hold about 12,000 suspected IS members in the country’s northeast.
Most of them are Syrian or Iraqi nationals but their ranks include between 2,500 and 3,000 nationals from around 50 other countries.
In the face of Western hesitation to repatriate their own nationals, the Kurds have resigned themselves to having to put those detained on trial in Syria.
The semi-autonomous Kurdish authorities “need international cooperation”, Fener al-Kait, a foreign affairs official, said in the Kurdish city of Qamishlo in Syrian Kurdistan (Rojava).
“We need a lot, at the judicial and technical levels,” he told AFP, adding that several countries were expected to come forward with assistance “in a month of two”, without identifying them.
Kait on Sunday met with a parliamentary delegation from Belgium, 15 of whose nationals are held by the Kurds, while more than 60 Belgian women and children remain in camps for suspected IS family members.
The Kurdish Democratic Union Party PYD and its powerful military wing YPG/YPJ, considered the most effective fighting force against IS in Syria and U.S. has provided them with arms. The YPG, which is the backbone of the Syrian Democratic Forces SDF forces, has seized swathes of Syria from Islamic State.
The Kurdish forces expelled the Islamic State from its last patch of territory in the eastern Syrian village of Baghouz in March 2019.
11,000 Kurdish male and female fighters had been killed in five years of war to eliminate the Islamic State “caliphate” that once covered an area the size of Great Britain in Syria and Iraq.
Syria’s Kurds have detained thousands of foreigners suspected of fighting for Islamic State, as well as thousands of related women and children, during the battle against IS in Syria and are being held in by Kurdish forces in Syrian Kurdistan.
Kurdish authorities say they are holding around 12,000 foreigners from countries other than Iraq, including 4,000 women and 8,000 children, in three displacement camps in northeastern Syria. The majority are being held in Al-Hol.
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