The final warfare to cease ISIS’s caliphate is now underway as US-backed forces push into the organization’s ultimate stronghold in Syria.
But the anticipated victory can be quick-lived for Western nations, with the intention to be compelled to confront the problem of what to do with their citizens who went to Syria or Iraq to join the militant institution.
Hundreds of Western ISIS warring parties are being held in refugee or detention camps via the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in northern Syria. Many others may additionally still be ensconced in ISIS’s final bastion — that’s shrinking by using the hour — within the town of Baghouz Al-Fawqani.
Experts say few countries have embassies or extradition treaties with Syria, not to mention with the Kurdish-held areas in northern Syria. Nor have they proven any choice to visit the regions in which ISIS fighters and families are being held, and put their government representatives in damage’s manner.
So what options are open to Western countries when it comes to dealing with their homegrown militants?
Despite urging Western governments to “take returned over 800 ISIS combatants that we captured in Syria and placed them on trial,” US President Donald Trump informed his administration not to permit the go back of Hoda Muthana, an Alabama female who left the US in November 2014 to join ISIS.
The US is now contesting her American citizenship, even though a circle of relatives consultant told CNN that Muthana, who’s of Yemeni heritage, become born within the US and had a US passport.
A similar state of affairs has performed out inside the UK, wherein the Home Office introduced its purpose to strip Shamima Begum, who joined ISIS in 2015, of her citizenship even though she is not a twin national — a circulate no longer usual underneath international law.
In 2014, then-Home Secretary Theresa May (now Britain’s Prime Minister) became given the strength to deprive someone in their citizenship if there have been “affordable grounds to agree with that the character is capable of end up a nation of every other us of a or territory under its legal guidelines.”
Begum’s own family is of Bangladeshi beginning. However, Bangladesh’s overseas ministry stated the 19-year-old became now not a Bangladeshi citizen and would no longer be allowed access to u . S.
Rebecca Skellett, head of the community of the strong town at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISR), an anti-extremism think tank in London, told CNN that citizenship-stripping is a policy used mostly on people from minority backgrounds.
She warned that it “indicates two one of a kind levels to crimes” and “dangers feeding into extremist narratives, that if you are Muslim or no longer a part of the mainstream of society, you will continually be a 2nd-elegance citizen in Western society.”
Begum’s husband, a Dutch ISIS fighter, has counseled a manner out for his spouse. Yago Riedijk, 27, who’s currently in a Kurdish detention center in Syria, instructed the BBC on Sunday that he would like his wife and son to go back to the Netherlands with him.
While refusing to comment on character cases, a spokesman for the Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security told CNN that the Dutch authorities aren’t willing to assist Dutch ISIS opponents in Syrian territory. But if a Dutch ISIS member “reviews at a Dutch embassy or consulate, that individual can be transported to the Netherlands, arrested and prosecuted,” he said.
And consistent with different European nations, the spokesman introduced that “foreign fighters with, or more, nationalities, who have deemed a risk to our countrywide safety, could have their Dutch citizenship (or) passport revoked.”
