Iraq completes investigation of 5,704 ISIS detainees formerly held in Syria
Iraq has completed its investigation into the 5,704 Islamic State detainees transferred from Syria earlier this year, the country’s Supreme Judicial Council said, moving a politically charged group of long-held prisoners closer to trial.
The council said it had concluded the “interrogation phase” of the 5,704 suspects and referred them to trial. Al Arabiya, citing AFP, reported that more than 450 Syrians among those held will be released and handed over to their country. Iraqi officials have not said exactly how many of the remaining suspects will face prosecution or remain in detention.
The men had been held in roughly two dozen facilities in eastern Syria since the fall of the Islamic State’s caliphate in 2019. At that time, the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces took responsibility for an estimated 50,000 to 80,000 people linked to ISIS. Most were women and children, but several thousand men were considered more dangerous and were kept in separate prison sites.
The SDF continued to guard those sites until it reached an integration agreement with the Syrian government, after which U.S. Central Command helped facilitate a mass transfer of the detainees to Iraq. That transfer ended a long period of physical displacement, but it did not resolve the legal question hanging over the detainees.
That legal ambiguity was years in the making. The detainees had come from more than 60 countries, and although roughly 80 nations joined the coalition against ISIS, no international court was created to handle captured members. In the absence of an internationally agreed solution, detainees in northeastern Syria spent seven years waiting to see what would happen to them.
Iraqi investigators say the interrogation process also exposed senior members of the organization. The Supreme Judicial Council said it identified several ISIS commanders, including high-ranking figures, and described their alleged involvement in crimes at an international level. At least six suspects are documented to have been involved in the 2014 genocide against Iraq’s Yazidi minority, according to the council.
That genocide remains one of the strongest arguments for holding ISIS members accountable. In 2014, ISIS overran the Yazidi areas of Sinjar, killed large numbers of Yazidi men and women, enslaved thousands of women and children, and forced many families to flee. Survivors have said for years that the courts have not caught up with the scale of the crimes.
Over the past decade, some Yazidi women and children have continued to be discovered in Syria and elsewhere, but many others remain unaccounted for. The cases cited by the judicial council are only a fraction of the abuses documented by human rights groups and the United Nations.
Iraq has also worked to reduce the number of its citizens stranded in Syria’s camps. The migration ministry said more than 20,000 Iraqi nationals have been rehabilitated after returning from al-Hol, the camp in northeastern Syria that became a symbol of the post-ISIS displacement crisis. Detainees involved in the recent transfer were moved to al-Jadaa, a government-run rehabilitation and integration center south of Mosul.
Other states have shown far less willingness to repatriate their nationals. Australia, for instance, resisted taking back women and children who had been living in al-Hol. As a result, the question of how to deal with Islamic State suspects has fallen unevenly on Iraq. Some of the transferred men are eventually expected to return to their home countries, including Syria and Turkey, which is likely to deepen debates over justice, security, and responsibility for the detainees who have been held without resolution for years.