Islamic State Foreign Collaborators

"What is inevitable is that the government will continue to create obstacles ... they will continue to delay."

"They'll continue to create secret frameworks without notice, and then change their position at the last minute. That's what's inevitable."

"Yes, it's complicated. And yes, it's difficult. And yes, it's challenging. And yes, there are logistical [challenges]."

"But what we're talking about here is the life and liberty of 23 Canadian men, women and children."

"There is no reason why these constitutional violations need to continue. Canada has the consent [to bring citizens home]."

"They have the ability. They've done it already without incident."

Lawrence Greenspon, lawyer representing ISIL detainees, Al Hol Camp, Syria 

 

The camp where foreigners are kept by the Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces is a squalid, miserable place filled with women and children living squalid miserable lives behind barbed wire. Some of those incarcerated are hard-core Islamist members of Islamic State of Iraq and Levant, and some are not of that ilk entirely. It is the hard-core Islamists that virtually govern the interior of the camp and those who fail to subscribe to their version of Islam are known to have been murdered, while all others live in fear.

The camps housing the ISIL male members are also densely crowded and squalid, miserable places to spend hours, days, months, years. So it is helpful to remember that these men did not hesitate to brutalize and murder thousands of Iraqis and Syrians, along with Yazidis who faced a genocidal effort on the part of ISIL jihadis who slaughtered Yazidi men, and took women and children into slavery, many of whom have never been returned.

Islamic State favoured producing shocking videos of captured British and American journalists and humanitarian care workers whom they filmed being hanged, set on fire in cages, crucified and most horribly photographic of all complete with mocking commentary, beheaded. The grislier the mode of death, the more viral their reputation as vendors of lethal terror, a bleak, dark celebrity they valued hugely. Their reputation as conscienceless purveyors of torture and death made them invincible.

 

Children at the Kurdish-run Al Hol detention camp in northern Syria in March. Some 70,000 people have been living in increasingly dire conditions there.  Credit...Ivor Prickett for The New York Times

Military opposition melted away as they advanced to occupy greater swaths of territory in Iraq and Syria, expanding their 'caliphate', spreading terror and subduing a cringing populace the military tasked to defend the citizens had abandoned. These are the prisoners that Kurdish defence forces rounded up and incarcerated to help make the world a safer, more sane place. Kurdish defense forces, unlike the two countries' formal military forces were fearless in combating the ISIL militias and protecting the minority groups they terrorized.

Now, the Federal Court of Canada is hearing arguments for Canada to rise to its international obligations to repatriate Canadian citizens who chose to join this odious group of murdering Islamists. Their family members in Canada have spearheaded a drive to have 23 Canadians returned to Canada, citing the violation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms by ignoring their plight abroad as prisoners. Canada is held to have breached its international obligations according to a United Nations special rapporteur by not repatriating these extremist fanatics.

Two ISIL-linked women and their children have previously been brought back to Canada, both women immediately arrested, one now free on bail conditions. As for other countries, France has absorbed 58 of its ISIL members, Australia 17 nationals, Germany a dozen, Netherlands, 40, Russia 38 and Britain two. Family members of these ISIL prisoners are looking for a declaration that the government's lack of action is unreasonable; they seek a formal repatriation of the detainees, emergency travel documents and authorization of a Canadian representative to accompany them on their return to Canada.

A 1960s-era government prison in Hasaka, Syria, that the Syrian Democratic Forces has used to detain male members of ISIS.  Credit...Charlie Savage/The New York Times

Canada's Responsibilities for its Islamic State Citizens

"Those Canadian citizens who came here, they came to kill us and they came to kill our kids and to destroy our towns."
"And the moment that we arrested them and had them in our prisons or our camps, we were saving the Canadian people in Canada. We were preventing them from doing any terrorist attacks."
“So doing nothing towards those citizens, [Canada refusing to repatriate them to take them off Kurdish hands currently responsible for them], that’s really not respectful for the sacrifice that we have done."
"The Canadian citizens who are here, they are six men and 12 women and some kids so when we talk about Canada … it’s as big as 10 million metres squared. It’s a very big country compared to our country [Kurdistan]."
"I’m just surprised how a big country like Canada cannot take six or 12 citizens to their country."
"The situation is really getting worse. We have those women in our hands, and every day, they are taking care of the kids, how to make them ISIS, how to make them follow ISIS ideology."
Mustafa Bali, spokesman, Syrian Democratic Forces

"I think it was pretty clear from our experience in Al-Hawl that there’s a small subset of women who kind of run the show at the camp, who are very much kind of overpowering a lot of the other women in the camp, policing what they wear, policing what they can say, policing how they act."
Foreign fighter expert Prof. Amarnath Amarasingam, Queens University, Kingston, Ontario

"The reality is that these individuals are Canada’s problem, yesterday, today and tomorrow. If they show up at our consulates or embassies, they will be a very real problem."
"If they help to reconstitute the Islamic State, they will be an even bigger one. And if they conduct terrorist attacks and take more lives, that will be on us."
Former Canadian Security Intelligence Service analyst Jessica Davis

At Al-Hawl camp in northern Syria, children watch as women confront Kurdish guards in a confrontation that quickly turned violent. Stewart Bell

For the past six months and more, since the Islamic State geographic caliphate was fully dissolved, Al-Hawl (Hol) camp in Syrian Kurdistan has housed an estimated 70,000 ISIL family members, women and children. Among them are 40 Canadians. Along with other foreign-sourced women who were pleased and excited to become part of a bold new Islamist enterprise in the creation of a dominating caliphate whose geographic presence was meant to expand, just as its ideology continues to fester in the Middle East and beyond.

The Canadian government -- like most other Western governments whose citizens answered the call to jihad and fled to Turkey to enter Syria and join the Islamic State terrorist group -- has no intention to reclaim its citizens. This is the very same government that overturned the previous Conservative-led government which had legislated a revocation of citizenship to any Canadians of immigrant status who left the country to go abroad to fight in the name of terrorist jihad with Islamic State. Justin Trudeau made it clear that to him, "A Canadian is a Canadian" and he would have no part of a two-tier citizenship system.

So these are still Canadians, their citizenship is intact (unlike Britain which detached their citizens), but the Liberal government sees no need to exert itself to relieve the pressure on the Kurds whose ill fortune it has been not only to be forced to be the only reliable fighting force to counter the malevolent deadly threat of Islamic State, but to imprison and to guard them, at the cost of manpower and treasury, attempting to handle a poisonous situation no other country is willing to undertake, much less assist with.

Al-Hawl Camp,  Associated Press

As for those Canadian Islamic State members who have returned of their own volition to Canada, many are free to roam the streets of the country, (instead of being peremptorily imprisoned) while Canada's security and intelligence agents twist their hands, and bemoan the fact that unless they are able to amass hard evidence directly implicating these ISIL stalwarts, arresting and imprisoning, much less trying them for the crimes they are suspected to have been involved with, won't pass muster under Canadian law.

The Turkish military invasion of southeast Syria enabled by a brain-distracted Trump administration has had the effect of disabling the Kurdish military from its preoccupation with ferreting out ISIL sleeper cells, as they must now respond to the defence of their nation and their people. Moreover, the hundreds of Kurdish YPG fighters deployed as guards over the prison camps housing tens of thousands of ISIL members and those of their families have been hollowed out in numbers, responding to the emergency imposed by Turkish President Erdogan's ambition to annihilate the YPG 'terrorists' and establish a 'safe corridor' between Turkey and Syria.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan's plan is to forcibly dump Syrian refugees, an estimated two million of the three-and-a-half million living in squalid refugee camps inside Turkey, fearful of returning to Syria where the Baathist regime's Alawite President Bashar al-Assad will resume barrel-and-chemical-bombing them once again. In forcing the Syrian Democratic Forces to withdraw their guards for the urgency of the battlefield against Turkish invasion, the fears now focus on Islamic State prisoners being freed from their prison custody, enabled to resume their reign of terror, as a result.

In the Al-Hawl prison camp where the ISIL women and children are incarcerated, a message from ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi called for his supporters to free the women from what he called the "prisons of humiliation", pleasing the women no end. They had, in effect, the hard-core among them, been effectively running the camp along an Islamic State model, in defiance of the Kurdish guards, and even threatening them with knives and cudgels.

The Kurdish guards speak of the camp as a "ticking time bomb". A dismembered body, days ago, was discovered in a septic tank at Al-Hawl. Some time later the body of a 20-year-old women was found as well, with 16 fatal stab wounds, according to a camp official. Last month, a 14-year-old girl had been murdered, her penalty for refusing to wear a niqab. Guards have reportedly been stabbed by these ferociously Islamist-violent woman of Islamic State. Little wonder that the camp has been described as a "mini caliphate".

Somehow, the camp women have been able to take possession of cellphones, of knives and even, it was reported, guns. The 400 guards who were responsible for the camp prior to this week's redeployment, make no pretense that the women haven't taken command of the day-to-day operations of the camp. They have been making efforts to smuggle themselves out of the camp, efforts that increased after they were called on to "rise up" by Baghdadi.

Guards at Al-Hawl camp in northern Syria arrest women accused of gathering to whip a woman for violating their religious code. Stewart Bell

 

Evacuating Baghouz, Syria

Smoke and fire billows after the shelling of Islamic State’s last holdout of Baghouz by Kurdish-led forces backed by US warplanes   Photograph: Delil Souleiman/AFP/Getty Images

"More than 6,000 people have fled or left Baghouz within the past 48 hours and more are expected to arrive to the reception areas."
"There are a large number of fighters who are inside [Baghouz] and do not want to surrender."
Adnan Afrin, spokesman and commander, SDF

"[Baghouz is a] horror film. [There is a] massacre [inside; constant shooting]."
"There were] no more homes, we live underground in tunnels and tents."
Dorothee Maquere, widow of French ISIL fighter

The families of ISIL fighters are believed to be among the latest civilians to flee [Bulent Kilic/AFP]

Among the civilians evacuating from the besieged village there are groups cursing the SDF, and shouting "Islamic State will remain!". Defiant as complete defeat looms, they are aggressive and scream their hatsez of the infidels. Rowdy, aggressive and defiant women gather in groups to declare their undying faith and screaming that "Islamic State will stay, God is great, Islamic State will stay, God is great!"

Their belief and their faith undiminished despite the clear evidence before them that their caliphate is no more. A caliphate which at its height four years ago ruled over 7.7 million people, according to Operation Inherent Resolve (CITE-OIR) the coalition fighting ISIL. Since its peak the caliphate's conquest of a third of Syria and Iraq netted it an annual revenue of $1.9 billion in 2014, much of it in oil sales from the conquered territory it exploited which was reduced two years later to $870-million by the calculation of the International Centre for the Study of Radicalization and Political Violence, King's College London.

Nonetheless, territory lost, factored in along with the loss of its operating funds. An estimation in July 2018 by a UN monitoring committee warned that membership in the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant remained between 20,000 and 30,000. And even now, while the final geographic position of the terrorist group is on the cusp of vanishing, there are reports out of Iraq that ISIL has been busy setting up new groups in the country.

People who fled Baghouz are transported in an area controlled by the Kurdish-led SDF

Photograph: Bülent Kılıç/AFP/Getty Images

The stepped-up assault by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces bringing them another step closer to vacating the village entirely of its terrorists while the evacuation of civilians is ongoing has yielded the emergence of hundreds of defeated fighters along with women and children. One of the women married to a prominent French ISIL member who was killed on the weekend during a mortar barrage spoke of continual shooting in the village where to avoid crossfire people had to remain flat on the ground.

 

Her seven year-old daughter was killed, another daughter wounded by an explosion several weeks earlier while two other sons had been killed in a mortar attack and Syrian government fire. Her losses borne alongside the loss of the dream of an Islamic State caliphate. The women don't hesitate to express their loathing for the Kurdish forces under whose oversight their futures lie for the present time. With the children remaining to her she will be trucked along with other women and children to a designated holding camp.

 

The Kurds had arranged a safe corridor where civilians left in the village, along with wives and children of the ISIL fighters could be evacuated. Arranging and conducting the evacuation along with the process of documentation and trucking them to camps consumed the time and attention of the SDF, giving a breathing space to the die-hard fighters refusing to surrender their weapons. Then on Wednesday, about 400 of the Islamic State fighters did do just that.

 

A Russian woman who evacuated with her three children responded when asked what the situation inside Baghouz was like, with one word in Arabic: "Fear". She too a widow, her husband recently killed in an air strike. Yet another woman in her mid-20s identified herself as Reena from Hama and spoke of waiting for her husband to emerge from an ISIL prison, there for months after he killed an ISIL member, retaliating "for his baby daughter being killed in an airstrike", she said.

 

On Monday alone, SDF spokesman Mustafa Bali tweeted that 3,000 people exited Baghouz through the humanitarian corridor the Kurdish forces had established. Altogether, since the siege and fighting began to retake Baghouz from ISIL, over ten thousand people left, with black-robed women and children moved on trucks heading into the desert to the camp locations for displaced people to the north. 

 

A large number among those leaving Monday were ISIL fighters who "surrendered to our forces", said Kurdish spokesman Bali. They were transported to detention facilities. It remains unclear how many civilians and ISIL fighters remain inside the village, but the estimate is that they have been reduced to hundreds from recent thousands.

People ride in a truck after being evacuated out of the last territory held by ISIL fighters [Andrea Rosa/AP]