[Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”]
“More than 70 repatriation missions have returned 1,500 fighters to their home countries, yet much work remains,” Adm. Brad Cooper told a UN conference in New York. “Today, I join you all in calling on every nation with detained or displaced personnel in Syria to return your citizens.”
The ‘citizens’ and ‘fighters’ in question are ISIS. And some are coming here.
Even while one arm of the Trump administration is trying to deport Islamic terrorists and their supporters, another is trying to import them into our communities and around the world.
While ISIS is rebounding in Syria, carrying out 117 attacks, the United States has adopted the position that the tens of thousands of ISIS ‘detainees’ left over from the previous defeat of the Jihadist group have to be distributed around the region and the world including to the U.S.
When an Al Qaeda group known as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) seized control over Syria, with backing from the Islamist terror regimes in Turkey and Qatar, the Trump administration had a choice between opposing the move or supporting it as a way of getting US troops out of Syria.
The Trump administration dropped sanctions and a $10 million bounty on the head of former Al Qaeda leader and ISIS ally Ahmed al-Sharaa (formerly Abu Mohammed al-Jolani) who along with some of his former Al Qaeda associates was able to tour New York City. Widely reported attacks on Christians, Druze and other minority groups by Sunni Jihadists soon followed.
But the real and much less widely reported issue for the United States that hardly anyone was talking about were the tens of thousands of ISIS detainees being held by the Kurdish militias known as the Syrian Democratic Forces. Unlike the Sunni Jihadist groups that were touted as ‘democratic’ during the heyday of the Syrian Civil War, the SDF is non-Islamist, includes Christians and women, does have Marxist roots, but is the only non-Jihadist game in town.
Turkey’s Islamist regime is obsessed with suppressing the Kurds in its own country and in those areas that its ruler, Erdogan, wants to expand into to rebuild the Ottoman caliphate, like Syria. During the ISIS war, Turkey covertly backed Al Qaeda, ISIS and other Jihadist groups to attack the Kurds. Erdogan did not go to all this trouble just to leave the SDF intact and operational.
The ISIS camps contain at least 9,000 ISIS Jihadis and around 30,000 ISIS family members, who maintain their own mini-ISIS state within the camps, with mothers preparing their children for an endless war. They all pose a significant national security threat wherever they go.
The Trump administration might have insisted that Erdogan leave SDF alone enough to be able to control the camps and keep those inside from breaking out or detain ISIS inside Turkey.
But the man in charge of our Turkey and Syria policy is Tom Barrack, a major Lebanese Arab donor and Jeffrey Epstein associate (Epstein reportedly gifted Barrack an $11,000 watch) who had previously been in court for acting as an unregistered foreign agent of a Muslim oil country (he was acquitted) and whose speeches can be hard to distinguish from Turkish propaganda.
Barrack bemoaned that under Western colonialism, “Sykes-Picot divided Syria” by which Arab nationalists generally mean Greater Syria, but at the same time insisting that federalism for Kurds and Druze is a non-starter because “you can’t have independent non-nation states within a nation.” Barrack reportedly purged American diplomats supportive of the Kurdish militias.
Officially, the new Al Qaeda regime is supposed to take control of all the Kurdish areas, including the ISIS detention camps, but the deal hasn’t been implemented because no one trusts Al Qaeda, and meanwhile we’re pushing other countries to take their ISIS terrorists.
According to a “Syrian military strategist”, the push to export ISIS terrorists is about authorizing a “limited military operation against the SDF” by Turkey and the Al-Qaeda regime while “removing the detainee issue as a bargaining chip.” Once the ISIS terrorists are out, the Al-Qaeda-Turkey alliance is free to attack the Kurds without a mass ISIS jailbreak.
The problem is that we’re already engaging in a slow-motion ISIS jailbreak to enable Turkey’s tribal warfare against the Kurds and the centralization of an Al-Qaeda terror state in Syria.
While most of the ISIS terrorists and their families are staying in Syria or going to Iraq and other places in the region, possibly accounting for the surge in ISIS attacks, some are going to Russia and others to Western countries, including the U.S., which is a potential national security disaster.
Around 6,000 of the ISIS detainees are “third-country nationals”.
“These detainees in camps and prisons must be repatriated by their respective countries,” Turkey’s Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan insisted, and we’re rushing to obey him.
Not everyone is.
France rightly refused to import around 200 ISIS detainees. Other European countries, some of which previously agreed to accept a small number of ISIS people are balking at taking them all.
And while CENTCOM, which is heading up efforts to clear the ISIS detainees out to make way for a Turkish-Al Qaeda assault on the Kurds, describe them as “foreign citizens”, that’s only by the Arab Muslim definition of ‘citizenship’ that always follows the father, not the birth country.
Many of the so-called ISIS families include children who were born to one or both foreign parents a decade or more ago in Syria or Iraq and have no ties to any other country.
Over the summer, the State Department announced that the United States had “repatriated a U.S. citizen minor” from Syria and claimed that they had given “this child, who has known nothing of life outside of the camps, a future free from the influence and dangers of ISIS terrorism” and urged that “every country must take responsibility for its nationals in northeast Syria and not look to others to solve the problem for them.”
So why is America being expected to solve Syria’s problem by taking in ISIS minors?
Any ‘minors’ living in an ISIS camp were almost certainly born in Iraq or Syria, not in the United States, to a parent who abandoned their American citizenship to join an enemy force. These foreign terrorist minors have no claim on entering America: a country that they never lived in.
The name of this ‘child’ was not given, but in one previous example of “repatriation”, Abdelhamid, a Muslim immigrant living in Minneapolis, left as a teenager to join ISIS, married an ISIS widow, and had a baby with her. Abdelhamid also adopted her previous offspring. The two boys, one of whom was born in Iraq to an immigrant who had temporarily lived in Minneapolis, and the other who had absolutely no blood ties to America, were ‘repatriated’ here.
While children are born innocent, ISIS members trained theirs to hate and kill from an early age. Visitors to the ISIS camps encountered children chanting support for Jihad and violence.
Repatriation means taking in terrorist teenagers already trained to wage war on America.
While there were only 22 U.S. citizens listed in the ISIS camps, each one is a potential ticking time bomb so even one is too many. One single Islamic terrorist killed 49 people in a Florida nightclub. One single Islamic terrorist driving a truck killed 15 people in New Orleans.
“If I had a bowl of skittles and I told you just three would kill you, would you take a handful?” Donald Trump Jr. tweeted about Syrian refugees a decade ago. The advocates for ‘repatriation’ might want to recall that wisdom before they bring the next future terrorist to our community.
“Repatriating vulnerable populations before they are radicalized is not just compassion—it is a decisive blow against ISIS’s ability to regenerate,” Adm. Cooper claimed. The “populations” were long radicalized. And we’re safer with them in Syria than we are with them living next door.
Fighting ISIS by importing ISIS into America, Australia, Canada and Europe is a terrible idea.
The disastrous ‘repatriation’ campaign puts the Trump administration on the same side as the terror lawyers who have been fighting legal battles to force European countries to take in those terrorists, and the ones who want to bring Islamic terrorists into America. President Trump ran on keeping Jihadists out of America but parts of his administration are pursuing appeasement of foreign interests in a way that not only empowers Al Qaeda but imports terrorists into America.
The last thing we should be doing is risking American lives for Turkey’s national interests. And yet we’re risking the lives of our civilian population so that Turkey can expand into Syria.
ISIS repatriation is a bad deal for America and for the rest of the world. We should stop pressuring our allies to take in terrorists and their families. They’re Syria’s problem now.
