Turkey will start sending captured ISIS fighters back to their home countries Monday

Turkey claims it will start sending captured ISIS fighters back to their home countries on Monday - even if they have lost their citizenship

• Turkish interior minister Suleyman Soylu said extraditions would start next week
• He has warned that jihadists will be returned even if they have lost citizenship
• However it is highly unclear how Turkey would be able to do that in practice

By TIM STICKINGS FOR MAILONLINE and AFP
PUBLISHED: 09:21 EST, 8 November 2019 | UPDATED: 09:31 EST, 8 November 2019


Turkey has claimed it will start sending captured ISIS fighters back to their home countries next week.

Interior minister Suleyman Soylu, who has warned that Ankara will send foreign jihadists back home even if they have lost their citizenship in the West, vowed today that extraditions would begin on Monday.

'Now we are telling you that we are going to send them back to you. We are starting this on Monday,' he said.

'There is no need to try to escape from it, we will send them back to you. Deal with them how you want.'

However, it is highly unclear how Turkey would be able to repatriate people who have lost their citizenship.

Earlier this week, Soylu said Turkey had nearly 1,200 foreign members of ISIS in custody, and had captured 287 during its recent operation in northern Syria.

Turkey has frequently criticised Western countries for refusing to take back their citizens who left to join ISIS in Syria and Iraq.

The UK alone has stripped more than 100 people of their citizenship for allegedly joining jihadist groups abroad.

In the most high-profile case in Britain, teenage ISIS bride Shamima Begum begged to come back to the UK after she gave birth in a prison camp.

But the UK government refused to let her return, and then-Home Secretary Sajid Javid stripped her of her British citizenship.

On top of that, detention camps in Syria are believed to be holding more than 10,000 militants, including some 2,000 foreign fighters.

In addition, tens of thousands of ISIS-linked women and children are held at the al-Hol camp in north-eastern Syria.

Security experts have warned it may be difficult to prove criminal charges against hundreds of fighters, meaning dozens or even hundreds of ISIS supporters would walk free in Europe.

French jihadists made up the largest contingent of European ISIS recruits, it is believed.

An ISIS cell of French and Belgian fighters previously crossed from Syria into Turkey and launched deadly attacks on Paris and Brussels in 2015 and 2016.
Donald Trump has also previously threatened to 'drop' jihadists at Europe's borders if Britain, France and Germany do not take their fighters back.


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Attack: Turkey unveils its flag next to that of a Syrian rebel group at a former Kurdish headquarters in northern Syria last month following Ankara's military assault

The President called his European allies a 'tremendous disappointment' in a furious attack last month, just moments after he announced the death of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

Trump warned the U.S. would not pay for hundreds of jihadists to be held at Guantanamo Bay 'for the next 50 years'.

Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan was in Budapest yesterday where he renewed his separate threat to throw open Europe's gates to Syrian refugees.

Turkey hosts nearly four million of them and has helped to guard Europe's borders under a deal with EU leaders in 2015 that he has repeatedly threatened to tear up.

'Whether or not support comes, we will continue to host our guests, but only up to a point,' Erdogan said.

'If we see that this does not work, just like I said before, we will have no option left but to open the gates. If we open the gates, it is obvious where they will go.'

Hundreds of people gathered to protest his visit in Budapest, calling him a 'genocidal dictator' in the wake of Turkey's military assault on northern Syria.

Around a million Syrians moved to Germany at the height of the refugee crisis in 2015 and the influx has caused a series of political headaches for Angela Merkel ever since.

Turkey has said it hopes to resettle more than a quarter of its Syrian refugees in the former Kurdish territory it has carved out in Syria.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...me-Monday.html

Turkey Will Start Deporting ISIS Fighters on Monday

NOVEMBER 10, 2019 / 4:37 AM / UPDATED 8 HOURS AGO

French IS suspects want to go home, and 'go on with my life'


SULUK, Syria (Reuters) - Three French women who escaped from a camp for suspected jihadists in northern Syria say they want to go home and face whatever legal action France requires over their alleged links to the Islamic State (IS) militant group.

The three, interviewed in Syria’s Suluk town, controlled by Syrian rebels backed by Turkey, said they had fled during the chaos of Turkey’s incursion into Syria last month and turned themselves over to Turkish forces in hopes of returning home.

The women, who declined to give their names, suggested they were prepared to go France for the sake of their children, adding that conditions in the camp in Ain Issa, run by the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), had been very hard.

The women gave no details of their life before detention. They are believed to be among the wives and children of former IS fighters killed or detained after the jihadist group was expelled from its strongholds in Iraq and Syria.

Ankara’s unilateral offensive angered Washington and Turkey’s main European NATO allies, who fear a return of IS in the region. European countries are especially concerned about foreign Islamic State fighters and adult relatives returning to Europe.

France has said citizens who joined the militant group, which operated in both Syria and Iraq, should be tried near where crimes were committed.

However Turkey says it will start repatriating IS detainees to their own countries on Monday, sending them back even if their citizenships have been revoked.

The women’s preferred destination was France.

“We want to go back for our children to go on with their lives,” said one of the women, who like the others wore the niqab or full face veil.

“I’ve been here for five years and I want to go back and go on with my life, go back to the time I lost. That’s it.”

A second woman said she wanted to return to France “quickly” and whatever the French courts decided was “not a problem”.

Their lives in the detention had been difficult. “Children got sick very quickly. There was not much to eat,” she said. “I want to go back to France with my son, (who is) 2-12 years old.”

A third woman said: “We have no problems with a ruling in France. It is for that reason that we handed ourselves over to the Turks, to go back to our country.”

Turkey launched an offensive into northeastern Syria against the Kurdish YPG militia last month following a decision by U.S. President Donald Trump to withdraw troops from the region. The move prompted widespread concern over the fate of Islamic State prisoners in the region.

The YPG is the main element of the SDF, which has been a leading U.S. ally in beating back IS in the region. It has kept thousands of jihadists in jails across northeastern Syria.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-syria-security-islamicstate-france/french-is-suspects-want-to-go-home-and-go-on-with-my-life-idUSKBN1XK0BN

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