Today, Explained - Hotel ISIS

Episode Date: November 14, 2019

Turkey says it’s “not a hotel” for ISIS, and is deporting fighters and their families. The problem is their native countries don’t want them back. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Last week, we did an episode about a law passed in California that would make classes start a little later so that kids could sleep a little more. I started the episode by calling one of my oldest friends to talk to him about how we used to show up at 7 a.m. for zero period at Saugus High School in Santa Clarita, California. Today, shortly after that 7 a.m. bell rang for zero period, there was a shooting at Saugus High School. As these things go, not a lot is known yet. As these things go, at least two students have died,

and multiple students are in critical condition. As these things go, the shooter is in custody. Before we start the show today, I felt the need to say something about this, and this is just for me, my opinion. I refuse to accept that this is just how it goes. That this is the cost of doing business in the United States. That we can pass laws to let kids sleep in a little more, but not ones that actually prevent kids from being shot when they go to school. I think that's insane. This is not the world we were promised in zero period at seven in the morning back at William Taylor, George Kent. And that whole time, just a few blocks south of our office here, the president was having a very important meeting. Erdogan or Erdogan, as Trump incorrectly pronounced his name. He did not do that. He did. Yesterday? A lot of people do. It's hard.

He thought it was a hard G. Yeah, it's a G, but like there's like a little, it's like in Turkish, it's different. So you say Erdogan. We're grateful to President Erdogan and to the citizens of Turkey for their cooperation. Now, but this isn't just a visit from like a Justin Trudeau. This is a big deal because the president recently withdrew troops out of Syria and Turkey stepped in. Right. So the U.S. and Turkey have been in a bit of a tiff lately over a few things. So it mostly kicked off with Trump and this phone call he had with Erdogan a few weeks ago in which he essentially agreed to pull U.S. troops out of northeastern Syria. We want to bring our troops back home.

It's been many, many years. It's been decades in many cases. We want to bring our troops back home. The U.S. was working with the SDF, the Syrian Democratic Forces, the Kurdish-backed forces. We have been partnered for several years fighting ISIS. Erdogan really does not like those Syrian Kurdish forces, considers them terrorists, and has wanted for a long time to basically launch military incursion and kick them out of the area, get them away from his border, and create what he's calling a safe zone. So Trump pulls these troops out. Turkey, Syria, let them take care of it. Let them take care of it. Turkey launches this incursion. The Turkish military unleashed an onslaught of artillery and airstrikes overnight targeting Tal Abyad and the Syrian town of Ras Al Ayn. Trump administration is suddenly like, hey, how dare you launch this incursion, even though we totally knew that was going to happen.

I have told Turkey that if they do anything outside of what we would think is humane, to use the word a second time, we talk about Hong Kong, we talk about this, they could suffer the wrath of an extremely decimated economy. Vice President Mike Pence went over to try to make a deal with Turkey and the Kurds and try to basically get the ceasefire put in place. That's kind of where we are now. The ceasefire is not totally holding. There are reports of war crimes being committed by the Turkish-backed forces in the area. There's still sporadic fighting on the ground. We are about a mile away from the Turkey-Syria border, and we've been hearing fighting, the sounds of mortar fire, automatic weapons, as well as grenades.

Not exactly the sounds you'd expect to hear during a successful ceasefire, a ceasefire. This decision to pull out troops from Syria and to let Turkey step in seemed to anger Republicans, the president's allies, far more than anything to do with what happened to Ukraine, this impeachment inquiry. How come? So two things. First, we essentially abandoned our Syrian Kurdish allies we've been fighting alongside in the fight against ISIS. And two, who's going to

deal with ISIS now? So the Syrian Kurdish forces that, again, we were allied with for years, fought ISIS, and they captured a lot of ISIS fighters and family members, wives, children of ISIS. They've put up all these basically ad hoc prisons. There are thousands of ISIS fighters and their family being held by the SDF, the Syrian Democratic Forces, the Kurdish-backed forces. When Turkey came in and ran the SDF, the Syrian Kurds, out of that region, it was like, well, what the hell? Who's going to watch over these prisons? What's going on with all these fighters? Like, is it now Turkey's responsibility? Do they even care? There was a prison break.

Some ISIS fighters and family members of ISIS escaped. The guard showed us this attempted prison break from four days ago. And then they pull the door off its hinges, and they charge even further down the corridor. And now it's, like, complete chaos. It's been over a month since the president made this decision and started executing it. What are the conditions right now in these prisons where members of ISIS are being held?

So these are mostly ad hoc prisons, right? They're like schools and government buildings that they just took over and converted and made into makeshift prisons, where a lot of the prisoners are, you know, sleeping on mattresses on the floor. Cells jammed with thousands of ISIS foreign fighters from countries including Britain, France, Belgium and America, captured in the Battle of Baguz earlier this year,

are now crammed together in prison conditions more reminiscent of concentration camps. There's hardly even room to move around. It's super overcrowded. There are also these camps. One in particular has something like 70,000. It's called Al-Hol, a camp that sprung from nowhere, now the size of a small town. Most of the people there are family members, so wives and children of ISIS. But there are also actual ISIS fighters, thousands of them also in this camp. Aid organizations say it is not too late to save the children of IS militants. But if nothing changes, they say, this humanitarian crisis could turn in to a security disaster.

And it's basically just surrounded by like a rusty chain link fence that's not super secure. We're basically rounding up people off the battlefield and putting them places wherever we can find place to stick them. And there's no real like accountability. There's no real like accounting of how many people are there. So it's kind of a black box, which is really scary. Are there any people in these camps that actually, you know, aren't associated with the terrorism of ISIS? Oh, it's entirely possible and probably likely that there are people who got caught up in

these because, again, like they're on the battlefield. So even when we're talking about Guantanamo Bay, like there are people there who were arrested and held in Guantanamo Bay that like it was just like mistaken identity that they were held. They didn't even do anything and were eventually released. But tens of thousands of people, how do you have like courts for each person to adjudicate? What did you do? Where's the documentation?

Can we prove beyond a reasonable doubt that you were a member of ISIS? Like, what does that even mean, a member of ISIS? Like, did you, you know, run like a local precinct? Did you run a school? Does that make you a terrorist? Even if it was an ISIS school, they had, you know, engineers who were building roads. Like, does that make you a terrorist if you worked for ISIS because you didn't want to be killed? Thousands of school. They had, you know, engineers who were building roads. Like, does that make you a terrorist if you worked for ISIS because you didn't want to be killed? Okay, thousands of people, some ISIS, some who knows, men, women, children, Turkey's leading this incursion into Syria.

Where does Turkey want to put them? Literally anywhere but there. Turkey's interior minister, Suleyman Soylu, said the prisoners will be sent to their home countries no matter what, even if their citizenship has been revoked. Soylu said last week that Turkey is not a hotel for ISIS members from other countries. They just don't want them on the Turkish border. They don't want them in Turkey. And this is the really big problem, right? Because it's like, what do you do with these people? One of the big issues is like, you know, especially in this big camp, right?

Like I said, it's women and children. So like, do you count them as ISIS fighters? You know, it's not like women had a ton of rights under ISIS. And so, you know, were they just kidnapped? Were they coerced? Were they forced to, you know, marry these ISIS fighters? Are they willing? Are they like hardcore ISIS supporters? So for example, in one of these camps, you've had some of the ISIS wives essentially set up these Islamic hardcore Sharia courts that are basically like meeting out justice according to ISIS's like crazy, hardcore, insane interpretation of Sharia law. In an ISIS propaganda video, these women sent a message from the camp where a ticking bomb says one of them, just you wait and see. ISIS propaganda video, these women sent a message from the camp.

Wear a ticking bomb, says one of them. Just you wait and see. And then you have the issue that thousands of these people came from other parts of the world, including America, including Western Europe, Eastern Europe, places even more far-flung. These women won't say where they come from, but sound British. This is ISIS ideology. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. That's what it is. They're not all from Syria, so it's not like you can just put them, you know, have a trial and put them in prison forever in Syria.

Turkey wants to get rid of these people, and so they're trying to send them back to their home countries, if they can, which means sending them back to places like Germany and Denmark and the United States. That's a problem because most of those countries are like, yeah, no, we don't want them. You keep them. No one wants to become Hotel ISIS. Well, that, I mean, is essentially Guantanamo Bay. It's Hotel ISIS, right, or, I mean, is essentially Guantanamo Bay, is Hotel ISIS, right? Or Hotel

Al-Qaeda. We were capturing people on these battlefields and we essentially left them to rot for like over a decade. And that's a problem, right? We've been trying to get rid of those prisoners out of Guantanamo Bay for a long time, the Obama administration, the Trump administration. And the way we did that is we sent them to third party countries. We asked other countries, hey, would you mind taking these folks? And we'll give you X, Y, Z in return. And they sometimes agree. But the problem is that once they get there, we don't really know, like, are they being looked after? Are they being monitored? Are they able to like slip out and go fight elsewhere? So it's really a long-term problem that there's really no great solution to. If no one wants to become Hotel ISIS,

how is the world going to deal with what's left of ISIS? That's in a minute on Today Explained. The End I used to live in Santa Cruz, California. I worked at a public radio station called Central Coast Public Radio, KUSP. And I lived with this lady who, after the earthquake in Santa Cruz, San Francisco, 1989, she made these shirts that said, shift happens. And she sold them for like, whatever, a reasonable rate all over town. And a ton of people bought them. In fact, when I told one of my colleagues, who's now a dear friend, Johnny Simmons, hey man, I live with a lady who made the shift happens t-shirts. Do you know her? And he was like, oh, Linda? Yeah, I know her. I bought one of those

shirts. Everyone had a shirt. She did really well for like, oh, Linda? Yeah, I know her. I bought one of those shirts. Everyone had a shirt. She did really well for herself, but it was kind of like a limited run. And then people got over the earthquake and that was it. But I kind of wonder sometimes, what could Linda have done with MailChimp's all-in-one marketing platform?

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but you're still asking yourself, oh, now what? Start with MailChimp. MailChimp.com. Jasmine El-Gamal, you're a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council doing research on the Middle East. You're based in Turkey, where the government doesn't want to be anywhere near these members of ISIS. And lots of countries feel the same way, except the United States. That's right. The U.S. has taken its citizens back,

and President Trump has repeatedly called on the Europeans to do the same. And when it comes to the Europeans, just to mention quickly, the Europeans have been much more willing to consider taking back women and children. But by and large, by and large, European countries have steadfastly refused to accept foreign fighters back on its soil because of the dangers they might pose to their societies, because public opinion is so incredibly anti-repatriation, and because a lot of these countries aren't necessarily able to guarantee that if they took back these fighters and put them in court, that any evidence would hold up and allow these fighters to be jailed. So a lot of them could end up being set free. And that's a really scary thought for a lot of

people in Europe. Why is it that European countries are finding it so hard to take back these ISIS members and their families when the United States is happy to do so? So there are two main reasons why the Europeans have been much more reluctant than the U.S. to bring back their citizens. And the first one is simply numbers. The U.S. had far fewer fighters leave the country to go fight in Syria for ISIS. And so the number of people that have been repatriated have been much fewer than what the Europeans would have

to repatriate. So that's first. The second major difference is that it's easier for us to deal with it because we have laws on the books that allow us to prosecute these fighters and give them harsher sentences than they would receive in many of these European countries, for example. So someone who is tried and sentenced in the U.S. and convicted and sentenced to 20 years, for example, in Belgium or Germany or in the U.K. for the same thing could be sentenced to five years. In Turkey, it's seven years. And so one of the main reasons why European countries are reluctant to take their citizens back is that even if they do find enough evidence to convict them in a court of law, the best case scenario is that they're in jail for less than 10 years and then they come out. And then they have to monitor them for the rest of their lives and that takes up a lot of resources and potentially puts a lot of people at risk in the eyes of the Europeans. Are all of these countries obligated to take ISIS members and their families back?

So that is such an important question. That really is the million-dollar question. Is there a legal basis or a legal requirement for these European countries to take their citizens back? And the answer is very murky. So let me just try to explain the nuance when it comes to, you know, foreigners in Syria trying to go back to their country. There are two possibilities here, right? One is if a European citizen who's in Syria is able to get to, let's say, Germany. Let's just use that as an example. If they're able to get to, let's say Germany, let's just use that as an example. If they're able to get to Germany on their own and they show up at an airport in Germany or at the border, then international

law is very clear. You have to let them in, right? The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for example, it says that, I'm quoting here, everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country. It's less clear if when it comes to active repatriation. So a lot of these, in fact, most of these European citizens are in Syria and they have no way of getting back to their countries, right? They have no way of showing up at an embassy and saying, you know, you need to help us because we're your citizens. But since those citizens aren't able to get to those embassies, you know, they're in prisons, they're in camps in Syria, then what the European countries are saying is that they are not obligated to proactively go into Syria, especially remember that these European countries have cut diplomatic ties with Syria, so they don't even have diplomatic relations with that country anymore.

So they're saying that we are under no obligation to go in and proactively take our citizens back, especially that we don't actually consider them citizens anymore because they tore up their passports or they denounced their citizenship or participated in acts that are really antithetical to what it means to be a German citizen or a French citizen or anything like that. So they don't even see them as really their responsibility. Okay, but these members are in Syrian prisons now being taken care of by Syrian democratic forces. they would like to see them repatriated to countries like Denmark,

the Netherlands, UK, France, Germany. Is there a middle ground? Is there a third option? Well, a bunch of them are being discussed right now. What the Europeans have been discussing amongst one another, but also publicly, and what the SDF has also suggested, is for an international tribunal to be held inside Syria in SDF-held territory, which is in the Northeast, and for those prisoners to be tried

there. Another option that is being suggested is to have all of them sent to Iraq and being tried there because Iraq is an actual state and has institutions that are, you know, at least on paper equipped to deal with this issue. Those are the two main options that are being discussed right now. And of course, they both come with pros and cons and complications, right? So, for example, for an international tribunal, you have the question of, well, who would pay for it, first of all? Under what international law would you be trying these prisoners? One of the complicating factors in this conversation is that there is no internationally agreed upon definition of

terrorism, for example. So it would have to be something like crimes against humanity, right? But if you're trying someone for crimes against humanity, you really have to have solid evidence for that because it's such a serious accusation. And there simply isn't enough evidence for most of these people to be convicted for crimes against humanity. A lot of the evidence that's being used right now against them is, for example, they posted something on social media or there's a video of them sitting next to a corpse or there's an ISIS document that lists their name. But those examples and those cases are few and far between. For most of the prisoners that are being held in Syria right now, the evidence simply wouldn't really stand up in court. It's just it strikes me as strange that people are afraid to bring these terrorists back maintain the prisons where they're being kept

and that they're falling into this state of legal limbo and could potentially just escape? You know, I know what you mean and I can see how you think it's strange. But when you think about it and when you think about politicians and policymakers in particular, it's quite easy for them to kind of imagine that this isn't going to be a big deal because it's not an immediate threat, right? Like, if you bring back people to Europe, that is to them an immediate threat that they have to deal with. But when you try to explain to them that, listen, if you leave them in Syria, they might escape from prison. The Syrian regime might take control over the prisons and then use them to blackmail Europe.

They could become more radicalized and they could radicalize future generations if they ever escape. I mean, there are so many awful scenarios on the horizon if you think about just leaving them there. But because that's, it seems kind of far down the road, that I think a lot of people convince themselves that, oh, but that's not really a threat. I mean, that might never happen. But are we risking having stateless militants floating from one conflict zone to another? I mean, isn't this how ISIS was formed in the first place? That's exactly right. I mean, ISIS grew out of al-Qaeda in Iraq. I remember when I was working at the Department of Defense and I was working on the Syria file, I was the Syria country director. And I remember, you know, in the beginning of 2011, 2012, when we first started seeing the first steady, slow trickle of foreign fighters

coming into Syria. And you could just tell, you knew that this was going to be bad. You knew that this was not going to end well. But you had leadership across, not just in the United States, to be fair, but across Europe as well, who were convinced that this was going to be a manageable problem, that you could contain this inside Syria, and that it wasn't really worth kind of trying to game it out or do anything more serious about it because it could be contained. And that's exactly what I see happening now. You know, the first time around, I mean, you could fault leadership in all of these countries, political leaders either way. But you fault them even more today because we saw this before. And we spent billions of dollars and put together an international coalition to defeat ISIS.

And we're leaving now and leaving behind thousands, thousands of them in an uncertain fate. And we think everything's going to be OK. It's really, it's just astounding. I don't want to fearmonger anything, but are you saying that, you know, there's this potential here for ISIS members who are in these prisons right now who are stuck in legal limbo to regroup and form something newer and even worse than ISIS? Is that what you're saying? I don't think it's fearmongering at all to say that. I think that that is a very possible scenario. And I think people need to understand the gravity of the risk that we're facing right now

in letting these fighters kind of languish in Syria under the control of the SDF. Just since October 9th, since the Turkish operation began in the northeast, more than 100 people with alleged links to ISIS have escaped. And that's just since October 9th. And there are 11,000 of them across makeshift prisons being guarded by a non-state actor that doesn't have the capacity to hold them indefinitely. So it's not fear-mongering at all. It is a genuine and urgent threat. And one of the ways to address that threat, and there is just no getting around this, is that the European countries that have citizens on the ground in Syria, they have a moral, a humanitarian, and a security-based

obligation to take back their citizens, to relieve the burden off of the SDF, and to help every country that is doing its part to fight and defeat ISIS right now. It's a necessary step. And I don't think European countries can deny that fact, even if they choose not to do anything about it. Jasmine L. Gamal is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. Jen Williams, who you heard from in the first half of the show, she's the co-host of the Worldly podcast from Vox. Today's episode is all about the big news out of Bolivia this week.

Was it a coup? Was it not? What comes next? Listen to Worldly to find out. This is Today Explained. The year's coming to a close. You got a lot to get done before you flip that calendar over to 2020. Who are we kidding? There's lots of resolutions you made back in December, January that you still haven't resolved yet. You know, don't be so hard on yourself. Let MailChimp help. MailChimp's got an all-in-one marketing platform. Tell me that's not going to help you figure out the rest of your year. Doubt it. MailChimp.com, that's where you can find it.