Syrian Kurdish officials say 66 Turkish ISIS fighters transferred for relocation to Iraq
The detainees were handed over from SDF custody to the US-led coalition for transfer to Iraqi prisons.
ROJ CAMP, Syria — Some 66 Turkish nationals who fought for the Islamic State and were under the custody of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces in northeast Syria were handed over from detention facilities in Hasakah to the US-led coalition for transfer to Iraq, a senior Syrian Kurdish official and a Syrian Kurdish counterterrorism official speaking on background told Al-Monitor.
The figure stands in sharp contrast with those cited by the Turkish media, which put the number of Turkish ISIS fighters in the process of being transferred to Iraq at 2,000.
“The 2,000 figure is not accurate,” the senior Syrian Kurdish official told Al-Monitor. The names of the Turkish ISIS prisoners are known to the US-led coalition but could not be shared with Al-Monitor for security reasons. The counterterrorism official said that around 100 ISIS fighters of “Turkish origin” had been in SDF custody. “Some of them lacked documentation and other attributes clearly identifying them as being from Turkey, but were likely to be from Turkey, nonetheless,” the official said.
An unknown number of Turkish nationals joined ISIS as it swept across large swaths of Iraq and Syria to establish its blood-soaked caliphate in 2013. Many are thought to have been killed in coalition airstrikes and fighting on the ground with Iraqi forces and the SDF ahead of the jihadis’ final territorial defeat in the Syrian town of Baghouz in 2019.
