Despite Trump’s Guantánamo threats, ex-Daesh US nationals return home

Shaimaa Hefzy

Eight Americans were quietly flown home from the former Daesh caliphate in Syria on May 5, despite threats by US President Donald Trump of sending captured Daesh fighters to Guantánamo Bay.

The two women and six minors, whose identities were not disclosed, are now being resettled at unnamed locations with help from the U.S. government, according to an article published by The New Yorker.

Three other American men and a woman await trials on various charges of aiding or abetting the world’s most notorious terrorist group.

U.S. officials have said that for months, the F.B.I. has been searching for Americans among the two thousand foreign fighters who surrendered or were captured on the battlefield.

Another twenty or so Americans, including half a dozen fighters, have been identified.

Most were in prisons run by the Kurdish-led militia that defeated Daesh or detention camps for women and children. The U.S. intention is to bring them all home eventually.

So far, the handling of returnees has been far different from what Trump promised during the Presidential campaign.

In 2016, Trump vowed to use Guantánamo Bay for captured Daesh fighters.

Guantánamo Bay is a prison camp opened in Cuba to house enemy combatants from the Afghanistan war.

After two years, during his first State of the Union speech, Trump announced a new executive order to keep Gitmo open.

“Terrorists who do things like place bombs in civilian hospitals are evil,” Trump said.

“When possible, we have no choice but to annihilate them. When necessary, we must be able to detain and question them. But we must be clear: terrorists are not merely criminals, they are unlawful enemy combatants,” he added.

Instead, the Justice Department has opted to try Daesh returnees in U.S. courts and even to release or resettle some of them. But the process is still in its early stages.

According to Marc Raimondi, the Justice Department spokesman, the United States is committed to taking responsibility for its citizens who attempt to travel or did travel to support Daesh.

“We have prosecuted over 100 cases against individuals who tried to travel to support Daesh and have brought charges against several who have returned, including as recently as earlier this year,” Raimondi said.

The article further added that deciding the fate of the Islamic State’s former citizens is a legal and moral minefield.

National-security interests can conflict with individual rights; Their cases raise unanswered questions about the government’s authority to invoke wartime powers against Daesh without congressional authorization.

The timing of returns so far suggests that the Justice Department may not want to repatriate Daesh members until it has sufficient evidence to indict them immediately upon arrival.

American citizens cannot be jailed indefinitely at home without violating their constitutional rights. Yet simply figuring out what each individual did in the fallen caliphate is consuming challenge. The main witnesses may be other Daesh citizens.

Last year, the United States opted to release a suspected Daesh member after holding him, without trial, for thirteen months. He had been captured by the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, in 2017, turned over to U.S. forces, and detained at a U.S. base in Iraq.

The United States has not disclosed the number of Americans who joined Daesh, but it was small, proportionately, when compared with the numbers from Russia, China, European allies, or even nations with small populations.

Tunisia, with only eleven million people, had more than three thousand of its citizens join the extremist movement.

Some three hundred Americans, by comparison, tried to travel to join Daesh, but dozens were arrested before leaving U.S. shores, according to George Washington University’s Program on Extremism.

So far, however, the United States has taken back only about a third of the known Americans who survived the caliphate. For disparate reasons, many of the eighty nations whose citizens joined Daesh have balked at dealing with the messy aftermath of the Islamic State.