For the past seven years, thousands of men from around the world have been held in squalid, overcrowded prisons in northeastern Syria in violation of international law. Trapped in a legal limbo, they are accused of membership in the Islamic State, or ISIS, though none apart from Syrians have yet to be charged with a crime, much less convicted.
It seemed the men’s circumstances couldn’t get worse. But that changed last month, when the Trump administration began moving the detainees to Iraq, where they face possible torture and death sentences. The transfers — around 5,000 so far — mark the latest effort by dozens of countries to wash their hands of this crisis.
The detainees subject to transfer, as many as 7,000, came from scores of countries as far-flung as Germany, Russia, Tajikistan and Tunisia. Most were captured in northeastern Syria after the fall of the so-called ISIS caliphate in 2019, which was largely brought about by the Syrian Democratic Forces, a Kurdish-led militia backed by the United States.
No detainees, with the possible exception of Syrians, have been allowed to challenge their detention in a hearing, as international law requires even in wartime. Yet officials in the Trump administration have labeled them the “worst of the worst,” reprising the chilling phrase that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld used to justify the torture and indefinite detention without charge of men and boys at the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
The U.S. military undertook the transfers, by bus and plane, to prevent the detainees from fleeing after clashes plunged the volatile northeast of Syria into chaos. By then up to 200 suspected ISIS members had escaped. The fighting pitted Syrian government forces against the Syrian Democratic Forces, which had been guarding the detainees.
In a U.S.-approved deal, the government forces now control most of northeastern Syria and its prisons and say they have recaptured scores of escapees, but their hold on the region is tenuous. Iraq, which borders eastern Syria, accepted the transfers in part because it feared the prison breaks would lead to a regrouping of ISIS.
Before the transfers, a U.N. report in 2023 found that the treatment of the detainees flouted international legal standards. Some have said they have been subjected to torture, and many have already died from tuberculosis and malnutrition.
ISIS committed countless atrocities in the 2010s including beheadings, bombings and rapes of Yazidi women and girls in Iraq and Syria. Any hardcore ISIS members among the detainees should be prosecuted and held to account. Iraq says it intends to do just that. But the odds of fair trials in Iraqi courts are low.
Iraq has a documented record of convicting and executing terrorism suspects based on confessions extracted through torture, although Iraqi officials have denied such abuse. Lawyers for some of the 47 French detainees transferred from northeastern Syria to Iraq in a separate U.S. operation last year accused Iraqi interrogators of subjecting their clients to slapping, strangling, handcuffing “with a pulley system” and threats of rape with iron bars. Iraq’s overbroad counterterrorism law makes little distinction between major and minor acts. Despite some reforms, the country’s embrace of the death penalty, slow progress on ensuring fair trials and failure to prosecute core crimes such as genocide torpedoed a multimillion-dollar United Nations project to help it bring perpetrators of ISIS crimes in Iraq to justice.
The U.N. Convention Against Torture, as well as customary international law, prohibits sending people to a country where there are substantial grounds to believe they face the risk of torture and other inhumane treatment.
Only 2,000 of these detainees are reported to be from Iraq. It’s not clear if any of the remaining 5,000 have ever set foot there, raising questions whether Iraqi courts have the right to prosecute them. What’s more, many of the detainees being sent to Iraq reportedly come from countries, including Britain, Belgium, France, Germany and Sweden, that have banned capital punishment and prohibit the transfer of individuals to countries where they risk execution.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said the transfers of men who are not Iraqis will be “temporary” and has repeated Washington’s calls for their countries to repatriate them. So has Iraq, which suggested that it may be hard pressed to handle this mass influx.
But apart from the United States and Iraq, most countries have for years refused to repatriate men and older boys held in Syria as ISIS suspects. This raises the prospect that the detainees could remain in a legal black hole, held indefinitely without charge in Iraq’s overcrowded prisons.
The transfers underway also do nothing to resolve a related crisis: the detention in northeastern Syria of more than 28,000 women and children from dozens of countries who were rounded up with the men by the Syrian Democratic Forces and locked inside two squalid camps. These camps, too, were plunged into chaos during the recent fighting. Some detained women have alleged beatings, lootings and threats of rape by guards. More than 6,000 women and children in Al Hol, the larger camp, reportedly have been moved out or escaped. Syrian government forces now control Al Hol and Damascus says it will close both camps, but it has yet to say where the women and children will go.
These children never chose to live under ISIS. Some if not many of the women were trafficked into the group. Yet like the men in prisons, they have been denied access to judicial authorities, making their detentions just as arbitrary and unlawful. Though several thousand women and children have been repatriated, most governments have balked at bringing more home.
Rather than abandoning their citizens abroad, countries with fair justice systems should repatriate all of them as soon as possible. Once returned, the adults can be prosecuted, if warranted. As for detainees who risk torture or unlawful execution if sent to their own countries, their resettlement elsewhere — with fair trials for any accused of crimes — will be a necessary, albeit challenging, next step. The United States has over the years brokered the transfers to other countries of more than 150 men it had held without charge at Guantánamo, though many later alleged hardship in their new homes.
In the meantime, the United Nations and all countries with citizens now being held in Iraq and northeastern Syria should ensure these men, women and children receive humane treatment. Iraq and Syria should allow lawyers and independent monitors immediate, unfettered access to all of them.
Letta Tayler is an associate fellow at the International Center for Counter-Terrorism and a former associate director at Human Rights Watch.
Source photographs by Narongrit Sritana and Jackyenjoyphotography/Getty Images.
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