Europe's Secrets and a Festering Problem in Syria

https://www.euractiv.com/section/politics/opinion/the-brief-europes-guantanamo/

Syria has been out of everyone's mind for a number of years and as such the public has forgotten about these prisoners - tens of thousands of ISIS members and affiliates still held in prison camps. The article is absolutely correct in pointing out that the Turkish backed militias could lead the Kurds to abandon these camps and thousands of these Salafist fighters could be once more on the loose.

One has to chuckle when reading that Ankara does not make a distinction between the SDF forces in Syria and the PKK operating out of Iraq and Türkiye. The West may try to distinguish them but when you pull up photos and videos of the SDF - they're using the PKK flag and you see images of imprisoned PKK-leader Abdullah Öcalan everywhere. Clearly, they are simply a branch of the PKK, but the US cannot acknowledge this because the PKK is officially designated as a terrorist group, and for many years Washington backed Ankara's bloody campaign in the Southeast against them. The same situation existed with the Kurds in Iraq. The US backed them, but just across the border they were designated as terrorists. Since the rise of Erdogan, the invasion of Iraq, and the Syrian Civil War, the situation has become more complicated.

Some of these people in prison were sponsored by Western intelligence during the early days of the Syrian Civil War in 2011-2014. On the one hand that means some of these people are assets that could once again be 're-activated' as it were or in other cases they would likely feel betrayed and are full of wrath. As such they are unpredictable. Some might start talking - revealing things that the powers that be would like to keep quiet. There are many secrets from this period about the pipelines running fighters and weapons to Syria, the various terrorist incidents in Europe, and the rise of ISIS.

As the article suggests many of the prisoners are in fact 'citizens' of EU nations. Some undoubtedly made their own way to Syria, while others were sponsored. This is a mess that I'm sure a lot of people wish would just go away. They don't want them back in Europe, that much is certain. America has also played a critical role in funding these prison camps and like Guantanamo for many years these people have not been charged or sentenced. They're just there - left in limbo.

The hope was that they could just sit on in the Eastern wilds of Syria until all was forgotten - but that's not too likely now.