Iraqi security officials say 47 French citizens suspected of Islamic State membership have been handed over from detention in northeast Syria and will be prosecuted in Iraq.
AP reported that the transfer took place about a month and a half before the story was published, though it had not been publicly reported until now. Three Iraqi security officials, speaking anonymously because they were not authorized to comment publicly, said the detainees will be tried on terrorism charges.
The men had been held in a network of detention centers in northeast Syria guarded by the U.S.-backed, Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces. Those facilities also house thousands of other accused IS members. The transfer shows that the post-caliphate detention system remains active and that Iraq is still a destination for terrorism cases exported from Syria.
The handover is notable not just because it involves French nationals, but because it adds another chapter to a long-running and politically sensitive cross-border justice pipeline. France has previously seen similar transfers. In 2019, 13 suspected French militants were moved from Syria to Iraq for trial, according to AP.
The Iraqi officials’ account also points to the broader scale of the detention problem. They said a total of 3,192 inmates have been handed over to Iraq by the SDF, with 724 sentenced to death and 1,381 to life imprisonment. Those numbers indicate that the France case is part of a much larger stream of transfers rather than a one-off arrangement.
The fate of the detention centers in northeast Syria remains unresolved, especially after the fall of Bashar Assad in December. Under a March deal between the SDF and the new authorities in Damascus, control of the camps and detention sites is supposed eventually to move to Damascus, but implementation has been slow.
The AP report also places the case alongside the camps at al-Hol and al-Roj, where tens of thousands of people with alleged ties to Islamic State remain, many of them wives and children of militants. The U.S. military has long pressed countries to repatriate their citizens from those sites.
France has begun to do that in at least some cases. On Wednesday, the country announced it had returned three French women and ten children from camps in northeastern Syria. That development shows that the nationality issue is being handled in different ways depending on the category of person involved.
For the 47 detainees transferred to Iraq, the next step is prosecution. The exact charges and timeline were not detailed in the report, but Iraqi officials were clear that the men are now in the Iraqi justice system and will face terrorism cases there.
