UK abandoning ISIS-affiliated British families in Syria, damning report finds

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - The United Kingdom’s refusal to repatriate British nationals believed to be associated with the Islamic State (ISIS) - and actively stripping the citizenship of at least 19 Brits stranded in northeast Syria - poses a serious security risk, a cross-party group of MPs and peers concluded in a report published on Thursday. The highly critical report recommends that Britain immediately repatriates its citizens, regardless of gender or age, in stark contrast to the government’s current approach.

Eight months after the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Trafficked Britons in Syria launched their inquiry, hearing from a range of experts including former security officials, human rights organisations including Human Rights Watch and Save the Children, as well as families of individuals themselves currently detained in northeast Syria (Rojava), the seventeen-member group found significant failures in the government’s approach to the trafficking of vulnerable women and children, in particular. 

In addition to finding that British officials did not do nearly enough to identify these at-risk individuals, many of whom were under-age at their time of travel, the report explicitly criticises the security risk that leaving the detention of suspected ISIS militants - and their families - to the Kurdish-led authorities poses; a warning played out in Hasaka, northeast Syria, in recent weeks, as well as suggestions that justice may be served in Syria.

“The APPG is deeply concerned by the UK Government’s public statements that express support for prosecutions of British nationals in the region. Multiple experts, including representatives of the US Government, told the inquiry that trials in the region are untenable, impractical, and unrealistic,” the report said.

“Authorities in NES cannot try them as they are non-state actors; and transfer to Iraq or Assad's Syria would expose British nationals to the risk of torture, the death penalty, and serious fair trial violations. This would do nothing to achieve justice for the victims of ISIS.”

The APPG, established in April by former International Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell MP, Lyn Brown MP, and Lord Jay of Ewelme, concluded that women and children had been both “trafficked” and then “abandoned” in Syria, with British nationals currently detained in the Kurdish-run al-Hol and Roj camps in Syria’s Hasaka governorate including “victims and desperate women who were coerced, manipulated, or criminally forced to travel” to Iraq and Syria by members of the so-called caliphate; a failure compounded by the government’s refusal to repatriate them.

Last year, Human Rights Watch estimated that 12,000 children and women who were not originally from Iraq or Syria now live in detention camps for family members of suspected ISIS militants, and a report by the legal charity Reprieve found that 84 per cent of British nationals detained in northeast Syria were women and children, with at least 63 per cent of detained women likely to be victims of human trafficking.

According to the APPG’s findings, approximately twenty British families are detained in camps in northeast Syria; around 50 people, half of whom are children. Sixty-three percent of British women in the camps, the Reprieve investigation found, are victims of trafficking to or within Syria; 44 percent having been coerced by a male partner or relative.

Around 27,000 children, of all nationalities, live in these camps, in what charities have called “unbearable conditions.”

The APPG expressed its concern over “distressing evidence of serious violations of children’s rights, including of British boys and girls.” In 2021, it found, “at least 163 people died in al Hol Camp, 62 of whom were children, and reports suggest that two children die in al-Hol and Roj camps each week from preventable illnesses.”

The APPG’s report also advises that all Brits in Syrian detention facilities holding ISIS supporters should be repatriated immediately, warning that, “Should the detention facilities collapse, the impact on national and global security could be extremely serious.” Last month, this happened.

ISIS launched an attack on a Kurdish-run prison in Hasaka and, although it remains unclear how many inmates escaped, the SDF have said 374 ISIS members were killed in subsequent fighting. On Thursday, as the APPG launched its report, an Iraqi security official warned that twenty dangerous ISIS militants were now unaccounted for, as he implored European countries to repatriate their ISIS-affiliated nationals in Rojava’s al-Hol camp.

As part of the inquiry, Kurdish authorities told the APPG that the situation in the camps is “very dangerous” and al-Hol in particular is a “ticking time bomb” that is out of its control, explicity offering “to provide unconditional assistance and cooperation with the UK to hand over its citizens,” should they receive an official request from the British government.

Commenting on the findings, co-chair of the APPG and Conservative MP Andrew Mitchell said, “The government’s approach to British nationals detained in Syria is morally reprehensible, legally dubious and utterly negligent from a security perspective.”

“It is also unsustainable, as recent IS attacks on Kurdish detention facilities have shown,” he added.

Writing for The Times on Thursday, founding member of the APPG and former head of the UK’s Diplomatic Service, Lord Jay expressed his dismay at the approach taken to British nationals detained in northeast Syria. “To put it bluntly, the government’s policy is to bury its head in the sand and hope the problem goes away,” he said.

“This disavowal of responsibility is causing consternation among our allies and damaging Britain’s reputation as a reliable security partner. The justification relied on by ministers - that abandoning British families in desert prisons is necessary for national security - simply does not hold water,” he added.

Among the expert witnesses who spoke to the APPG was Richard Barrett, former director of global counter-terrorism operations at MI6, who advocated for the repatriation of all Brits from Syrian detention facilities and told the APPG that US leaders were “bemused and infuriated” with the UK’s failure to repatriate British citizens.

In a piece for The Telegraph on Thursday, Barrett lamented the “immense propaganda value for ISIS,” that the detention camps for women and children serve.

“The only way to reduce the potential threat from British nationals in these detention facilities is to repatriate them and either prosecute them or reintegrate them into society, working within a rule of law framework,” he said. “The UK’s myopic, incoherent, and increasingly isolated approach is not so much ‘Global Britain’ as it is ‘insecure island.'”

Another concerning finding, the report found, was evidence that the UK government has made citizenship deprivation orders “in respect of at least 19 British adults in NES.”

“The Government’s policy has had clear discriminatory impacts,” it says. “The inquiry received compelling evidence from the Institute of Race Relations about the impact on Black, Brown, and Muslim communities, notably because citizenship deprivation powers have been used almost exclusively against Muslims, mainly of South Asian, Middle-Eastern, and African heritage."

“The Government has justified this unprecedently broad use of citizenship-stripping powers and refusal to repatriate British families from NES on the grounds that it is necessary to protect national security,” it added in an additional statement. “Multiple experts, including representatives of Britain’s close security ally, the United States (US), told the inquiry that in fact, this approach is deeply harmful to national and global security."

Since 2014 at least 154 British nationals have been deprived of their citizenship, and the report recommends the end of discriminatory citizenship stripping, rather than extending it as proposed through the government’s Nationality and Borders Bill.

After losing a legal challenge last month, brought by an alleged ISIS member who faced the removal of her citizenship, the government is continuing to push the Nationality and Borders Bill through parliament, hoping to change the law in order to avoid providing notice to those it wants to deprive of citizenship - the opposite approach to Thursday's report.