What will happen to Swiss nationals who joined the Islamic State terrorist group and who are now imprisoned in northeastern Syria? Human rights experts, humanitarian groups, and even the US are calling for repatriation. Switzerland says it won’t support their coming back. For at least six years, three Swiss men have been held without trial in prisons controlled by Kurdish autonomous authorities in northeastern Syria. They are among the tens of thousands of jihadists from Europe and elsewhere that came to join the self-declared caliphate of the Islamic State (IS) in Iraq and Syria between 2014 and 2019. A Swiss woman and her eight-year-old daughter are also being held in Al-Roj, one of two camps where families of former IS fighters are detained. But while some European countries and Iraq have begun to repatriate their nationals to prosecute them in their home country, Switzerland has so far refused, arguing that these prisoners should be tried in Syria or in Iraq. “These individuals ...
