The world may have sighed with relief when the ISIS caliphate spanning across Iraq and Syria came crashing down in February 2019. But there was little interest in the fate of thousands of defeated ISIS fighters who were captured by the heavily under-resourced Autonomous Administration of North Eastern Syria (AANES) or Rojava. International negligence persists, despite the fact that AQI, an al-Qaeda group, and predecessor of ISIS, first took shape at a US-managed Iraqi prison known as Camp Bucca in 2004.
Rojava’s pleas to the international community to repatriate their fighters have fallen mostly on deaf ears. The UK government responded by stripping them of their British citizenship. Rojava also asked the International Criminal Court (ICC) to prosecute ISIS on its territory but neither Syria nor Iraq are signatories to the Rome statute which established the court so it has no jurisdiction.
