Werner Pleil has no idea where his son is.
The last that the retired photographer from the southwestern German state of Baden-Württemberg heard, his son Dirk was in a prison in northeastern Syria.
Dirk joined the extremist “Islamic State” group in Syria in 2015 but was arrested in 2017 and has been imprisoned there — held without trial — ever since.
Dirk likely has tuberculosis and his father has been trying to get him brought back to Germany, for his health but also to face justice if necessary. Pleil’s daughter-in-law and a nine-year-old grandson are in Turkey and Pleil would also like to bring them home.
But over the past few weeks, the family’s future became even more uncertain. Due to clashes between Syrian interim government forces and the Syrian Kurdish militias that controlled much of the northeast, the prisons and detention camps holding “Islamic State,” or IS, members changed hands.
In the ensuing chaos, some IS members and their relatives escaped from detention camps. Others were moved to Iraqi prisons. Between January 21 and February 12, the US military helped transport more than 5,700 prisoners out of Syria.
US military convoys took thousands of IS prisoners to Iraq: ‘The US urges countries to take responsibility and repatriate their citizens,’ US Secretary of State Marco Rubio urgedImage: Delil Souleiman/AFP/Getty Images
“I’ve been in contact with the foreign office and they told me that Germany was not involved in the transfers,” Pleil told DW. “They said it was purely a matter between the Syrians, the Kurds and the Americans.”
The German government confirms this. “The Federal Foreign Office is aware of the transfers from detention centers in northeastern Syria to Iraq,” a spokesperson told DW. But it “was not involved in the transfer process.”
The foreign office doesn’t have “a complete picture of the nationalities of the individuals affected by the transfers,” it said, but is currently working with Iraqi and US authorities to figure this out.
However, it does seem likely the 27 German men, previously detained in Syria, are now in Iraq.
Local and international media reports say Germans were among the thousands transferred. An Iraqi judge at al-Karkh prison in Baghdad, in charge of the committee interrogating transferred prisoners, told news agency Associated Press that he’d seen German detainees there.
How many German IS members are there?
It’s unclear exactly how many of the Germans who travelled to Iraq and Syria to join the IS group are still there. Currently the German government believes there’s a number in the low to mid-double digits.
Women and children were mostly detained in Syrian camps like al-Hol or Roj. According to UNHCR reports, al-Hol camp, which once housed over 26,500 people, has emptied out. An area that held about 6,000 foreigners — that is, mostly women and children not from Iraq or Syria — is apparently uninhabited now.
Some of the residents of al-Hol have been, or will be, transferred to another camp, Akhtarin in Aleppo province, by Syrian government forces. Others seem to have simply fled to relatives or used smugglers to get out. It’s unclear where they’ve gone. This would likely include any Germans still detained there.
Around 1,268 Germans are thought to have travelled to Syria and Iraq to join the ‘Islamic State’ group since 2014; those who returned home often faced arrestImage: Sebastian Widmann/Getty Images
Syria: ‘Not our problem’
A government source told DW that for about two days, nobody was in control of al-Hol camp.
“In the first two days [after the Kurds withdrew] there was no control,” the source told DW off-the-record because they didn’t have permission to speak to media. “Some of the people in the camp got outside.”
The surrounding area is difficult to police and the new Syrian government doesn’t have enough troops to do so, they noted.
“And if some of the foreigners who were held in the camp managed to get out, if they were to make their way to Turkey or Lebanon, then back to their home countries, then — to be frank — the Syrian government probably wouldn’t try too hard to stop them,” the person explained. “The foreigners are not our problem. They’re the problem of their own countries, who haven’t been taking this issue seriously enough,” they argued.
This already seems to be happening. UK newspaper, The Guardian, reported that this week a Belgian woman, convicted of being an IS member, arrived back in Europe via Turkey. Also this week, 34 Australians from Roj camp have tried to make their way home.
Warning the EU for years
The unregulated return home of European citizens, who were IS members or followers, poses a security problem that terrorism experts have been warning about for years. They have regularly urged countries to take back their own citizens and deal with them at home, whether in the justice system or by rehabilitation.
“There is no perfect answer to this question,” says Sofia Koller, a senior research analyst at the Berlin office of the Counter Extremism Project, or CEP, who’s written several reports on the topic. “Politically it [repatriation] is controversial but from many other perspectives, it’s not at all. Especially if we consider what the negative outcomes of not repatriating might be — that is, the kinds of outcomes we’re seeing at the moment.”
Iraq has called for repatriation of foreigners it’s holding, as has the US.
An Iraqi court in Baghdad: Iraq has long argued against what it sees as the outsourcing of European legal responsibility around IS membersImage: Ahmad Al-Rubaye/AFP/Getty Images
What next for ‘lost’ German prisoners?
German officials however have been reluctant.
German repatriation efforts have mostly been focused on women and children. With regard to German male prisoners, the government often argues it wants to respect the interests of the country where crimes were committed.
Member of Parliament Lamya Kaddor of the Green party, who recently submitted an official question to the government on the whereabouts of the Germans, believes local politicians have been hesitant about repatriation “due to fear of getting burned on this politically sensitive topic.”
But, she told DW, “leaving German citizens subject to inhumane detention conditions or potential torture, despite existing repatriation options, is unworthy of a state governed by the rule of law. It is also irresponsible from a security policy perspective, as the warnings against uncontrolled returns to Germany demonstrate. Refusing all responsibility cannot be a long-term strategy,” Kaddor argues.
“No matter what, these individuals are not going to be in a much better situation than they were previously,” the CEP’s Koller argues. “There are all kinds of very challenging developments that make their situation more dangerous.”
For one thing, Iraq now says it will prosecute the IS prisoners.
The fact that German men are held in Iraq might be a positive for them, Koller points out. “Germany and Iraq have proper, working diplomatic relations, that are much more stable than those we’ve seen in Syria,” she notes. “That might mean the German government has more access to these individuals, it can assess their mental and health status, possibly improve access to lawyers and communication with their families.”
It would also be easier to repatriate them to a German prison once they’ve been prosecuted in Iraq, she says.
Still, as she and others have pointed out, the legal situation remains dubious. There are questions about whether the mass transfer of prisoners was actually legal and whether Iraq even has jurisdiction over crimes committed in Syria.
It is also possible that individuals convicted of terrorism in Iraq could be sentenced to death. This has happened to foreign IS members before, including from France and Germany.
The Iraqi prison system is already extremely overcrowded and there are also questions about who pays for the trials and imprisonment of foreign nationals Image: Marwan Naamani/AFP/Getty Images
“Our position is clear: The death penalty is a cruel and inhumane punishment that Germany rejects,” the German foreign office says. This is why it is monitoring the situation carefully. “We are awaiting the Iraqi government’s plans and coordinating with the Iraqi side,” a spokesperson told DW.
Yet despite the troubling change in circumstances, no repatriations are planned, they confirmed.
All of this has retiree Werner Pleil worried about more than just his son’s whereabouts.
“In Germany, the death penalty has been abolished,” Pleil says. “But Iraq doesn’t care a jot about that. And our government has just been sitting around waiting for a solution to turn up by itself, or until somebody else does their dirty work for them.”
Edited by: Jess Smee