Loading...
The Islamic State once ruled eight million people across Syria and Iraq. It lost its last village in 2019. What remained was several thousand fighters hiding in the desert, and about ten thousand captured men and forty thousand women and children held in prisons and camps in north-east Syria, guarded by Kurdish forces and paid for by the United States. Nobody wanted them: not their home countries, not Iraq, not Damascus. When the Syrian army moved into the north-east in January 2026 the arrangement broke down, prisoners escaped, and America began shipping thousands of detainees to Iraq.
The wider conflict and each side's full account: Syria after Assad.
Iraq completed its investigation into thousands of Islamic State detainees formerly held in Syria. A court in France sentenced a former Islamic State executioner to 30 years, and a French man received 30 years for joining the group in Syria. Syrian authorities dismantled an Islamic State cell operating across four provinces. United States forces moved to Turkey after completing their withdrawal.
Who holds the prisoners. For seven years the answer was a Kurdish militia with no state, no courts recognised abroad and a foreign paymaster. Damascus claims them as the sovereign. Washington has chosen Iraq, which has courts and the death penalty.
Whose citizens they are. The captives come from some sixty countries. Most of those countries, European ones among them, have refused to take back more than a few.
Who fights the group now. America is drawing down. Its partner on the ground is no longer the Kurds but a Syrian government led by men who were the Islamic State's rivals in the same movement.
The caliphate was destroyed and its leaders have been killed one after another. What remains is a policing and detention problem that belongs to the states of the region. Moving the detainees to Iraq puts them before courts and beyond the reach of a prison break. Syria's government has joined the coalition and fights the group, and American forces strike when they find a target.
The men now governing Syria fought the Islamic State for ten years and lost thousands to it. The group is an enemy of the new state and attacks its soldiers. Prisons and camps on Syrian soil are Syria's to run. The escapes of January happened in facilities held by the Kurdish forces, who opened doors to make the state look unfit.
They defeated the Islamic State at the cost of more than ten thousand dead and guarded its prisoners for the world for seven years with little help. They warned that an attack on them would empty the prisons. It did. The group is now recruiting among the escaped and the resentful.
Washington's leaves out that it paid for an arrangement with no legal basis for seven years and ended it in a week; and that Iraqi trials of Islamic State suspects have been faulted by United Nations bodies for confessions under torture and hearings lasting minutes.
Damascus's leaves out that its leaders and the Islamic State's came out of the same organisation and split in 2013 over who should command; and that former jihadists from abroad serve in its ranks.
The Kurdish leaves out that they used the prisons as their strongest card with Washington, and that children grew up in al-Hol for seven years in conditions that produced the next generation of recruits.
The home countries' leaves out that leaving their citizens in a desert camp was a choice, made for domestic reasons, and that others bore the risk of it.
Names and terms the sides do not share. This page keeps them out of its own voice.
Per-week distribution of events. Click a bar to see that week's top events.
Click a week bar to select. Light blue = active week.
Evidence gathered on a battlefield rarely stands up in their courts, and returned fighters cannot be held for long. They take back children and some women, case by case.
