{"id":180880,"date":"2021-02-17T22:26:23","date_gmt":"2021-02-17T19:26:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/bring-them-home-macleans-ca\/"},"modified":"2021-02-17T22:26:23","modified_gmt":"2021-02-17T19:26:23","slug":"bring-them-home-macleans-ca","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/bring-them-home-macleans-ca\/","title":{"rendered":"#Bring them home – Macleans.ca"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#Bring them home – Macleans.ca<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

\n It\u2019s been two years since the final territorial redoubt of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) fell to the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in the Euphrates River Valley, in the Battle of Baghuz Fawqani. Aided by the air power of a 30-nation U.S.-led coalition, the SDF siege began on Feb. 9, 2019.<\/p>\n

The battle was expected to take a few days, at most. The operation ended up taking weeks, for reasons that touch on a subject that Global Affairs Canada and the Prime Minister\u2019s Office are reluctant to discuss. Human rights activists are beginning to call it \u201cCanada\u2019s Guant\u00e1namo.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Battle of Baghuz Fawqani turned into a bloody and drawn-out affair not only because the town was trip<\/a>wired with bombs and riddled with tunnels. It was also that the holdout militants included perhaps 2,000 of the most devoted and hardened foreign ISIS fighters, from more than 60 countries. There were Canadians among them, along with their wives and children.<\/p>\n

The reason Ottawa goes quiet is that, apart from a five-year-old orphan girl Canada repatriated last October in a widely celebrated case, at least 46 \u201cISIS-affiliated\u201d Canadians are still over there. By a rough count, the Canadian detainees known to remain in Kurdish custody are eight men, 13 women and 25 children.<\/p>\n

Most of the children are under the age of seven. Born in Syria to Canadian parents, they are as entitled to the same citizenship rights as the orphaned girl known in court documents only as \u201cAmira.\u201d They\u2019ve been left behind, nonetheless.<\/p>\n

The Kurdish authorities in the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES) say they don\u2019t want to keep the Canadians in custody, and stipulate only that Canadian children should not be separated from their Canadian mothers.<\/p>\n

But Canada still won\u2019t take them back, and Global Affairs has consistently offered only opaque justifications\u2014the absence of formal diplomatic relations with the Syrian Kurdish authorities, the safety and security of Canadian consular personnel\u2014that haven\u2019t stood up under the scrutiny of international human rights organizations. The UN\u2019s Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights, which looked into the matter of the Canadian children last year, was especially unimpressed: \u201cReturning children is a humanitarian and human rights imperative.\u201d<\/p>\n

The federal government\u2019s excuses don\u2019t hold up in Canadian law, either, says Lawrence Greenspon, the human rights lawyer who represented Amira in a federal court judicial-review app<\/a>lication last July. Ottawa avoided a court order in Amira\u2019s case by moving swiftly to repatriate the girl to Canada.<\/p>\n

Now, a dozen Canadian families have retained Greenspon to act on behalf of four of the \u201cISIS-affiliated\u201d men under lock and key in Syria, along with 11 women\u2014mostly ISIS widows\u2014and 19 children. None has been charged by the Kurdish authorities with any crime. Greenspon says he expects others to sign on before legal proceedings begin.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Women, children and an ISIS militant walk during the surrender in Baghuz (Issam Abdallah\/Reuters)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Most of the Canadians are now lodged at a special camp at Roj, a village in a secure area about a half-hour\u2019s drive from Iraqi Kurdistan via the Semalka border crossing at Faysh Khabur, on the Tigris River. The AANES authorities have put the camp to use as a temporary detention site for the \u201cleast radical\u201d of the foreign ISIS women\u2014those who have demonstrated genuine remorse\u2014and their children.<\/p>\n

An Ottawa lawyer known for taking unpopular cases, Greenspon says there may well be individuals among the Canadians in Kurdish custody who have committed horrific acts of terrorism, but there\u2019s little merit to the common assumption that their convictions would be hard to secure because of evidence-gathering difficulties. Travelling overseas to join a terrorist group alone is a criminal offence under amendments to the Criminal Code brought in by the 2013 Combating Terrorism Act.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have the machinery in place. If you\u2019ve got the evidence to prosecute them, then prosecute them,\u201d Greenspon says. \u201cIf you bring them home and you don\u2019t have the evidence, then isn\u2019t that more of a reason why they shouldn\u2019t be rotting away in a prison in northeastern Syria?\u201d<\/p>\n

In the absence of criminal-justice remedies, Ottawa is spending millions of dollars every year on monitoring, counselling and rehabilitation in its national strategy to counter radicalization, Greenspon noted. It is not as though the returned detainees would simply be allowed to hail a cab at the airport and vanish.<\/p>\n

As things stand, Greenspon says, it\u2019s Ottawa that\u2019s in breach of the law by violating the Canadians\u2019 rights under the Citizenship Act, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and the international Convention on the Rights of the Child. If the government doesn\u2019t relent and bring them home, Greenspon says, he\u2019ll be seeing the federal government in court, before a judge, sometime this spring.<\/p>\n

He won\u2019t reveal his clients\u2019 identities, and in court documents they\u2019re expected to be identified only by initials. This is not just to shield the Canadian families from hostile publicity, he says, but to protect the children from the trauma of enduring notoriety.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Amira was orphaned in the final days of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi\u2019s nightmare \u201ccaliphate,\u201d during the Battle of Baghuz Fawqani. According to details pieced together by her relatives and friends of the family, Amira\u2019s parents and two older siblings were killed in a coalition bombing. At least 290 air and artillery strikes rattled Baghuz Fawqani during the battle, according to Airwars, a British agency that monitored harm to civilians during the western air operations in Syria and Iraq.<\/p>\n

A study by the Washington-based Middle East Institute paints a picture of bloody chaos in the caliphate\u2019s last days in the Euphrates Valley. ISIS shooters fired on civilians trying to flee. The Kurdish-led SDF fired on civilian vehicles racing toward them, mistaking them for suicide cars packed with explosives. Several SDF troops were killed by black-draped \u201cISIS brides\u201d carrying bombs made to look like swaddled babies. Hundreds were killed in the battle, and it has never been clear how many were foreign ISIS fighters or how many of them, if any, were Canadians.<\/p>\n

Several countries have already repatriated their ISIS foreign-fighter nationals, their wives or widows, and their children, Last year, the Kurdish authorities repatriated nearly 200 Americans, Russians, Danes, Albanians, Belgians, Finns, Germans and Norwegians. As for why Canada has become an outlier, Ottawa has consistently referred to \u201csafety and security,\u201d and the absence of diplomats in Syria. Canada severed diplomatic ties with Bashar al-Assad\u2019s blood-drenched regime in 2012.<\/p>\n

Ottawa\u2019s public position remains unchanged, even though several senior Canadian officials arrived safely in limousines for an Oct. 7 meeting with senior Kurdish officials at the gleaming AANES offices in the Syrian Kurdish city of Qamlishi on the Turkish border, and left with Amira without difficulty, according to the AANES foreign relations department. The Canadian delegation was led by Canada\u2019s executive coordinator for Syria, Gregory Galligan, a diplomat based in Beirut.<\/p>\n

Global Affairs declined to provide Maclean\u2019s<\/em> with answers to several questions: how many \u201cISIS-affiliated\u201d Canadians are known to be detained by Kurdish authorities at its camps in northeastern Syria; details of the detainees\u2019 ages and genders; what efforts Canada may be making on their behalf; what consular services, if any, are available to them; and what specific obstacles stand in the way of their return.<\/p>\n

Global Affairs says only that it is monitoring the situation \u201cvery closely\u201d and that Canadian consular officials are \u201cactively engaged\u201d with the Kurdish authorities. \u201cCanada\u2019s embassy in Syria remains closed and we have no diplomatic representation in the country at this time,\u201d spokesperson Angela Savard tells me. \u201cDue to provisions of the Privacy Act, no further information can be disclosed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Erin O\u2019Toole\u2019s Conservative Party has called on Ottawa to bring the children home and prosecute their parents under Canada\u2019s terrorism laws. Last year, New Democratic Party elder statesman Ed Broadbent, acknowledging Canadians\u2019 disgust with ISIS atrocities, said Ottawa must act, regardless: \u201cThe real test of political character is to defend rights when they are under threat by public opinion here at home.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the height of its barbaric reign in Northern Syria and Iraq, the ISIS caliphate ruled over about seven million people and controlled at least 100,000 sq. km of territory, an area about the size of the American state of Virginia. The al-Qaeda offshoot\u2019s scorched-earth reign of terror was marked by mass slaughter, mass rape, slave-raiding and a ferocious, genocidal war on the area\u2019s minority Yazidi population.<\/p>\n

Quite apart from the duty of care Canada owes to its citizens in Kurdish custody, Ottawa should consider Canada\u2019s obligations to the Kurds, says Leah West, a national security scholar at Carleton University\u2019s Norman Paterson School of International Affairs, and former counsel in national security litigation for the Department of Justice.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t care about those adults,\u201d says West, who served as a captain with the Royal Canadian Dragoons in Afghanistan, and led armoured reconnaissance operations for combat missions in Kandahar. \u201cI had a lot of friends die at the hands of al-Qaeda and the Taliban, so no. I don\u2019t care about the adults.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut I do care about Canada\u2019s responsibilities, and it astounds me that we are still expecting the Kurds to bear this burden, that we export our trash to the main victims of ISIS. Let\u2019s take this responsibility off the shoulders of the poor Kurds.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Baghuz<\/p>\n

Baghuz the day after the SDF declared victory over ISIS (Giuseppe Cacace\/AFP\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Kurdish irregulars bore the brunt of the global struggle against ISIS, losing roughly 11,000 fighters in the years leading up to the Battle of Baghuz Fawqani. They were aided by Canada only briefly, when the Canadian Forces played a small part in the U.S.-led air coalition, and then took on a special-forces training role with the Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga.<\/p>\n

And ISIS was not merely a Syrian or an Iraqi phenomenon. The International Centre for the Study of Radicalization at King\u2019s College in London has built a data set of 41,490 fighters from 80 countries who devoted themselves to war crimes and terror in service of jihad and the ISIS cause. That\u2019s not some auxiliary grouping. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says foreign jihadists far outnumbered Syrian jihadists in the casualty rolls in the first three years of al-Baghdadi\u2019s caliphate.<\/p>\n

Among the \u201cISIS-affiliated\u201d Canadians still in Kurdish custody is Mohammed Khalifa, captured by the SDF in January 2019. The former Toronto resident has confessed to his captors, to Global News<\/a> reporter Stewart Bell and to the New York Times<\/em> that he was the notorious ISIS propagandist \u201cAbu Ridwan.\u201d Voice-analysis specialists have confirmed that Khalifa was the narrator of the gruesome \u201cFlames of War\u201d videos that showed captives forced to dig their own graves and then executed en masse, and captives drowned in cages and burned alive. Khalifa also narrated the 2014 video depicting the beheading of American journalist James Foley that U.S. President Barack Obama called \u201can act of violence that shocks the conscience<\/a> of the entire world.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another is Muhammad Ali, an ISIS sniper and third-tier propagandist from Mississauga, Ont., whose online persona was \u201cAbu Turaab al-Kanadi.\u201d Ali, whose Canadian wife, Rida Jabbar, and two children are also in Kurdish custody, claims that he grew disenchanted with ISIS, and is resigned to facing charges when he returns to Canada. He says he just wants his life back.<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s the strange case of \u201cJihadi Jack\u201d Letts, the Canadian-U.K. dual national whose British citizenship was revoked for joining ISIS\u2014a charge Letts denies. His parents, who say Letts suffered as a child from obsessive-compulsive disorder, ended up convicted on charges of funding terrorism. They say they merely sent their son money to help him escape from ISIS.<\/p>\n

In a similar case, the dual U.S.-Canadian citizen Kimberly Polman, a Mennonite-turned-Muslim from Hamilton, left three adult children and travelled to Syria to marry a pen pal and work as a nurse. She says she had tried to escape ISIS territory but was caught, brutally raped and locked away for months in solitary confinement. Now she\u2019s in Kurdish custody, hoping to find a way home to Canada.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

As for little Amira, she was finally identified and located by her uncle Ibrahim (also a court-application pseudonym) at a makeshift displaced-persons camp at al-Hawl, a six-hour journey north of Baghuz Fawqani, several weeks after the battle. A refugee camp from the 1990-91 Gulf War built for 20,000 people, it had become a dangerous, violent and disease-ridden tent city of 70,000. Amira survived all this, and by all accounts she is living a happy, well-adjusted life in the Greater Toronto Area in the care of her uncle and her grandparents.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe\u2019s just a wonderful, wonderful girl,\u201d Greenspon tells me. \u201cShe\u2019s a bit shy, but she\u2019s a wonderful little girl. She\u2019s been learning English by watching Paw Patrol<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Global Affairs still won\u2019t even say whether Amira left with Canadian officials via the Turkish border crossing a short drive across town from the AANES offices in Qamishli\u2014the Kurdish authorities are in an on-again, off-again state of war with Turkey\u2014or through Iraqi Kurdistan via the Semalka border crossing at Faysh Khabur, 132 km east of Qamishli. The government \u201cis committed to protecting the safety and security of Canadian officials,\u201d Global Affairs\u2019 Savard told me. \u201cWe will not be providing further details for security reasons.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even the United States has managed to bring American ISIS fighters back to the U.S. for prosecution. The week before Amira was retrieved from Kurdish custody last October, the U.S. Justice Department announced that it had repatriated the last four Americans detained by the SDF on terrorism charges. A total of 27 Americans were repatriated before Amira was released into Canadian custody. Ten are being processed on terrorism-related charges in the U.S. arising from their support for ISIS.<\/p>\n

In a stinging 24,000-word analysis published last year, Human Rights Watch (HRW) concluded that Canada is flouting its international human rights obligations to the Canadian detainees by failing to take necessary and reasonable steps to assist them, by denying them consular assistance, by failing to support family members who want to provide their detained relatives with money for essentials like food and medicine, and by denying the Canadian children citizenship verification. They possess only birth certificates issued by the Islamic State, rendering them effectively stateless.<\/p>\n

The report\u2019s lead researcher and author, Letta Tayler, associate director of HRW\u2019s crisis and conflict division, says she was shocked by what she found. There are more Canadian detainees languishing in northeast Syria than there are prisoners left at the notorious Guant\u00e1namo detention facility the U.S. set up after 9\/11 to detain al-Qaeda suspects, Tayler pointed out. \u201cAnd more than half of these Canadians are young children. It\u2019s great that Trudeau brought home one orphan, but that doesn\u2019t absolve him of responsibility for the fates of all the other Canadians he left behind.\u201d<\/p>\n

Like Greenspon, Tayler insists that the \u201cISIS-affiliated\u201d Canadians should be repatriated and prosecuted in Canada on the evidence for whatever criminal acts they may have committed. Abandoning citizens to the Kurdish AANES, which international law defines as a non-state entity, is wholly unacceptable in a \u201crule of law\u201d country, she says.<\/p>\n

\u201cCanada projects this warm and fuzzy reputation on the global stage. It takes in refugees, it champions the rights of women, it even spearheads global efforts to help children who are victims of armed conflict\u2014which is exactly what the Canadian children trapped in northeast Syria are,\u201d Tayler tells me. Canada is \u201ccoasting on its reputation and evading the pressure that rights groups are putting on Western European countries to bring their citizens home.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even former U.S. president Donald Trump and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson have brought more citizens home from Syria than \u201cMr. Nice Guy Trudeau,\u201d Tayler says. The U.K. has done so despite passing a law in 2014 allowing the government to strip ISIS fighters of their citizenship, even if that meant they were left stateless.<\/p>\n

Stephen Harper\u2019s Conservatives brought in a law similar to Britain\u2019s, stripping citizenship from dual-nationality Canadians convicted of terrorism, treason or espionage, but it was overturned by Trudeau\u2019s Liberals. Trudeau campaigned against that law during the 2015 election campaign, and even had a snappy slogan for it: \u201cA Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian.\u201d<\/p>\n

Alexandra Bain, an associate professor of religious studies at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, laughs about that. A co-founder of the support group Families Against Violent Extremism, Bain says most of the Canadians who were drawn to the ISIS caliphate should be understood as the victims of a bizarre cult within a gross perversion of Islam. She says Canadians have little to fear from their return.<\/p>\n

Bain, who has served as an informal liaison between the \u201cISIS-affiliated\u201d families and Greenspon, says part of the attraction of Northern Syria is the role it plays in a prophecy attributed to Mohammed, which situates the town of Dabiq, an ancient town about 40 km northeast of Aleppo, near the Turkish border, as the site of the final battle that will herald the Day of Judgment.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s basically a cult,\u201d Bain says. \u201cBut there\u2019s no forgiveness for these people, there\u2019s nobody helping them. And if we don\u2019t help them, we\u2019re acting just the way ISIS does. If they\u2019ve broken the law or harmed somebody, they still have rights. They deserve to come home.\u201d<\/p>\n\n

This article appears in print in the March 2021 issue of<\/em> Maclean\u2019s magazine with the headline, \u201cBring them home.\u201d Subscribe to the monthly print magazine here<\/a>.<\/em>
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“#Bring them home – Macleans.ca” It\u2019s been two years since the final territorial redoubt of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) fell to the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in the Euphrates River Valley, in the Battle of Baghuz Fawqani. Aided by the air power of a 30-nation U.S.-led coalition, the SDF siege…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":180881,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/www.macleans.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/SAVING-AMIRA-GLAVIN-FEB03-01-750x422.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[22974,67806,71576,71577],"class_list":["post-180880","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-canada","tag-editors-picks","tag-isis","tag-syria"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180880","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=180880"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180880\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/180881"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=180880"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=180880"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=180880"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}