When shadowy ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi broke his intensive security procedures to appear in-person in a mosque in Mosul, Iraq in 2014 to announce his so-called “caliphate,” it was a shocking moment for much of the world — but probably a bit more so for the Americans in uniform who guarded him at military detention centers in Iraq a decade before.
Al-Baghdadi, whose real name is Ibrahim Awwad Ibrahim Ali al-Badri, was also reportedly detainee number US9IZ-157911CI at American-run detention camps Abu Ghraib and Bucca in 2004.
He was hardly the only one. The Soufan Group, a private intelligence firm headed by former FBI special agent Ali Soufan, reported in 2014 that a number of top ISIS leaders had done time in Camp Bucca.
The holding facilities were meant to take dangerous enemies off the battlefield, but military officials didn’t appreciate at the time what would happen if many of the Iraqi insurgency’s thugs, opportunists and true believers were forcibly grouped together. Bucca became an “academy” for low-level jihadists and a “management school” for ISIS’s future senior leaders, according to a former detainee.
“Before their detention, Mr. al-Baghdadi and others were violent radicals, intent on attacking America,” military veteran Andrew Thompson and academic Jeremi Suri wrote in the New York Times. “Their time in prison deepened their extremism and gave them opportunities to broaden their following. … The prisons became virtual terrorist universities: The hardened radicals were the professors, the other detainees were the students, and the prison authorities played the role of absent custodian.”
Fourteen years after al-Baghdadi was allowed to walk out of detention, the U.S. military could be back in a similar, dangerous position, according to senior U.S. officials.
“A significant challenge we face as we complete the defeat of ISIS is the repatriation of hundreds of foreign fighters to their home countries. The SDF [Syrian Democratic Forces] and the ISF [Iraqi Security Forces] are both holding several hundred fighters from a number of different countries in prisons or temporary detention facilities, with no clear process for prosecution or repatriation,” the commander of U.S. Central Command, Gen. Joseph Votel, said in Congressional testimony Tuesday. “The longer these fighters remain in detention together, the greater danger they pose as they form new connections, share lessons learned, and prepare to re-establish networks upon their release or escape.”
On the same day, in remarks to the International Conference on Mobilizing Law Enforcement Efforts To Defeat ISIS, U.S. State Department Coordinator for Counterterrorism Ambassador Nathan Sales echoed Votel’s concerns and said the home nations of the fighters must step up, and quickly.
“Successful prosecution also relies on accepting responsibility for repatriating our citizens captured on the battlefield,” he said. “Let me be clear: as politically difficult as this may be today, failing to take custody of these fighters now will lead to more difficult and painful consequences down the road. If these fighters make their way home or into the territory of our allies and partners, we’ll all pay the price for inaction.”
ISIS is believed to have drawn tens of thousands of foreign fighters from dozens of different countries — each of which will have to figure out what to do about potentially hundreds of their countrymen who are currently in detention in Iraq and Syria. The longer that takes, the more opportunity like-minded radical Islamists will have to rub shoulders and figure a way to gain their freedom.
“This urgent problem requires a concerted international effort involving law enforcement, intelligence sharing and diplomatic agreements,” Votel told lawmakers.
In the short term, terrorism expert Mia Bloom told RealClearLife that an effort should be made immediately to identify and separate the most dangerous of the fighters in custody.
“I assume a different approach [from Bucca] might be useful [in] creating schisms among the population based on whether these were active fighters with blood on their hands versus fighters who might have been motivated for more tangible reasons, like a job or a wife,” said Bloom, Professor of Communication and Middle East Studies at Georgia State University.
Allowing those two groups to remain mixed, Bloom said, “might have unintended consequences” like further radicalizing the more half-hearted ISIS supporters and pushing the die-hards even farther as they feed on each other’s toxic devotion to the cause.
But physically separating detainees is only a temporary solution until the world’s bureaucrats can catch up. Meanwhile, a disturbing thought remains: could a new al-Baghdadi be sitting in some Iraqi or Syrian detention center, biding his time?
“Honestly, I don’t know,” Bloom said.
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