Turkey has warned its NATO allies in Europe that it will repatriate thousands of captured ISIS fighters and their families back to their countries of origin even if their citizenship has been revoked.
“We are not going to keep them until the end of time. We are not a hotel for anybody’s Islamic State members,” Turkey’s Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu told reporters in Ankara on Saturday, the Telegraph reports.
Following its military incursion into northeastern Syria, the Turkish military now has more than 1,000 foreign ISIS terrorists and their loved ones in its custody.
Ankara’s warning comes despite various European states refusing to take back foreign fighters, or in the case of the UK, having gone far as to strip known ISIS terrorists of their citizenship.
Minister Soylu then accused EU member states like Britain and the Netherlands of stripping foreign fighters of their citizenship in an attempt to prevent Ankara from sending them home.
“We will send back those in our hands, but the world has come up with a new method now: revoking their citizenships,” Soylu said on Monday. “They are saying they should be tried where they have been caught. This is a new form of international law, I guess.”
“It is not possible to accept this. We will send back Daesh members in our hands to their own countries whether they revoke their citizenship or not,” Soylu declared.
Before Turkey’s invasion of northeastern Syria, Kurdish forces had previously held roughly 12,000 captured IS members and their families in detention facilities. It remains unclear just how many of them managed to escape during Turkey’s military onslaught in the region.
No comments:
Post a Comment