By CHARLIE SAVAGE, MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT and ERIC SCHMITT MAY 11, 2016

 

Iraqi security forces detained men suspected of being members of the Islamic State for interrogation last month. The men were found among civilians returning to Ramadi. CreditKhalid Mohammed/Associated Press

 

The Islamic State calls them “inghimasi” — zealous foot soldiers who intend to fight to their deaths. And as the American-backed coalition has reclaimed territory from the group in Iraq and Syria, that fervor has kept prisoners from being much of a problem: The shooting only stops when almost every Islamic State fighter has been killed.

But that could change as the coalition moves toward the Islamic State’s largest urban strongholds — Mosul, Iraq, and Raqqa, Syria — raising a potential problem for the United States. If the coalition is successful and thousands of ordinary members of a collapsing Islamic State have nowhere left to retreat, will they start to surrender in greater numbers? And if so, who will be responsible for imprisoning them?

After the experiences of the past decade in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Obama administration is determined not to revive large-scale detention operations. But it is far from clear whether allies on the ground — especially rebels in Syria — are prepared to hold large numbers of prisoners, raising the prospect of an ugly aftermath to any victory.

“If they’re not killed but detained, we are concerned about the standards of care, who would do it and how it would be done,” Peter Maurer, the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, said in an interview.

William K. Lietzau, who oversaw detention policy at the Pentagon from 2010 until 2013, said there was “widespread” opposition in the upper levels of the Obama administration to conducting wartime detention. But the alternative, he said, could lead to war crimes if American-backed local fighters encounter more potential prisoners than they can handle.

 “If the numbers start climbing, they’re going to shoot them and you’ll never hear about it,” Mr. Lietzau said.

No one wants a repetition of the chaos that occurred in Afghanistan during the fall of Taliban rule in December 2001. At least hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Taliban prisoners of war who had surrendered to forces loyal to an American-backed warlord were killed.

Yet while international human rights groups say they, too, are concerned about the humane treatment of detainees, there appears to be little desire among them for the United States to run a new wartime prison. Such groups have spent the past decade criticizing abuses at the former prison operations at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan and at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, as well as at the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, which is still open.

American officials, for similar reasons, have said they do not want the responsibility for handling large numbers of Islamic State captives.

“The United States does not intend to engage in the long-term detention of ISIL detainees, nor will we send any such detainees to the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay,” said Myles Caggins, a National Security Council spokesman, using the government’s preferred acronym for the Islamic State, also known as ISIS.

In a recent interview, Falih al-Essawi, the head of the security committee in Anbar, Iraq, said that when Iraqi security forces recentlyreclaimed Ramadi, they detained 1,870 people. Of those, he said, about 300 have confessed to being members of the Islamic State, while the rest maintained they were civilians. But so far, capturing an Islamic State fighter after a battle has been rare.

“Most of the foreign militants are either suicide bombers with suicide vests or car bombs,” Mr. Essawi said. “Many of them were killed in the coalition airstrikes or Iraqi Air Force strikes or killed in the battles, and some of them have withdrawn to other areas.”

It is also possible that Islamic State fighters and other members would “try to hide, throw away their weapons and melt into the local population,” said Mr. Maurer, of the Red Cross.

Christoph Wilcke, a Human Rights Watch researcher who specializes in Iraq, said that scenario could permit Islamic State fighters who are responsible for specific atrocities — like the slaughter of thousands of Yazidis in 2014 — to escape prosecution.

“I am interested in detention issues for the sake of justice,” Mr. Wilcke said.

The alternative would be sweeping up large numbers of people, taking them to a holding facility, and attempting through interrogations to identify them and determine what they had done.

But who has the legal authority to prosecute people in the anarchic regions of Syria is not clear. And whoever takes custody of prisoners would become responsible for coming up with a long-term plan for any detainees deemed to be dangerous but who for some reason cannot be prosecuted, because of a lack of admissible evidence, or repatriated, because they might be tortured.

Such problems have bedeviled the Obama administration’s attempt to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay. And there would also be a diplomatic complication: The Islamic State has attracted thousands of followers from many countries, including from Europe, raising the prospect of negotiations with foreign powers that have different standards and levels of interest in how their own nationals are handled.

The potential for a large number of prisoners presenting these kinds of challenges — for somebody — has been raised at planning meetings for months both inside the Obama administration and with coalition partners, according to officials familiar with internal deliberations.

But with no good options, the Obama administration’s default policy is to take custody of the highest-value detainees for interrogation, something the United States has done only twice with Islamic State prisoners. Both were later moved to Kurdish prisons.

The assumption is that the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government or the Iraqi Kurdish forces will hold and, if appropriate, prosecute any suspected foot soldiers and sympathizers they capture.

“We’re not equipped for long-term detention,” said Col. Steve Warren, the spokesman for the American military forces in Baghdad. “We’re not set up here for that, so we’re not in that business.”

Mr. Wilcke, the Human Rights Watch researcher, said that his group has received some accounts of abuses in Kurdish prisons, and more frequent and severe accounts of abuses in government-run prisons in Iraq.

He also pointed to an Iraqi trial of 40 people who were accused of being Islamic State members and were sentenced to death in a brief proceeding in February; human rights groups criticized the trial as a sham process that relied on torture-induced confessions.

“If you ask me if they have a plan or the capacity to hold these people, my answer would be look at how they have dealt with sympathizers: In Kurdistan, there has been no due process, and in Baghdad, stark violations like torture and sentencing 40 people to death in two hours,” he said. “I don’t think there is much planning going on at any level.”

And whatever the shortcomings of the Iraqi authorities, there are more problems in Syria, where the United States is working with rebel militias known as the Syrian Democratic Forces, or S.D.F., but not with the government of President Bashar al-Assad.

“We take the treatment of detainees very seriously and have every reason to believe the S.D.F. will do so, as well,” Colonel Warren said.

But pressed to say what the American plan is for any suspected rank-and-file Islamic State members who may be captured by the Syrian Democratic Forces, he said there was none, noting that the United States-led coalition does not provide “direct supervision” over their detention practices.

“It’s clearly a dilemma,” said Raha Wala, the director of national security advocacy at Human Rights First. “On the one hand, detention operations post-9/11 have been incredibly problematic from a treatment and legal position. But on the other hand, the answer can’t be simply to wash our hands of it and turn over operations to local partners who may not follow the same principles that Western governments would follow in terms of adherence to human rights norms. So you’re sort of in between a rock and a hard place.”

Falih Hassan contributed reporting from Baghdad.

http://www.nytimes.com/

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