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Government buys time to act on captured IS sympathizers in Syria
Authorities are vetting the citizenship status of Indonesians who have defected to Islamic State but want to return following last weekend's demise of the group.
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A screen capture of Mariam Abdullah, an Indonesian in an Islamic State camp in Syria, in a video by Tirto.id. (JP/-)
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ndonesia has still not decided what to do with citizens who are suspected of having defected to join the Islamic State (IS) group in Syria but are now eager to return, following the group’s demise and the growing urgency to take back these so-called returnees.
Kurdish-led forces over the weekend conquered the last stronghold of the IS in Baghouz, eastern Syria, ending the group's dream of establishing a caliphate and leaving thousands of jihadists and their families to live out of the Al-Hol camp for displaced persons in the country's north.
The Kurdish side has since asked countries to take back the tens of thousands of detained foreigners who are overcrowding local facilities.
According to the World Health Organization, some 67,000 internally displaced people reside in the camp, exceeding the facility’s original capacity of 10,000 people.
Some of these people hail from Indonesia.
In a recent report by freelance journalist Afshin Ismaeli that ran in several news outlets, dozens of former IS sympathizers – including women and children – said they wanted to return to their “homeland” Indonesia.
While no official tallies have been published, the Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict places the number of Indonesians who joined the IS in Iraq and Syria at 574 as of September 2017.
