10 March 2019

Morocco takes back fighters from Syria

On 10 March, the Syrian Democratic Forces announced that a group of Daesh fighters with Moroccan citizenship was repatriated to their country. This is one of the rare cases in which the origin country accepts to receive Islamic State fighters. Despite no official announcement was given by the Moroccan authorities, the US commended the decision of Rabat because “Repatriating foreign terrorist fighters to their countries of origin is the best solution to prevent them from returning to the battlefield” as Robert Palladino, the State Department’s Deputy Spokesman, declared on Twitter. Palladino also thanked Morocco for the “high qualification” of its troops in the fight against ISIS. The US-supported Syrian Democratic Forces are facing the problem of the hundreds of foreign jihadists captured during the last confrontation of ISIS resistance. In the same day, Reuters reported that a Belgian court overturned a ruling to repatriate two wives of jihadists with their six children in order to avoid to set a precedent. In the UK the Home Secretary Sajid Javid is under fire after a British young girl that was fighting for the Islamic State and whose repatriation was denied announced the death of her 3-year-old son in a Syrian refugee camp.

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