Turkey Doing Precisely What United States Wants- Repatriate Prisoners To Their Home Countries
STATISTICS UPDATE: Associated Press (18 February 2021): Al-Hol houses the wives, widows, children and other family members of IS militants — more than 80% of its 62,000 residents are women and children. The majority are Iraqis and Syrians, but it includes some 10,000 people from 57 other countries, housed in a highly secured separate area known as the Annex. Many of them remain die-hard IS supporters. Some 27,000 non-Syrian children are stranded in al-Hol, including some 19,000 Iraqi children and 8,000 from other countries. On Jan. 30, U.N. counterterrorism chief Vladimir Voronkov urged home countries to repatriate the children, warning that they are at risk of radicalization. The coronavirus pandemic has brought a drop in the already slow process of repatriation. Many countries have been reluctant to bring back their citizens, though France repatriated seven children in January and Britain one child in September. Iraq has taken back very few. Repatriation by other countries dropped in 2020 to only 200 children, from 685 in 2019, according to Save the Children.
An issue for countries accepting the return from/through Turkey of their nationals (and those from whom citizenship has been rescinded) from Syria is cost.
These nationals are those who traveled to Syria to support ISIS, DAESH, etc. and either have been imprisoned or have yet to be apprehended.
Estimates are that each person (man, woman, child) may cost US$500,000.00 to US$1,500,000.00 annually for an untold number of years. The governments are estimating those costs could be incurred for at least ten years per person.
The low-end cost estimate is for those persons who are not deemed to be have a meaningful threat level; the high-end cost estimate is for those persons who are deemed to have a meaningful threat level.
If there are 2,000 persons from sixty countries needing to be repatriated, that’s a potential US$3 billion annual budget impact for ten years- US$30 billion dispersed among countries. [Note: Save The Children reported as of 31 December 2019 there were 9,500 children (nearly 50% under the age of five) from forty countries at the al-Hol refugee camp in Syria].
Costs include: domestic surveillance (human and installation of physical assets), international coordination, social re-adjustment costs (apartment, education, healthcare, psychological treatment, unemployment benefits, etc.).
Many of the persons will require monitoring twenty-four hours (24) per day, seven (7) days per week. Children may require assistance and monitoring for decades.
No current government in Europe or any country (including Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, etc.) wants to propose that spending; it’s a potential political death sentence for their time in office.
President Erdogan of Turkey is doing precisely what President Trump of the United States wants him to do- use the repatriations to put pressure on the twenty-eight EU-member governments and twenty-nine NATO-member governments.
What pressure? For President Trump, the issue is primarily one of responsibility. The President wants members of the EU and NATO, some of whom share membership, to have enhanced connectivity with decisions by their citizens that impact other countries. President Trump believes that governments are awaiting the United States to use its human resources and financial resources to restrain and accommodate a potential 70,000 individuals from perhaps forty countries who are currently located in Syria. That the United States will finance what could approach US$1 billion for prisons in Turkey, Iraq (Kurdistan), Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria (at some point) is unacceptable to President Trump, particularly when some NATO members are not adhering to defense spending guidelines. The President continues to criticize the US$13 million per prisoner cost at Guantanamo Bay, Republic of Cuba; more than US$350 million annually- approximately US$6 billion since 2001- where the inmates have been nationals of other countries and those countries have been reticent to repatriate them.