Ottawa urged to take action on Syria ISIS camps’ ‘echoes’ of Guantanamo Bay
Global News
A delegation presented a report in Ottawa on Thursday after visiting the region, which is home to camps filled with family members of Islamic State group militants.
A Canadian civil society delegation working with Sen. Kim Pate is urging Ottawa to take action over detainees in northeast Syria whose experience “echoes” that of those in Guantanamo Bay after Sept. 11, 2001.
The delegation presented a report in Ottawa on Thursday after returning from a visit to the region that is home to camps filled with accused members and family members of Islamic State group militants.
The group rose to power amid an uprising-turned-civil war that erupted 12 years ago and has left hundreds of thousands of dead. At one point, the militants controlled large swaths of Syria and Iraq, but Kurdish forces backed by an international anti-IS coalition, as well as Iraqi and Syrian government troops, recaptured that territory by 2019.
Tens of thousands of others remain left behind in detention centres — including Canadians who left to fight for the Islamic State and children they had while there — with no immediate sign of getting out.
“They languish, warehoused with thousands of other foreign nationals in detention centres across the region held beyond the reach of law, far from outside scrutiny in a detention regime that is devoid of any sense of accountability and in which human rights violations are unsurprisingly rampant,” said delegation member Alex Neve, a senior fellow with the graduate school of public and international affairs at the University of Ottawa.
“It has echoes of the widespread abuses we witnessed following Sept. 11. We found ourselves thinking of Guantanamo Bay, black-hole detention sites … and wondering how we could possibly be back in that same space again.”
The group said it was aware of nine Canadian men being held in detention centres on allegations of working with ISIS, and spoke to two of them. The delegation said the Canadians have been detained for many years without charge or trial, without contact or communication with their families, without access to lawyers, and without receiving consular visits.
U.S. Naval Base Guantanamo Bay in Cuba became notorious following the Sept. 11 terror attacks due to allegations of torture of prisoners by the U.S. military and intelligence actors, and their denial of protection under the Geneva Convention.
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