Xtra News Community 2
March 28, 2024, 11:34:31 pm
Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
News: Welcome to Xtra News Community 2 — please also join our XNC2-BACKUP-GROUP.
 
  Home Help Arcade Gallery Links BITEBACK! XNC2-BACKUP-GROUP Staff List Login Register  

Europe tells Trump's America to “go fuck yourself”…

Pages: [1]   Go Down
  Print  
Author Topic: Europe tells Trump's America to “go fuck yourself”…  (Read 210 times)
0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.
Kiwithrottlejockey
Admin Staff
XNC2 GOD
*
Posts: 32232


Having fun in the hills!


« on: February 19, 2019, 05:56:53 pm »


from The Washington Post…

European leaders hit at Trump's demands that
they take back ex-ISIS citizens from Syria


Trump threatened E.U. allies that they would face terrorist attacks
unless they took swift action to repatriate their citizens.


By MICHAEL BIRNBAUM | 12:40PM EST — Monday, February 18, 2019

A veiled woman walks with her child at a camp in northeastern Syria on Sunday. — Photograph: Bulent Kilic/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images.
A veiled woman walks with her child at a camp in northeastern Syria on Sunday. — Photograph: Bulent Kilic/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images.

BRUSSELS — European leaders expressed skepticism on Monday about their willingness to cooperate with a request by President Trump to bring home citizens who went to fight with the Islamic State, underlining a security dilemma as the U.S. military prepares to pull out of Syria following the collapse of the group's self-declared caliphate.

Many European nations have been content to leave citizens who may sympathize with the Islamic State in Syria, gambling that their societies will be safer if radicalized citizens are kept far from their borders. But the Kurdish fighters who have kept many of the former caliphate residents under lock and key worry that with the U.S. pullout, they may need to shift resources elsewhere, disbanding camps and allowing the residents to disperse.

Trump over the weekend threatened E.U. allies on Twitter that if they did not repatriate their citizens, the United States would simply let them go, warning that Europe could face a surge in terrorist attacks as a result.

But his tactic sparked anger at a Monday gathering of E.U. foreign ministers, where leaders said that they would make no plans under threat from Washington and that counterterrorism policy shouldn't be made by tweet.

“It is surely not as easy as imagined in America,” said German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, who said Germany is discussing the issue with France, Britain and other European countries. The U.S. request is “difficult to implement” right now, he said, because Germany cannot yet guarantee that all returning fighters would be taken into custody immediately while cases were prepared against them.

Hundreds of captured Islamic State fighters have been imprisoned by Kurdish forces in the parts of northeast Syria that the Kurds control with U.S. support. Thousands more women and children who lived in the caliphate but did not necessarily take part in the fighting are living under tight control inside ­Kurdish-run camps. Many of them are European citizens.

“There is a problem. We are aware of that in Europe,” Luxembourg Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn said. “If we want to find a reasonable solution, then we have to discuss this, not send tweets back and forth. That doesn't make sense.”

Among the challenges E.U. nations face is that it is often difficult to gather evidence of participation in violence by their citizens in the Islamic State, forcing prosecutors to try them on lesser charges that carry penalties of only a few years in prison. Politicians are hesitant to take the risk of one of the returnees plotting an attack.

But some security services believe that it would be safer to have potentially dangerous citizens inside their home countries, where they can more easily be monitored, than to have them float free in the tumult of the Middle East, analysts say.

“You will have a security problem if you leave them out there,” said Rik Coolsaet, a terrorism expert at the Egmont Institute, a Brussels-based think tank. “You can follow them here, and you can't follow them there.”

France has started planning how to bring back its more than 100 fighters from the camps, along with women and children. Other countries are considering what to do.

The political challenge extends beyond the adults who may still sympathize with the aims of the Islamic State. Many of them started families while living in the caliphate, and Kurdish authorities estimate that at least 1,300 children, many of them younger than 6, are inside their camps. European countries have hesitated about their obligations to those children, and several are debating whether bringing the children home without their parents would be a violation of the children's rights.

In Belgium, the government is appealing a court order to bring back six children ages 7 and under, along with their two Belgian mothers. The appeal is scheduled for Wednesday.

“You cannot say that a child of 8 months is dangerous,” said Walter Damen, attorney for the children and their mothers. “You cannot say that a child of 8 months is being indoctrinated by the Islamic State.”


__________________________________________________________________________

Quentin Ariès contributed to this report.

Michael Birnbaum is the Brussels bureau chief for The Washington Post. He previously served as the bureau chief in Moscow and in Berlin, and was an education reporter. He has covered the conflict in Ukraine, the Egyptian revolution, the fall of Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi and the Arab Spring elsewhere in the Middle East. He has also worked at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Birnbaum has a degree in German history from Yale University and he speaks French, German, some Russian, some Latvian. He grew up in Chicago.

__________________________________________________________________________

Related to this topic:

 • Their parents joined ISIS. They were raised in the caliphate. Can they come home?

 • ‘All I want to do is come home,’ says pregnant British teen who joined ISIS in Syria


https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/european-leaders-hit-at-trumps-demands-that-they-take-back-ex-isis-citizens-from-syria/2019/02/18/62a32794-338e-11e9-8375-e3dcf6b68558_story.html
Report Spam   Logged

If you aren't living life on the edge, you're taking up too much space! 

Pages: [1]   Go Up
  Print  
 
Jump to:  

Powered by EzPortal
Open XNC2 Smileys
Bookmark this site! | Upgrade This Forum
SMF For Free - Create your own Forum


Powered by SMF | SMF © 2016, Simple Machines
Privacy Policy
Page created in 0.044 seconds with 16 queries.