US brings home 11 Americans held in Syrian refugee camp for ISIS families
He was also able to confirm that “around 25” American citizens remain in the northern Syria camps including the infamous Al Hol camp, which The Independent visited in 2019.
Mr Miller took a second question in the briefing related to Austin Tice, an American freelance journalist and US military veteran who went missing in Syria in 2012. His answer reaffirmed the US government’s belief that the Syrian government is either directly or indirectly responsible for Mr Tice’s continued captivity, and he called for his release.
“We call on the Syrian regime to ensure that Austin Tice and every other US national held in Syria are able to return home,” Miller said.
The move by the US government to repatriate its citizens was cheered by Austin Doctor, an expert with the National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education Center. The organisation authored a report in 2023 which supported an organised process for repatriating the spouses and children of Islamic State fighters. The terrorist group’s physical territory collapsed after a sustained international effort to dislodge its fighters from Iraq and Syria, however, the ISIS ideology continues to promulgate violence around the world.
“Good news, & the result of dedicated hard work,” Doctor wrote on Twitter.
Roughly 30,000 people, the majority of whom are children, remain scattered in refugee camps for ISIS family members in northern Syria, according to the US State Department.
In 2019, The Independent found that authorities still saw a dangerous undercurrent of ISIS’s radical Islamist ideology within the Al Hol camp. Detainees spoke of entire “groups” of refugees disappearing from the camp, with their escapes credited to Isis-contracted smugglers.
“We can see it happening all the time. Everybody knows,” said Umm Abdullah, a 37-year-old detainee from Khartoum, Sudan. “You’ll see one group disappear, and figure out that they left. Then another group will go. Good luck to them.”
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Source » msn
