US Commander: Threat of Islamic State Looms Large in Syria
Elements of the Islamic State group are working to rebuild in western Syria, where the U.S. has little visibility or presence, the top U.S. commander for the Middle East warned on Wednesday.
In the region west of the Euphrates River where the Syrian regime is in control, “conditions are as bad or worse” than they were leading up to the rise of the Islamic State, according to Gen. Frank McKenzie.
“We should all be concerned about that.”
McKenzie said insurgents are operating with some degree of freedom and that the U.S. and its allies have little hope the Syrian regime will do anything to crack down on them.
The western part of the country has historically been controlled by Russian-backed Syrian troops, while the U.S. and its allies, the Syrian Democratic Forces, have largely been in the north and eastern parts of the country.
Speaking online to a United States Institute of Peace forum from his U.S. Central Command office in Tampa, McKenzie said that the effort to transfer people out of Syrian refugee camps has been complicated and delayed by the pandemic.
And that, he said, fuels concerns about radicalization — particularly of the youth — in the camps, which officials worry are breeding grounds for IS insurgents.
The al-Hol camp in northeastern Syria is home to as many as 70,000 people — mostly women and children — who were displaced by the ongoing civil war in Syria and the battle against IS.
Many fled as the U.S.-backed SDF cleared out the last pockets of land held by IS last year.
Leanne Erdberg Steadman, the USIP director for countering violent extremism, said getting people out of the camps is key to securing a new future.
Repatriation is the key to clearing out the refugee camps, and the U.S. has aggressively pushed to get allies to take their citizens back. Most nations, however, are reluctant to take in potential IS insurgents.
Humanitarian groups say many of the women and children are not risks, but officials also note that many women have been radicalized and are active in the insurgency.
McKenzie said that unless political leaders find a way to deradicalize and repatriate the displaced people in the camps, there will be another IS resurgence in the future.
“As young people grow up, we’re going to see them again unless we can turn them in a way to make them productive members of society,” he said. “We can either deal with this problem now or deal with it exponentially worse a few years down the road.”
The Western Journal has reviewed this Associated Press story and may have altered it prior to publication to ensure that it meets our editorial standards.
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