Foreign Affairs Committee
Oral evidence: The situation in Syria, HC 668
Tuesday 28 January 2025
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 28 January 2025.
Members present: Emily Thornberry (Chair); Aphra Brandreth; Phil Brickell; Dan Carden; Richard Foord; Blair McDougall; Abtisam Mohamed; Edward Morello; Sir John Whittingdale.
Questions 1 - 91
Witnesses
I: Lina Khatib, Associate Fellow, Middle East and North Africa Programme, Chatham House; Simon Collis, former UK Ambassador to Iraq, Syria, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
II: Richard Barrett CMG OBE, former Director of Counter-terrorism, MI6, and former head of the UN al-Qaeda/Taliban Monitoring Team; Paul Jordan, Head of Responding to Security Crises, European Institute of Peace; Professor Harmonie Toros, Professor in Politics and International Relations, University of Reading.
Witnesses: Dr Lina Khatib and Simon Collis.
Q1 Chair: This is a one-off session of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee on the situation in Syria. We have oral evidence today. We have two panels this afternoon. As the first panel, I wonder whether you could introduce yourselves.
Dr Khatib: I am Lina Khatib. I have been working on Syria for a very, very, very long time—since before the conflict. I am an associate fellow with Chatham House.
Chair: On the Middle East and North Africa programme.
Dr Khatib: Yes.
Chair: We have met you at least once before. Thank you very much for helping us. When Chatham House did its briefing for us, you were very helpful in the evidence you gave.
Simon Collis: I am Simon Collis. I was the last British ambassador to Syria. I closed the embassy in February 2012, one year into the uprising. After that, I was ambassador in Iraq and Saudi Arabia. For the last five years I have been doing consultancy work in the Middle East.
Q2 Chair: Fantastic, thank you both very much for coming. We have a number of questions, but perhaps I should start with the obvious one. Were you surprised by the sudden collapse of the Assad regime in December?
Dr Khatib: I was not, because I knew that it was going to happen, simply because I was in touch with people inside Syria who were part of the plan, and also some other actors outside who were seeing this and anticipating that the regime was just really hollow, when most of the western world assumed that the regime was pretty solid, even though it had shrunk. The people in the region and on the ground were seeing things and acting very differently.
The surprise really applies to those who were outside who just felt comfortable with the dominant narrative that this was a regime that had been resilient and mostly won, and were frankly not paying enough attention to what was happening on the ground, because Syria was no longer a policy priority or even a media priority.
Q3 Chair: Dr Khatib, I hear you, but it was resilient; it had resisted an uprising for a long time and it did seem to be in control. For those of us who certainly did have our eye off the ball, what was it that we missed? What was happening?
Dr Khatib: For example, the evolution of groups such as HTS. I am not contesting the designation of the group as terrorist. However, no matter what we designate groups as, we should constantly follow the way they are changing, because they could change even as terrorist groups.
With HTS, for example, I was one of the first people to flag it, all the way back in 2015 when it was not HTS; it was a group at the time known as the al-Nusra Front. I was one of the first to publicly write about the pragmatism that I saw this group embracing. I wrote at that time that this is a group that has political ambitions and wants to be at the table whenever transformation in Syria becomes possible, and that it was, at the time, heading further away from al‑Qaeda, even though it was allied with al-Qaeda at the time. I said at the time that it was engaged in battles with ISIS and perhaps could become an actor on the anti-ISIS side of the equation. Here we are, 10 years later, and this is exactly what happened.
This process of evolution did not happen overnight. HTS did not suddenly become an actor that has political ambitions and has the capacity to administer areas in Syria. It built this up over time. This is the kind of thing that is missed when groups are simply labelled as terrorist, because this means that the focus becomes just on that kind of activity and misses all the other things that the group is doing.
Q4 Chair: Mr Collis, would you mind answering the same question? Were you surprised?
Simon Collis: Yes. What was surprising was the speed with which it happened. There is the old saying about how you go bankrupt slowly and then fast. The regime had been hollowing out, as Dr Khatib described. There was clearly no long-term future with the regime. There had been four years of the frozen conflict from 2020 when it did not take the opportunity to advance. Of course, it also had heavy reliance on support from Iran, from Lebanese Hezbollah and from Russia. After the conflict in Ukraine began, Russia was distracted, and after the Gaza conflict began, Hezbollah was decimated and Iran was falling back, so the regime’s external pillars of support were not there any longer.
Q5 Chair: Is there something about the army not being paid as well?
Simon Collis: The army was brutalised. The foot soldiers in the army were cannon fodder all the way through, even at the higher levels. The regime had become, for a long time, basically a crime family. The Assad-Makhlouf family were a crime family, and acted and behaved like a crime family with their control of resources.
Q6 Chair: Is it true that his brother was running a criminal enterprise?
Simon Collis: Yes, Maher was. Their main source of revenue, it seems, was the Captagon trade, this amphetamine drug trade.
Q7 Chair: We are going to ask some more questions about that later. Okay, so you were surprised.
Simon Collis: I was surprised at the speed. I suspect that Ahmed al‑Sharaa was surprised at how quickly he got from Aleppo to Hama. Once they reached Homs, I think they knew they would get Damascus. Homs was the last place where the regime could have taken a stand, but given the speed with which they got from Aleppo to Hama, and once it was clear that the regime was unable, unwilling or incapable of defending Homs, which is the hinge that connects Damascus with the coastal and mountain areas, the Alawite heartland, there was no sustainable regime after that.
Yes, it happened very quickly. The fact that it would happen eventually was clear, but the precise timing of it was unexpected, not just internationally, but to many people inside Syria who did not expect it to happen that quickly.
Q8 Chair: Before I open it up to other questions, let me ask this another way. It is our job as the Select Committee to always try to input positively into the role of the Foreign Office. Because everybody seems to have been taken by surprise, I suppose the question the public might be asking is, “What more could the Foreign Office have done to predict this?” Dr Khatib may have some answers on that.
Dr Khatib: I did tell the Foreign Office what I knew in February 2024. I reminded it of that, and I did tell it in writing. For the record, I did relay all the information that I had about what was going on in Syria. It is just that, to be honest, at that time—as in many other countries in Europe, as well as the US—Syria was just not a priority. Even if you receive information about things changing on the ground, ultimately, if it is not a foreign policy priority for the country, this information is only going to be filed away as, “Oh, this person told us this.” For me, the key thing I would urge is not to fall into comfort when it comes to how we approach this region or any other region.
Q9 Chair: Yes, it is the question of frozen conflicts. If people feel that something is frozen, it can be just filed away somewhere and the more pressing problems can be dealt with instead.
Dr Khatib: Yes. No status quo is necessarily permanent. It is often policy that puts it in that particular box, because the Foreign Office obviously has the whole world to deal with and not every region can be a top priority. However, when it comes to the Middle East there is a particular situation that I see being repeated, which is that conflicts become normalised. It is expected that this region will have conflicts that are frozen, or that go on for a very long time but only simmer. As we saw with the horrific 7 October attack by Hamas and the situation in Syria, honestly, there is no such thing as a simmering conflict that we can live with.
Q10 Chair: That is very well put. Is there anything you want to say, Mr Collis? We are not beating you up. We appreciate that you had left the Foreign Office.
Simon Collis: No, I have been out for five years and I am certainly not here to speak for it directly. On the question of whether things could have been predicted, I am not sure how big a difference it would have made, actually, to what happened on the ground. Let us say people thought that there was a high probability of the regime collapsing over a set timeframe. Nobody expected that regime to endure; it had no future. There was no future for Syria under that regime, but, on the question of the timing of its collapse and the nature of the eventual collapse, I am not sure that there would have been much different to be done from a policy perspective if there had been more focus. The more interesting question is what should happen now.
Chair: You may find that that is the next question. John, do you mind picking up on that? The question is, “What is going to happen now?”
Sir John Whittingdale: I wanted to come in on the question about drug production in particular.
Chair: Yes, but there is a question about the stability of the current Government, is there not? What is the assessment of the stability of the current Government? The drug production is obviously an important aspect of that.
Q11 Sir John Whittingdale: That is certainly another question, but here is a more general question about the stability. To what extent does HTS now control Syria? What are relations with the other groups like? To what extent is there a possibility of a relatively stable Government emerging in the near future?
Simon Collis: That is the key question. Syria is in a very dangerous phase right now. It is a fragile phase. It is a little concerning to see the extent to which media attention has already moved on. This is why it is very welcome that this Committee is looking at Syria right now, less than two months in.
The HTS leadership seem to be a small circle in Damascus. In groups with the sort of background they have, you are going to have a small number of people who have been working tightly together, with very limited trust for outsiders, for a long time. There is a bond there that is hard to break. You could argue, and some people have, that they had success in Idlib and in controlling Idlib, which is very difficult terrain geographically, and the human geography was very difficult, with people flooding in from all different parts of the country, internally displaced people. They established control and, through that, a measure of security and the ability to deliver services. That was basically achieved, as far as I could see from a distance, by a readiness as they went on their political journey to say to rival factions, “You can join us or we will deal with you.” Through that, they were able to make progress.
There does need to be some toughness in the present phase to avoid chaos and anarchy, with all the different groups still active, and the diversity in Syria’s demography and geography, but what worked in Idlib will not work at a national level. We are seeing the invitations to the groups and the factions to lay down their arms, to present them to the national Ministry of Defence, and for fighters to join and to come under the umbrella of a national Ministry of Defence, but not as groups—the groups get dissolved. The Kurds, the Druze and others are being invited to do this in the absence of clarity as yet about what the transition and the national convention will look like.
The Idlib model of imposing security and then moving on to governance may have worked in that place at that time, but attempts to make that the national model will be more difficult. It is important for anybody who can influence these things from the outside to lean in and to encourage the HTS leadership to lead the process, because if they do not there will be anarchy. They must lead it, but not in an exclusive way.
Q12 Sir John Whittingdale: Given your experience in the Middle East, having observed other collapses of strong authoritarian regimes and the chaos that potentially follows, how optimistic are you?
Simon Collis: Optimism is the pragmatic response. There are clearly risks, but there is nothing to be gained by the UK or other countries with any potential influence sitting back to wait and see, and then having the satisfaction of eventually being proved right about our pessimism. Optimism is the pragmatic course. It is not a matter of wishful thinking; it is a matter of understanding that this is a moment to lean in.
Q13 Chair: What does “lean in” mean, though? Does “lean in” mean having a photograph taken with the current leadership? Does it mean recognising the current leadership? What does it mean?
Simon Collis: It does mean engagement. It does not mean necessarily lifting the sanctions on HTS or on the leadership figures, as long as those measures are not a barrier to engagement with them. They have a past. They have a history. They have been on a journey. Let us make sure that it is a future and that those measures may provide a measure of leverage to encourage progress.
We are not going to pretend that they have completely changed, but I see no basis for the sanctions against Syria as a country to be maintained. They were put in place because of the actions of the previous regime, the Assad regime. That regime is gone; the justification for the sanctions is gone. The idea that we saw coming out of Brussels yesterday of taking an incremental approach to this, as if it is a dial that you can fine tune, is dangerously mistaken.
Q14 Chair: Your advice is that Britain just lifts sanctions, unlike the Europeans.
Simon Collis: Yes, for trade to resume. There are humanitarian reasons for this, there are legal reasons for this, but it is also pragmatic politics. If it all goes wrong, sanctions can be brought back; there is nothing to stop them being brought back, but this is a period to give the people in Syria the best chance of moving forward. That is going to involve allowing them to deal with the humanitarian situation, which is acute. The hours of power in Damascus and other cities are minimal.
For there to be political progress to be made and for there to be that opportunity, people are going to have to have a chance to get beyond that level of having to fight for daily needs. We are going to have to make some progress there in order to be able to think politically in a rational and expansive way. Yes, lift the sanctions.
Q15 Sir John Whittingdale: Dr Khatib, do you have anything to add?
Dr Khatib: I agree with everything that has been presented.
Chair: Then you do not need to repeat it.
Dr Khatib: I am not going to repeat it.
Chair: We can just take it that you agree, but I know that you have extra insights.
Dr Khatib: I just want it noted that I do agree with lifting the sanctions, for example.
Chair: I have to give some impression of controlling these proceedings.
Dr Khatib: What we need to bear in mind is that this administration in Syria is very keen on international legitimacy. They want to be regarded as legitimate. Even if it is for the moment, temporary, it wants to be seen as legitimate, and this means we have an opportunity to have influence in this setting in a positive way.
One thing that we can have influence over is this issue of what inclusion means when it comes to Syria’s governance. Right now, the situation is temporary. There is meant to be an interim Government formed in March. That will be the real test of what inclusion actually means. Does inclusion mean this current HTS-dominated administration continues and grants privileges to, for example, other groups in Syria, or does it mean power sharing and not using the disastrous Lebanese/Iraqi model of allocation of seats based on sectarian or ethnic background?
What we need to try to push for is basically embracing the values of liberal democracy when it comes to power sharing and inclusion. There is potential for us and our allies to nurture Syria in that way. That is something we can do.
Q16 Chair: Sorry, I do not understand. Are you saying, therefore, that we should lift sanctions straight away, but not give them any other credibility until after March?
Dr Khatib: No, we need to encourage all the positive steps. This is about looking at governance in Syria, not just from the perspective of who is in formal positions, but as an inclusive social contract between the people who are in charge and society—those voices right now who are calling for inclusion, for women to play a meaningful role and for secular people to be represented.
Civil society in Syria has had years to actually become a civil society, because under Assad there was no civil society. These kinds of actors need to be involved in the policy debate and in being able to set policy for their country. That is something we can definitely work on. You lift sanctions, but you also nurture all these positive conversations happening about inclusion, because we can do a lot in that regard and they need our help. Here is something that we can also do in a concrete way. If you want more ideas for what we can do in a concrete way, I am very happy to provide them.
Q17 Edward Morello: On that point, we have had discussions with some of those Members who had the opportunity to go to Jordan fairly recently. The invitation of the Jordanian Government was around the fact that the rules of the future Syrian society are going to be based by the people who are there, yet obviously an enormous number of people are currently outside Syria. To what extent is it possible to build an inclusive Government when so many people are currently not living in the country? I do not know if you have a view on that.
Dr Khatib: A lot of people are already going back or want to go back. When I say a lot of people, I mean people who are in positions of potential influence, so those who got involved in think‑tanks outside, academics, civil society actors and people who formed political parties. A lot of these people did all these things outside in preparation for one day going back. If they were not interested in going back, why would they be doing all this work for Syria outside? It is still early days. We have to remember that we are only in January, and this thing only happened last month. We should be realistic about when these people can basically uproot themselves from their homes abroad and move back, but there are very serious efforts being made that would really benefit from the expertise of the Syrians outside.
I personally would not put a separation between outside and inside at the moment. Of course, there are people outside who have become disconnected and who may be opportunistic—this happens in every context like that—but the people on the inside living under the Assad regime had very limited space to breathe, so they also want those people outside to come and work in partnership with them to build the new Syria. Inside-outside separation is not helpful at the moment.
Edward Morello: John, I was interested on the drug side, but I know you are. We will piggyback.
Sir John Whittingdale: We are both interested.
Chair: They were both on the border between Syria and Jordan just last week, so they are both interested in knowing what is happening.
Q18 Edward Morello: Mr Collis, you have talked about the Assad regime being a criminal enterprise. Syria was obviously also a narco state, with something like 80% or 90% of the world’s Captagon production happening inside Syria. I am interested to understand to what extent HTS is dealing with that in the areas that it controls. Is it dealing with the drug production? Is it eliminating it? Have we seen any reduction in production and smuggling?
Simon Collis: My understanding is that it has basically eliminated and stopped it. That has been a clear priority for Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the other Gulf states that were victims of the transit, trafficking and consumption of Captagon.
Q19 Chair: How bad was it within those countries? Do we know?
Simon Collis: It is hard to see data, but I know from talking to senior Saudis that they were seriously concerned about it. They have spoken about it publicly, but the private concern was even greater.
Q20 Chair: As a drug that we do not necessarily know that well, is it very addictive?
Simon Collis: Yes. My understanding is that it is an upgraded version of speed.
Q21 Sir John Whittingdale: Unlike, for instance, Afghanistan, where a large proportion of the population were involved in growing opium, as I understand it Captagon does not require large numbers of people; just a few people in a laboratory.
Simon Collis: Yes, you get some chemicals, and you cook it and distribute it. It is the perfect product for criminal gangs.
Q22 Sir John Whittingdale: The number involved in employment is probably not that great, but obviously the revenue that supported the regime was considerable.
Simon Collis: Yes, it was huge. It was billions of dollars. It was probably the largest single component of the economy in the final years.
Q23 Edward Morello: Just to follow up on that, because I am interested in this money issue, I have seen figures of anywhere between $5 billion and $55 billion in terms of the size of the Captagon market. Dr Khatib, if you have a new Syria right now that does not have a source of income, is there any risk that we see the new regime, criminal gangs or whoever it might be turning back to the Captagon market in order to bring revenue back into the country?
Dr Khatib: It will definitely not be the Captagon market. As we heard, they have been finding and publicly exposing warehouses where Captagon was stored in areas that used to be under the control mainly of the 4th Division headed by Maher al-Assad, Bashar al-Assad’s brother, who was the main person leading the Captagon trade inside Syria.
Also, as we heard, Saudi Arabia was a big market for the export of Captagon from Syria. The new Administration in Syria are very keen to have smooth relations with Saudi Arabia, so the last thing it will want is to reactivate a trade that Saudi Arabia was very, very concerned about. You can see this through the behaviour of this new Administration vis-à-vis Saudi Arabia. The first diplomatic visit by the new Administration abroad was to Riyadh. The first interview that Ahmed al-Sharaa gave was to a Saudi television station. We have now seen the Saudi Foreign Minister visit Damascus, which was something that had not happened in a very long time. We can safely predict that that scenario that you mentioned is not going to happen.
Q24 Blair McDougall: You talked a moment ago about the importance of inclusion, and HTS has obviously spoken a lot about that. The flipside of that for me is justice for things that have happened in the past. It is remarkable to me how little of the debate since Assad has fallen has been about justice for the past. That is partly because he has fled off to live with someone else who has his own troubles with international justice. How important do you think justice for past crimes is for HTS, and is there a balancing job they have to do there with inclusion?
Simon Collis: It is a great question. These issues are important everywhere, and that includes Syria; Syrian society is no different. One thing that has been remarkable so far, when you look at the discovery and the opening up of Sednaya prison and the other prisons, is the sheer scale of the torture, detentions and murder that took place there—at least 150,000, probably more, through a conflict where over 500,000 were killed, with maybe 80% of those at the hands of the regime. The question of justice will be an issue. It is remarkable how little reprisal killing there has been so far.
Q25 Chair: Can we be sure that there has not been reprisal killing?
Simon Collis: There has been, but it has been limited. Quite a lot of it has been spontaneous, by local groups. It has not been directed from the centre. You may have more information, Lina, but in the last few days there have been a couple of episodes where it looks like HTS‑directed forces went into a couple of villages in the Homs area to attempt to arrest prominent figures from the previous regime who had been involved in high-profile massacres, where women and children were murdered, not just fighters.
Q26 Chair: That was reported in the media.
Simon Collis: Yes. There was an attempt at detention, it seems, that turned into a firefight, and these people were killed.
Q27 Blair McDougall: To take that operation, for example, is the driving force behind that because the people who conducted the massacre are a security threat to the regime, or is it about justice and retribution?
Simon Collis: All of these things connect. When HTS took Damascus and the other cities, it allowed senior members of the previous regime to disappear. A lot of those people have gone to the mountains, to the extent that they were Alawites. They will be sitting there in the mountains now with weapons, waiting to see what happens. If they do not have a political future, we may see the violence resume. HTS forces are spread quite thinly. This is why it is so important to maintain a political momentum, and a component of that will have to be justice.
It is not helped by the fact that the HTS figure who was appointed Minister of Justice is somebody who—it seems accepted those videos were genuine—as a judge in Idlib presided over what in effect was the street execution of women in a way that I find disgraceful, but also unnecessary. In the struggle to put some governance into Idlib, you can see why they may have felt it necessary to use violence in order to establish dominance, so that you can get security, because without that nothing happens, but summarily executing women for alleged immoral behaviour is not about establishing power, control and security; it is just Daesh-type excess. For that person to have been made the face of justice in the new Syria is worrying. That is one of the worrying things.
Q28 Chair: What is the name of the Justice Minister? We have a note saying Shadi al-Waisi; is that right?
Dr Khatib: I am not sure.
Simon Collis: I am not sure either.
Chair: We can just get that clear.
Simon Collis: I have a very clear memory of the video clips of the behaviour.
Q29 Chair: What you are saying is really important, and we need to get the person identified.
Simon Collis: Yes, we can write and confirm it.
Q30 Blair McDougall: Do you think that justice will be a priority for HTS, or will it be offset by trying to hold the country together?
Dr Khatib: It is a very important and delicate issue for everyone. For HTS, it is delicate and important because there is a lot of public expectation that the people who were involved in torturing others at Sednaya prison, for instance, need to be brought to justice. There is public expectation that whoever is now in charge of Syria needs to hold these people accountable.
At the same time, there is the broader issue of transitional justice. This is broader than just regime figures who have been involved in transgressions, because Syria obviously had other groups that had also engaged in transgressions, and it would not be a fair process if only one group is held accountable for crimes and not everyone, so this is very delicate for HTS.
The other issue right now is that HTS currently does not have the capacity as an Administration to really govern Syria and bring everyone to justice. For that to happen, you need the transition to happen. You need a functioning Government. You need to set up an independent judiciary. You need to set up transitional justice processes.
There are lots of Syrian initiatives abroad that have already started working on these issues and would be best placed to come up with a plan for Syria in that regard. We are not starting from scratch; there are people who have been documenting crimes by everyone, and people who have used European courts to bring to justice people from all sides who have been involved in transgressions.
All this needs to be put together in a package. This is something that Syria needs the international community to help with. This issue of transitional justice in Syria is one of the other things that we can concretely help with, because it is very important. Without it, people are going to be resentful, and at the same time there might be incidents where people just feel they need to take revenge into their own hands. This is very dangerous for stability and for social cohesion.
That is another issue I will very briefly raise. Under Assad, Syria was a society in which people were encouraged to mistrust even members of their own family. Again, this is a society that is now trying to live as one society once more, for the first time in more than half a century, without this shadow of the regime looming where the walls have ears. You are talking about generations who have not known anything different, who are now suddenly expected to just trust one another in society. Any functioning society needs to have social trust.
That is a very important thing that we can also help with, working with civil society to encourage social trust in Syria. As I said, this is not just about different sectarian groups; it is even members of one’s own family. There is a lot that can be done and a lot that needs to be done, but there are a lot of opportunities for us to positively engage.
Chair: That is very helpful.
Q31 Phil Brickell: Mr Collis, Turkey obviously shares a very long border with Syria. There were diplomatic efforts between Ankara and the Assad regime to re-establish diplomatic relations. The Turkish regime had been supporting the Syrian National Army in the north of the country. In your estimation, how important was Turkey in the fall of the Assad regime?
Simon Collis: That is a great question. Turkey was clearly the most significant external actor in what happened. You just have to look at the map. Idlib’s only international border—the base that HTS broke out of—was with Turkey. There has been plenty of media coverage of the nature of its relationships with Turkish security forces.
The nature of HTS’s relationship with Turkey is different from that of the other factions, the SNA factions, that are less disciplined and more under the direct control of Turkish authorities. They do not seem to be autonomous actors. It looks like they are more like hired guns in the SNA, which is the force that has been used against the Kurds in Manbij and so on.
As for HTS and Ahmed al-Sharaa’s relationship with Turkey, my sense is that it would have been a very important relationship while they were in Idlib, because he would have been highly dependent on that. Now they are in Damascus they have options, and they have been exercising those options, not least through the engagement with Saudi Arabia, with Jordan, and with other countries. I suspect part of the Saudi engagement with this emerging leadership in Syria is not to leave the field only to the Turks.
Q32 Chair: We have had two things from visits. The first was when we were in Brussels, we were told by a Turkish representative there not to overestimate Turkish influence in Syria politically, and that there was a disconnect and so on, which seems to be similar to what you are saying, which is interesting. In the second visit that we had, we were told that the Turkish penetration into Syria has been very much on the commercial front. There is Turkish stuff flowing into Syria now in a way that has not been seen before, even to the extent that it might undermine the Syrian economy.
Simon Collis: I am not sure how much Syrian economy there was to undermine. To your first point, it is important not to overstate Turkish influence and how deep that is. As this leadership come to terms with their situation in Damascus, they will find that there were plenty of Arab countries that were looking at Syria while the Assad regime was still there and thinking, “Why is the future of this Arab country being decided by Turkey, Russia and Iran, three non-Arab countries?” That has changed, and that is an important opportunity to change. With Iran now out, a secondary consequential view by many in the Arab world will be not to let Turkey just fill that gap, “Iran is out and Turkey is in.” They will want Syria to return to its natural place as an Arab country in the Arab world.
The second part of the Turkish engagement is in relation to the north‑east and the Kurdish areas. This is an area where there has been quite a lot of wishful thinking in the west—in the US and UK—that this problem can somehow be wished away and mitigated away. It seems to me that this is a core security question for Turkey, and therefore not one that will be on the table for negotiation. I do not expect it to be ready to tolerate an autonomous Kurdish region on its southern border. It would see it as a fundamental threat to its security.
Q33 Edward Morello: There has arguably been an autonomous Kurdish region on its border for the entirety of this conflict, operating with a US security guarantee, effectively. There must be some scope for that to exist alongside Turkey.
Simon Collis: It is basically completely dependent on the US security guarantee. The alliance with the Kurds to counter Daesh was necessary, right and critical, particularly in the first phase. I was the British ambassador in Baghdad when Mosul fell to Daesh. At that moment, Daesh/ISIS was 70 km from Erbil, and working with the Kurds to counter ISIS was essential.
What grew out of that, for various reasons, is that generals and security people find it very easy to deal with Kurds compared with some of the other people in the region that they might need to engage with. The Kurds began to be used as a force for taking territory from ISIS in areas that were not historically Kurdish. They then began to be used as a force for holding that territory in areas that were not traditionally Kurdish.
The problem there is that you wind up solving your immediate problem, which is defeating Daesh, by setting the conditions for the next problem, which is changing facts on the ground in an unsustainable way. That is part of what we are having to deal with now. Untangling that in a way that does respect the legitimate rights and aspirations of all people in Syria, including the Kurds, is going to be a big question. It is not the only one, but it is probably the single biggest one.
It feels like people are waiting on all sides now in this potential conversation between the Turks, the Kurds and the authorities in Damascus. A lot of people seem to be waiting on what Trump is going to do, and to find out whether the American forces will stay or will not. If they do not stay, I imagine that the British forces that are reported to be there will not be able to remain.
Q34 Chair: Forgive me though. There is also an independent Kurdish state—well, pretty much independent state—on the southern border of Turkey, is there not, in the north of Iraq?
Simon Collis: It is not a state.
Chair: Let us not get into that.
Simon Collis: If anybody starts playing with or redrawing lines on maps, it will just open a world of pain. The future is to work within the recognised borders. I do not expect to see an agreement that provides for autonomous regions. That is going to be unacceptable to too many of the parties, not just Turkey, but others, but that does not exclude the possibility of decentralisation.
Syria itself is quite a decentralised country. Historically, the cities and the areas around each of the cities are quite distinct. They have distinct cultures, economies and so on, so you could imagine a future Syria that would be aligned with how it actually is on the ground, and therefore sustainable. You would not be forcing something unnatural on to the terrain. You could imagine something that is relatively loose and decentralised, but not with autonomy.
Q35 Phil Brickell: Reflecting on those comments about looking forward, Dr Khatib, do you want to come in on what Mr Collis has said about what role, positively or negatively, Turkey could play in light of the Kurdish question with HTS in Syria?
Dr Khatib: We have to remember that Turkey’s main reason for getting involved in Syria in the first place, way back when the conflict began, was because of the Kurdish issue. That has always been Turkey’s priority. Right now, again, we need to remember it is still early days. When something shifts like this, all stakeholders see an opportunity. Everyone will begin with maximalist positions, because that is just how it is in any negotiation. Right now, Turkey and the Kurds are starting with maximalist positions, and HTS is doing the same.
Further down the line there is a possibility for compromise. Ultimately, regardless of the Syrian economy having been devastated, there is going to be reconstruction happening in Syria. This is something that will be very attractive for Turkey to be part of. This provides us, as an international community, with a card to use with Turkey to nudge it towards some sort of compromise with the Kurds.
I do not think Arab countries actually want to see a federal Syria, because this is a very sensitive issue for the rest of the Arab world, not just in Syria. Decentralisation is a whole other issue. Even that is considered sensitive in certain contexts. However, in Lebanon right now, with the changes in the Government that are happening, the issue of administrative decentralisation, which was agreed under the Taif agreement of 1989 and never implemented in Lebanon, is back on the table. If this takes off in Lebanon, it makes it more likely for this to be actually implemented in Syria. This is definitely more than acceptable for the Arab world. We have to remember it was Saudi Arabia that brokered and hosted the Taif agreement that ended the Lebanese civil war. In a way, you can use that to imagine what Saudi Arabia would accept in terms of a governance arrangement in Syria.
I emphasise Saudi Arabia, because this is now the most important regional actor in the Syrian conflict—more important than Turkey, but there will be a balance in Saudi-Turkish relations regarding how the situation in Syria plays out. We should not forget that Saudi Arabia is very politically influential when it comes to reconstruction. All eyes are on the Gulf when it comes to the Syrian actors. Again, this is another card to push for a political compromise.
It is early days, but I expect there can be a way out. That way out for the Kurds in Syria is if they say, “We are not the same as the PKK. We are striking a different path. We are going to be pragmatic and we want to engage with everybody. We will engage with Saudi Arabia, the US and everyone else, and accept decentralisation.” At the moment it is not surprising, as I said, that everyone is starting with maximalist demands, but let us not get hung up on where things are right now as publicly expressed, because politics takes time to play out.
Chair: We are starting to run out of time. I am so transfixed by your evidence and it is so interesting, but I have to be a bit more disciplined with myself. We have three large areas of questioning that we would like to ask you and we now have only 10 minutes. I put that down as a marker.
Q36 Phil Brickell: Talking of regional actors, we have seen repeated Israeli military airstrikes in Syria, but also reinforcements of positions in the Golan Heights. Dr Khatib, to what extent do you expect Israeli military involvement in Syria to be temporary, or do you see that as being a lasting course of activity?
Dr Khatib: This is where Syria is not about Syria any more, because for Israel this is about Israeli security in general. As we know, after 7 October, Israel is determined not to see a repeat of that awful scenario. At the moment, with the situation as it is in Syria being uncertain, Israel is saying, “Due to this uncertainty we need to secure ourselves. We need to be present in these areas that allow Israel surveillance so that they can maintain their security.”
The only thing that would change this is if Israel feels secure among its neighbours. This is not just about Syria; this is about what plays out in Lebanon as well. Frankly, this is about relations with the Arab world as a whole. If the Arab world heads in the direction of increased normalisation with Israel, this will translate into security deals between Syria and Israel. This is very different from the current context, in which Israel is basically there in a de facto way.
There is nothing to prevent us seeing a scenario a few years down the line where there is a new security architecture in the region in which Israel, Syria and Lebanon have a security agreement that maintains their stability, but for that to happen we need a few years. It is a possibility. The defeat of Hezbollah militarily in Lebanon paves the way for this scenario to play out. The change in Syria, where the Iranian role has basically been completely devastated, paves the way for this kind of scenario, because it was the Iran-dominant status quo that had prevented this scenario from happening. With the removal of Iran as a spoiler, to a large degree, there is a possibility to change the security equation in the region.
Simon Collis: Israel did what it did because it can. One can understand, if you are an army, why you want to hold the high ground. It is not yours, but you want to hold it. You can understand why you might want to deal pre‑emptively with stocks of heavy weaponry and so on. This is not helpful to the stability of Syria itself, and perhaps not really to stability and security across the region, which is an Israeli interest, as well as an interest of all the other countries there.
What can we do about it? What can others do about it? We need to follow up with the leadership in Damascus on their readiness, and engage with them. This is the question about dialogue, talking not just about abstract concepts but practical co‑operation over counter-terrorism. This leadership can be potentially a counter-terrorism partner against Daesh. There are concerns about the resurgence of ISIS in Homs governorate, in that area south of the Euphrates that is not under the control of the SDF and the Kurds, and down towards the Jordanian border where the US insert is.
Chair: We are going to hear more in terms of the security situation in the next panel.
Simon Collis: The key point is looking to engage with HTS, which has fought ISIS. There is doctrinal difference. The history that Dr Khatib referred to earlier is a distinct history. Even when they had the al-Qaeda roots in the al-Nusra Front they were seen as different, so we know that they are ready to combat Daesh. We should exploit that and see what can be done there.
It is the same thing on weapons of mass destruction. The Syrian regime had chemical weapons. Some engagement may already be happening, but I hope more will happen about what can be done in a negotiated way to deal with that. That removes security problems for us, but also for other countries in the region, including Israel. There are two ways at bottom of managing your security. You can do it by force and dominance, or you can do it through negotiation to lower the levels of mutual armament.
The al-Sharaa leadership have made clear that they have such big domestic problems and challenges to deal with in Syria, which they recognise, that they are not prioritising these external concerns. They have not made it an immediate priority to respond to what Israel has done, but they will naturally want to focus on building up security and prosperity inside the country. This is an opportunity to do that in a way that promotes regional security. You do not have Iran playing the spoiler role any more. You can build up what begins to look more like the Westphalian state system, which is what countries like Saudi Arabia basically want. They want to see Governments in control of countries with borders that can deal with each other in a normal way. It seems to me that is very much in our interest too.
Q37 Sir John Whittingdale: The Assad regime was previously reliant to some extent on both Iran and Russia. You have already talked about Iran and you said Iran is out, but Russia is not out; it still has a military presence in Syria, both an air base and a naval base. When we were in Jordan it was said that HTS probably has enough on its plate without wishing to pick a fight with Russia, but in the longer term it cannot be happy that Russia supported Assad and is still harbouring Assad. Where do you see the likely future of Russia’s presence in Syria?
Chair: If at all.
Simon Collis: If at all—exactly. What does Russia have to offer Syria potentially in the future? It is Russian pilots who murdered Syrian civilians across Aleppo and other cities. Syrians are not going to forget that in a hurry, and nor should they. On a practical level, looking ahead, it is not obvious to me what Russia has to offer a Syria that is looking to build a future. It is a major oil producer and that is about it.
Might a Syrian leadership be tempted to let the Russians stay in the naval base a little bit and in the air base a little bit, so that they have something on the table when they talk to the Americans? I do not know. They might think like that. That would be a mistake. It would not give them very much leverage with the Americans. I do not see why they would want it themselves.
They have cracked down. There has been some media reporting on them kicking out a Russian company that had a contract in Tartus port and ending that. Let us see where it goes, but I do not expect to see Russia playing a significant role in Syria’s future, whether or not it maintains some vestigial presence.
Q38 Abtisam Mohamed: You have made reference to the Americans a few times throughout. We know that Donald Trump initially said that it is not their fight, but quite recently they have been sharing intelligence with the new Syrian leadership. They still have a significant number of troops in the country. How do you think the Administration might deal with Syria now?
Simon Collis: There are so many uncertainties. We still do not know exactly who in the Trump Administration will be leading on Syria. I have heard a couple of names, but what will they do? What will be the gap, when President Trump is saying, “We do not want to be in the Middle East. We have other things to focus on”?
Successive American Administrations have tried to lean out of the Middle East. This is not just a Trump thing. Under Obama, Trump and Biden, successive Administrations have tried to be less in the region and they have found that they get drawn back in, for one reason or another. It may be that that is still going to be the case, to a certain extent, with Trump. I am sure that the language will be different. Maybe the substance will be different. The Abraham accords were a genuine achievement, of course.
We will have to wait and see. Whatever they do or do not do will be hugely influential. Even if the European and UK sanctions are lifted, because of the extraterritorial element of American sanctions, companies will still hesitate to trade or do business. It will be very difficult. There has been this six-month waiver from the US, which has been clear and decisive, and is actually ahead of where Brussels and London are. It is a temporary measure.
I hope we can follow that, but six months is not a long enough timeline for people to take reconstruction decisions. It will allow a surge of humanitarian support and short-term trade, but it will not allow reconstruction and rebuilding of infrastructure. I hope that, for the Government here, in thinking what they can do about Syria, conversations with Washington about this will be important. We and the Europeans can decide to do a whole bunch of stuff, but, if the US sanctions remain, nothing that we do will make a difference. If US forces stay or do not stay in the Kurdistan region, that will make a difference to the internal dynamics. It is about understanding what the US’s vision is and shaping it to extent we can. That is not going to be easy, but there is no point ignoring it.
Q39 Abtisam Mohamed: Dr Khatib, do you think that the US would withdraw, given that there is a significant amount of oil resources in the country? Would it be in its interest to withdraw?
Dr Khatib: It is not just about oil.
Chair: It is not, but it helps.
Dr Khatib: There is also the issue of Iran and the issue of ISIS. I just published an article about the relationship between ISIS and Iran. Because ISIS and HTS have historically been rivals for more than a decade, ISIS is not happy that HTS is now the most dominant actor in Syria. Iran, at the same time, is not happy either about having basically lost its influence in Syria. There is a pragmatism that brings these two, Iran and ISIS, together, which can be a destabilising factor inside Syria.
For the United States, the key thing for us is to think about what the Trump Administration want to do about Iran and clearly the focus here is no longer about the nuclear deal, which was the biggest issue under the last Administration. Trump made it clear that, with Iran, the new strategy will link the nuclear file with the file of ballistic missiles, with the file of Iran’s regional interventions, which, frankly, should have happened a very long time ago, but finally. Iran’s destabilisation was also emphasised in the conversation between US Secretary of State Rubio and the Saudi Foreign Minister recently.
Here you have Saudi interests when it comes to Iran’s destabilisation coinciding with US interests about Iranian destabilisation coinciding with a Government in Syria that will not want to have to deal with Iranian destabilisation either. For that to play out, we need to think about what Washington will do about Iran. If the US is serious about tackling the issue of Iranian destabilisation, then Syria is definitely a key part of this picture.
Again, this takes us back to the issue of Israeli security, because with Iran running around, causing destabilisation, Israel is under threat. That is now a red line after October 2023. Things have shifted. What used to be tolerance in Washington and even in Tel Aviv regarding Iran being an influential actor in the Middle East is no longer the case. I expect the US is not just going to withdraw and leave the door open for Iran to try, for example, to activate ISIS. In Iraq, for example, Iran used ISIS to empower the militias that Iran sponsored, which were fighting ISIS. Iran wants to show that it is needed in the fight against ISIS. It is in Iran’s interest for ISIS to be active again.
The US is aware of all this. This is why we are seeing the sharing of intelligence with HTS, because the situation can spiral out of control. We should not be myopic, but think long term and big picture when it comes to how the US will handle Syria. I expect it will handle it through this bigger prism.
Q40 Abtisam Mohamed: I have a very quick follow-up question. Do you think HTS will welcome the support from America? How is its support being received? What is the flipside to this?
Dr Khatib: Absolutely, the sharing of intelligence will be both ways. The US has alerted the current Administration in Damascus about, for example, the planned attack that did not happen on Sayyidah Zaynab in Damascus. Equally, there will be sharing of intelligence from the field in Syria with the US because, as I said, this is a shared concern and it has to do with Israeli security as well.
One thing I will add here about Israel is that Ahmed al-Sharaa did say, “We are not interested in starting war with Israel. That is not what this Administration want to do.” When it comes to Russia, he also said that they view the relationship with Russia as a long-term strategic one.
Again, looking at how Saudi Arabia, despite its close relationship with the US, maintained relations with Russia at the same time, I think this is the formula that will also play out in Syria in the sense that this is going to be an Administration that know that it is in their best interests to remain on friendly terms with everyone and not place themselves in any one particular camp. We are seeing a lot of pragmatism at play. That is something to work with.
Simon Collis: The Russian and Saudi Arabian relationship is actually very thin, with the exception of one big thing, which is the co-ordination over oil production. OPEC+ is the one thing that Riyadh needs to co-ordinate with Russia about. The “plus” in OPEC+ is Russia. Beyond that, it is a thin relationship. There just is not much to offer and that would be the same for Syria in the end, long term.
Dr Khatib: Absolutely. When we say “keeping relations with everyone”, it is not with the same intensity or the same depth. Yes, absolutely.
Q41 Dan Carden: I want to return us to UK policy. We have been right the way around the region and we touched on UK policy a little bit earlier. You both agreed that sanctions against Syria should have been lifted by the UK. We have two minutes left. Can you give us a little outline of your assessment of UK policy towards Syria? What has been done well and perhaps what more should have been done?
Simon Collis: I can understand why a natural instinct here might be to be cautious, because there are so many uncertainties and the politics of it are difficult.
Dan Carden: Should we reopen the embassy?
Simon Collis: It is time to be bold. There is nothing to lose from being bold, dropping the sanctions, reopening the embassy. It is doing more, more quickly, along the lines that are already happening.
Q42 Dan Carden: Earlier on, you said, “Lift the sanctions because you can reapply them.” Would that same logic not apply to considering HTS to be a terrorist organisation?
Simon Collis: Yes. We should build on the engagement that is already happening with it. We do not need to remove the designation of HTS. HTS, by its own lights, is preparing to dissolve itself. It will not exist any more. There will be decisions about the individuals who have been designated, but the organisation will morph into a national body. It will not exist as HTS any longer. Ahmed al-Sharaa has been quite clear about that.
We should be lifting the sanctions, engaging in a security and counter-terrorist dialogue, engaging in a political dialogue while understanding that, in the end, these will be Syrian decisions, and making nudges in the right direction where possible on the national convention about inclusion and women.
Q43 Dan Carden: We talked earlier about the importance of governance and the UK is in a special place in terms of what it can do to support countries developing their governance models. Could we do that better if we had the embassy there?
Simon Collis: Yes, of course, although just from a practical point of view, the prerequisite for any kind of governance is a minimum of security and then understanding what that is going to look like—it is not going to be perfect—for HTS to provide security across the country, without which nothing else can happen. We must be respectful of that as a practical matter and go along with it, without conceding that that then allows Ahmed al-Sharaa and his team to treat the national convention, the national dialogue process, as one where they decide what role the minority communities will have.
Dan Carden: Can I give Dr Khatib one minute? We have about a minute left.
Chair: You can have the last word, but could you make it brief, please?
Dr Khatib: I am not sure I have much to add, to be honest, in terms of policy. Again, I have been talking about engagement, working with civil society, working on transitional justice and talking to our Gulf friends. Israeli security is something to bear in mind.
Q44 Dan Carden: Is it important for the UK to be bold because of the geopolitical considerations, in that Russia and other countries will want to gain influence in Syria?
Dr Khatib: As you know, there is no such thing as a vacuum in international relations. If we are not there, someone else will occupy that space, which is what happened with Russia in 2015. We cannot afford for that scenario to be repeated.
Chair: Can I thank you very much indeed for the time that you have given us? It has been such an interesting session. I intend to have a two-minute break, so that we can all recover before we get into the next one, which, I suspect, will also be quite an interesting and intense session.
Thank you all very much for your time today and, if there is anything that we have missed out or that you think that we should know about, please do write in as well. We would appreciate that. You can give written evidence as well as oral evidence. Thank you so much.
Examination of witnesses
Witnesses: Richard Barrett, Paul Jordan and Professor Harmonie Toros.
Q45 Chair: We are now going to begin the second session of oral evidence on the situation in Syria. Will our three witnesses introduce themselves? Perhaps we can begin with Professor Harmonie Toros.
Professor Toros: I am Harmonie Toros. I am a professor in politics and international relations at the University of Reading and I have been following the question of detainees in the various detention centres, camps and prisons in north-east Syria for the last five years now.
Richard Barrett: My name is Richard Barrett. I was dealing with various security issues until I was asked by the Secretary-General to go to New York to help with the Security Council sanctions regime on al-Qaeda and the Taliban, as it was then, and al-Qaeda and Daesh, as it is known now.
Paul Jordan: My name is Paul Jordan. I am a senior adviser working on international and national security. The topic here relates to my work at the European Institute of Peace, where I head work in responding to security crises, of which violent extremism is one.
Q46 Chair: Thank you very much for coming before this Committee. I will kick off by asking some questions about Islamic State and Syria. Mr Barrett, how serious is the threat posed by Islamic State in Syria today? Is it a threat to the UK?
Richard Barrett: Islamic State reckons that it has a good opportunity. It has been contained so far by CENTCOM, in conjunction with the SDF, but the SDF is under increased threat from Turkey and is now finding it harder and harder to insert itself into the new Government in Syria in a way that preserves its identity and helps its aspirations towards increasing the Kurish-controlled area that already exists in Iraq.
ISIS has had something of a resurgence anyway over the last year or 18 months, because it had been really knocked back by CENTCOM and other forces, including the Iraqis and, of course, the Russians and Iranians, who are no longer there to help that fight, and the Syrian army. It probably has about 2,000 to 3,000 active fighters. That is a long way down from what it had in, say, 2019, when it probably had about 15,000 fighters. You can still do a lot of damage with 3,000 fighters.
It sees a big opportunity to increase its numbers from the 9,000 Islamic State prisoners who are under SDF control at the moment. There are about 22 prisons that the SDF has these people in. CENTCOM has been trying to help it improve the security. If you remember, there was a big prison break, again in 2019, I believe, where about 500 people were killed, prison guards and prisoners alike. Islamic State sees these 9,000 still in prison as people it could liberate and have join its ranks, because the prisoners would have nowhere else to go.
It has revived what it calls the “breaking the walls” campaign, which it initiated in Iraq during the Iraq war, when it managed to liberate a lot of prisoners who then were able to join al-Qaeda in Iraq, as it was, to fight and increase their dominance in their areas. I do not know how long you want me to go on talking about Islamic State.
Q47 Chair: It is interesting to hear, given that we were told in 2019 that it had been defeated, that it now has a campaign of “breaking the walls” and trying to get the 9,000 inside the walls out. That is important for people to hear, if that is what is happening. You also touched on the other side of it, which is the relationship with the Syrian Democratic Forces and how strong the SDF is.
Richard Barrett: The Syrian Democratic Forces, of course, is under considerable threat, because it has not been able to negotiate with HTS, with the new de facto Government in Damascus, to preserve its identity. HTS has I think been negotiating with 67 other armed groups.
HTS has offered to allow the SDF members to come into the new Syrian army, but the SDF, as Simon Collis was saying, has insisted that it remain as a bloc and remain deployed in north-east Syria, which HTS cannot accept, because it would look as if it is a potentially separatist group within Syria, but also the Turks would not accept that at all. Turkey is, apart from the United States, the main player in all this in the short term.
Q48 Chair: You refer to the United States in this area being a major player. What difference has there been in the area as a result of the election of Donald Trump?
Richard Barrett: We do not know and that is the big question. What will happen? The SDF is hoping that CENTCOM will be allowed to stay, will manage to keep its 2,000 troops, its air support and so on, and therefore will see SDF as an essential partner in the continuing fight against Islamic State. Although General Kurilla, the head of CENTCOM, has been very busy in trying to negotiate things between the SDF, HTS, the Turks and everybody else, he has not actually managed to come up with anything that is concrete. Of course, he does not know what Trump and Hegseth are going to tell him to do, because Trump’s isolationist policy would tend to make us think that he would probably want to withdraw those troops or at least have as little to do with the future of Syria as possible.
Q49 Chair: Has there not also been a change in terms of funding in the area?
Richard Barrett: Yes, that is right. USAID, as you have seen, has just now suspended for the time being all its funding of foreign initiatives all over the world. Trump will no doubt say, “Who benefits from all this? They should pay.” I do not mean to be rude to the US President—
Chair: No, of course you do not.
Richard Barrett: These issues are really complicated, of course, as the previous panel was explaining. Erdoğan, for example, has very strong ideas of Turkish regional power and in a way the resurgence of the Ottoman Empire, in his grandest moments. He remembers how he dealt with President Trump in the past, at the end of President Trump’s first term. Erdoğan reckoned he had got one over him and managed to persuade him that he should leave this area to the Turks and not get further involved.
Erdoğan is quite confident that he can persuade Trump that this is not his battle. “You can get out of here. We will look after it and we will come to some arrangement with HTS in order to be able to deal with the Islamic State prisoners and the Islamic State threat as well. You have air power, but we have aeroplanes too.” In fact, the reality is that, if the Turks were to take part in or take over the CENTCOM role in the battle against Islamic State, there would be a real challenge to the new Government in Damascus that they would find hard to deal with. It would not be a satisfactory answer for anybody.
Paul Jordan: I wanted to come in on the last point with regards to what difference it would make and particularly on the funding. The US State Department, as you are probably all aware, has put an embargo on all of its funded programmes, one of which is the camps. There is an organisation called Blumont that runs al-Hol and Roj, which are the two main humanitarian camps, but are more like big detention facilities. That has led, in the last few days, to basically nothing being delivered within the camps. No NGOs were able to go in. There was no camp administration and very little security. Food was not delivered, et cetera. It had an immediate impact on the people on the ground, on the safety, on the security and everything else.
I have been working since 2019 on the camps, the prisons and the issue of repatriation—basically, helping countries with their repatriations, looking at getting people back to their countries of origin. A lot of our work is funded by the US. We have the same thing. The US has a lot of partnerships with countries in terms of repatriation, and that stopped immediately. In terms of an immediate impact, I have never seen anything as significant as this before.
Q50 Chair: Who is paying the guards?
Paul Jordan: Again, the US. That will come from the US. Now, today, I have heard that Blumont, which runs the camps, is back in the camps. I would think that something has been done. Maybe the coalition has taken over or something, but everyone is waiting to see what will happen. It is really in limbo around what is going to happen with the camps in the short to medium term, while this three to four-month decision is made.
Q51 Chair: Just so I have it clear, the Americans were paying the guards of these camps. They have withdrawn the funding and the money for food was not going in; the money to pay the guards was not happening.
Paul Jordan: The whole camp administration is basically shared between an organisation called Blumont and the Kurdish administration, of which the US will be funding the vast majority. The entirety of the camps and how they work is down to that funding.
Q52 Chair: What has happened since?
Paul Jordan: For the last couple of days, there was basically nothing. Nothing was happening at the camps. A number of the NGOs that provide humanitarian support also get their funding via the US, so they had to withdraw anyway, but no others could go in because of the level of safety and security, and because there was no administration.
Q53 Chair: Are these the camps with the men in or are these the camps with the women in too?
Paul Jordan: When I talk about camps, you have al-Hol, which is the biggest one and has an annexe that is third-country nationals. That has people from around about 55 countries, everywhere apart from Iraq and Syria; it has around about 6,000 people or something like that, purely women and children. The other side of al-Hol is women, children and men, but men not thought to be part of ISIS. It is generally in family units. That is purely Syrian and Iraqi people, and about 20,000 or 30,000 people are left there now.
Those are just camps. The prisons are separate but, again, there will be US funding to the prisons. Then there are also detention facilities for young males and boys.
Q54 Chair: You are now saying that the latest news is that suddenly someone seems to be funding it again.
Paul Jordan: Yes. Literally during the first session, I got an update, because we have teams on the ground who have not been able to do anything for the last couple of days. They said that today it looks like the administration is back, but no one really knows what is going on and how long that is going to be fixed for.
Q55 Chair: I do not mean to ask a flippant question, but who do you think might be funding them again?
Paul Jordan: I guess it would probably be the coalition.
Chair: The coalition is who?
Paul Jordan: The coalition to defeat Daesh. This was the coalition that was formed to partner with the Kurds, which basically has a military part and a political part. It has a lot of funding from the US. The UK funds it, as well as European countries. I think around 27 countries are part of it in total, but most of the funding and the grunt work, if you like, is US, UK and some western European countries.
Richard Barrett: I could just mention that both Turkey and HTS have offered to take over running these camps. They would rely, to a certain extent, on other people helping them fund it, but they will have their own sources of income or they will claim to, and that may encourage the Americans to feel they can get out.
Q56 Sir John Whittingdale: I have a quick question, which is probably for Mr Barrett, although I welcome any thoughts. There has been cheering at the fall of the Assad regime, and there is also recognition of the threat that ISIS poses. Can I ask what your assessment of HTS is? Previously, it has been designated as a terrorist organisation, but now they are suggesting that they are reformed characters, if you like. To what extent should we accept that? Should we still treat them with considerable caution?
Richard Barrett: The HTS argument that they are just nationalists, certainly anti-Assad, certainly insurgents, but not in any way interested in attacking anybody outside Syria, can be taken more or less at face value based on their track record. Yes, Ahmed al-Sharaa went to Iraq in 2003 and joined al-Qaeda in Iraq. He was 20 at the time, so he must have done something, but maybe not a hell of a lot before he was banged up by the Americans.
Of course, in the camps that the Americans were running, where he was from about 2003 to 2006, he met Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and all those other people who went on to join al-Qaeda in Iraq. He went with them to do that, but quite shortly after the start of the Syrian revolution he went over to Syria with eight or nine other people from al-Qaeda in Iraq, rather against Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s wishes, to start what was called then Jabhat al-Nusra, an al-Qaeda affiliate.
All of these labels are easy to stick on and quite easy to peel off, in a way, because everybody was looking for some sort of purchase, some sort of reason that people would come and join them. There was great competition, if you like, and Ahmed al-Sharaa made clear from the start that his ambition was to change the regime in Syria, not to do anything even in Iraq particularly and certainly not abroad. More recently, since 2020 anyway, he has been trying to make overtures to the Americans, sharing intelligence and stuff like that.
The Americans eventually took him up on that and, of course, in the recent couple of years have been finding, killing or otherwise encouraging HTS to imprison various al-Qaeda leaders and Islamic State fighters who turned up in Idlib or in other areas where HTS had some control. If I may add, recently—a couple of weeks ago, in fact—based on some American intelligence, HTS arrested a cell of four Islamic State fighters who were really very ready to attack Shia shrines near Damascus.
That is quite a significant track record. Of course, Islamic State refers to them as apostates and takfiris. It calls them jihadists turned politicians. I do not know whether it is worse to be called a jihadist or a politician.
Sir John Whittingdale: What a terrible accusation.
Richard Barrett: Anyway, in Islamic State language, that is the wrong direction. HTS is very much in the other direction of jihadists turned politicians, to the better.
Q57 Edward Morello: I am interested in extrapolating a little bit further on this, because we are going to talk about Islamic State and foreign fighters, but HTS has also had foreign fighters within its ranks. Some of those are Uighurs from the East Turkestan Islamic Movement and elsewhere.
While HTS, as it morphs into the state of Syria, has looked to incorporate some of those fighters into the new military, I am interested to know whether, Islamic State aside, from within HTS we are going to see an outflux of foreign fighters returning to either home or other operating theatres. Should we have any concerns around that?
Richard Barrett: It is a very good question. So far, HTS has, much to the annoyance of Syrian colleagues, put some of these foreign fighters in positions of authority, particularly in the north-west where they are well known, as a way to calm them down, keep them within the tent and so on. It may be also that they have some ability at administration because, after all, HTS has been essentially providing governance in that area for a long time now and doing it relatively well, I would say.
Yes, there is that risk of people going outside who could claim to have come from an HTS route. You can see, since the beginning of December, how much activity HTS has engaged in with other states, including, of course, Ann Snow going from the Foreign Office here. It has been really intense, particularly with Turkey, but also with the European Union, with the Americans, with anyone who wants to go, pretty much.
One of the subjects on the agenda will very much have been, “How many of our nationals might you have? How many members might you have who might come and threaten our security?” The HTS response has been, “These are the people we have. We do not think they are going to be a threat to you, but let us talk about it. Let us manage it together.” This will come back also with the offer to take over the camps and prisons in north-east Syria, because in the camps remain some British citizens. One of the issues the Government here will have to face is what to do with them as the situation becomes more and more fragile.
Q58 Abtisam Mohamed: I have a question for Paul. You referenced earlier the camps and people’s experiences there. What are the conditions like in the detention camps?
Paul Jordan: To say “dreadful” is to put it mildly, to be honest, particularly at the moment. I have not been for a little bit now—last year was the last time I went—but, as I say, I have a team on the ground, who are there 24/7, and since 2019 I have been going pretty regularly. It used to be every couple of months or so. There is not enough food. The sanitation facilities are poor. There are nowhere near enough medical facilities.
In terms of the annexe where the third-country nationals are in al-Hol, the Kurds saw them as the more dangerous of those two communities, the other being the Iraqis and Syrians, who are largely people who fled. Those who joined Islamic State from other countries were seen as being part of Islamic State and, therefore, a higher threat. They just kind of put them in an area, closed the door and then did not let anyone in or out of that.
It has been like that for a long time now, since the end of 2019. There has never been enough funding for it to get it to an appropriate level. There has never been enough competency of those managing it and that is largely because it has been under Kurdish control. The UN has not been able to step in, because it is not a state. There has been a hodgepodge of different actors and largely Kurdish administration.
Initially, the Kurds saw this as something they could use for leverage. They saw it as a good opportunity to speak to different states, to act as a state on the international stage, and that made repatriations difficult. A lot of the work I was doing initially, particularly with European states, was trying to manage that relationship between the Kurds and the states that wanted to repatriate. Repatriation really is the only solution and that is why the US has been pushing it for a long time. That is why, now, pretty much all European states have repatriated all of those that they have been able to. There are some Europeans left, but a lot of those are the refuseniks, the ones who are saying, “I am not going to come back.”
Roj is slightly better but, again, conditions have been going down and down. Roj is much smaller. That is only a couple of thousand, as compared to tens of thousands in al-Hol. Al-Hol, at its highest, had nearly 90,000 people and around about 12,000 to 15,000 in the annexe.
Q59 Abtisam Mohamed: What is the experience like for children and women?
Paul Jordan: For children, it is indescribable; it really is. It is terrible.
Q60 Abtisam Mohamed: What is the longest that someone has lived there, as a child?
Paul Jordan: Since 2019. The only time that a child will move is either when they are repatriated, so their country comes to collect them, or, for the boys, when they get to around about 13 and are moved to a detention facility to stop the sexual violence and rape that happens a lot. They are separated from their mums and taken to a detention facility, which is just young boys. When they get too full, then they go into the prisons.
Just a few months ago, some of the boys were taken back into the camp, into al-Hol, from the detention facilities. They were immediately married by the women inside the annexe. That was largely north African women. There is a significant radical element. It is an incredibly radicalising place. Most of the education, if you can call it that, within the annexe is carried out by radicalised women who are just forcing Islamic State propaganda on the kids.
There are no activities for the kids, nothing to play with. They create toy guns and stuff. Where any support tries to go into the annexe, often people are stoned because, again, the kids are just taught to be radical towards other people. It is a very grim existence.
Q61 Abtisam Mohamed: Is this likely to get worse?
Paul Jordan: Absolutely, yes. 2024 was the worst year for funding for Syria as a whole. It was around about half of the modal average from 2016 to 2023. It was £1.6 billion, I think, for the whole of Syria, and al-Hol camp would be right down the bottom of that list. It is nowhere near enough. WHO, MSF and all of the humanitarian organisations have said that it is a catastrophe in terms of medication, supplies, sanitation and everything else.
The various conflicts that have taken donors’ attention and money away have just meant that the conditions will get worse. What happened with the US funding, again, will not only start to reduce capacity to deliver support within the camps, but then also have an effect on those within the camps. It will increase violence. It is already a very violent place. It will increase distrust and animosity. You have a bad situation only going in one direction.
Professor Toros: Could I just briefly come in on that? It is important to note that Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, who was there with her team in 2023, concluded that the treatment of children there amounts to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.
Q62 Richard Foord: Can I just ask who Fionnuala is?
Professor Toros: She was a special rapporteur for counter-terrorism and human rights. She led a team of international lawyers and visited the camps and the detention centres. She essentially concluded that this amounts to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of children and that there is a cradle to grave system for these children. They are essentially born into camps, graduate into detention centres, graduate into prisons and then potentially die, because they have large amounts of tuberculosis in the prisons. It is a pipeline of degradation and inhumanity that these children are exposed to.
Chair: I hear what you say. I know that there are still British women and children in these camps. I have a constituent of dual nationality and I think she was offered a deal, whereby she had to stay but British authorities would take her children back to the UK. One of them has died and she has one child left. She is still trying to come back into the UK. There have been times when the family have seen video of her and she has not been able to stand up. The account that you give seems to be consistent with the accounts that the family give me of the conditions in which she lives.
Paul Jordan: Absolutely, yes. From the perspective of the Kurds, they had just finished this conflict, this battle, this war with Islamic State, and then they have all these people who they see as their opponents in this battle who they now have to look after. They have never run a camp of this size. They do not know what they are doing. They do not have the finances. They do not have the wherewithal. They do not have anything.
They are starting from such a low starting point that to be able to get to even just ticking along was too far for them. With the amount of money that would be needed and the influx of expertise to be able to get it to a standard, it is just never going to happen.
Q63 Chair: My constituent was 17 when she was, some would say, trafficked; some would not, but she was a child when she went out to Syria to marry a fighter. What is the youngest age of a girl you have heard of who has gone from one country to another in order to marry a fighter? How young are we talking?
Paul Jordan: I have certainly heard of 10 and 11-year-olds and some very young teens as well. There are definitely cases of trafficking. There is no doubt in my mind at all. If you ask anyone who has actually been there and dealt with these people, it is absolutely true. It smacks you in the face. If you were speaking to the SDF and the administration right at the start of it, and they were sticking a finger in the air as to, “This is what we think are the different women within the annexe.” They suggested that around about 10% to 20% were trafficked and were total victims. They would definitely err on the side of caution. They are not particular fans of anyone in there, but there are certainly a sizeable amount who are trafficked.
On the other end, there are definitely some deeply radicalised women and some women who have no doubt completed some heinous crimes, but they will not answer for those crimes in the camps. At the moment, they are just arbitrarily detained. There is no justice for the victims. The victims are all around where the camp is. Everyone there was immediately affected by ISIS and their crimes. There is no justice for them, so there is no chance of getting through this.
Again, if we are just swapping the management of the camp, there is no progress on this. There needs to be some form of justice for those at that end. From the Kurdish perspective and from my experience, I would say you have two ends, each with 10% to 20%: at one end total victims and at the other those who are heinous and deeply radicalised. Then you have a very large centre where they could be at either end.
Part of what I have been doing is establishing whereabouts these people are on this scale and then trying to move people, so they can be repatriated and then be dealt with within their countries. That is the only solution for this.
Q64 Blair McDougall: You mentioned the radicalising education that the kids are getting in the camps. We also have reports of children, child soldiers, being taught how to fight and taught to be suicide bombers. It feels a bit like the “war on terror” has gone from being a situation where we attack terrorist training camps to one where the international community seems to be essentially creating one at the moment.
Could you say a little bit about that side of things? What dangerous skills are these young people being taught?
Paul Jordan: If you look again at al-Hol, particularly on the Iraqi and Syrian side, it definitely had infiltration of quite serious ISIS members. It had cells operating in the camp, because you had, at its peak, 80,000 people in there, men, women and children. You had basically criminal gangs operating within the camps, lots of murders, lots of smuggling of weapons. The Kurds and the SDF would do military operations periodically and bring in caches of weapons, discover a load of dead bodies, maybe arrest some cells, but then they would be able to build back up again.
In the annexe, the immediate threat to the security forces is slightly less, because they have left them, but there is definitely a radicalising and radicalised approach, whereby the most radical women run that annexe. They have to because, if you step out of line, you will be killed. It is simple as that. For anyone who is not adopting those radical processes, their life is in immediate danger. Even if you are not that way, you are damn sure going to pretend that you are.
They are definitely looking at perpetuating the violence. They had celebrations when the Taliban took over in Afghanistan. They had celebrations with regards to Gaza, because they saw these as opportunities for extremist groups to fight back. They have been preaching that. They have been preaching that they will be rescued by Islamic State and should prepare themselves. Part of that is conditioning the young for that.
Q65 Blair McDougall: I suspect I know the answer, given that earlier you were talking about the failure to feed them and provide basic medical support, but is there any effective international intervention to combat the radicalisation within the camps?
Paul Jordan: No. There are bits and pieces that happen on the Iraqi and Syrian side in al-Hol. A lot of that is around strategic communications, so messaging to people. Within Roj, it is slightly better. We did a lot of work with the children in Roj, because Roj is a much smaller camp of a couple of thousand people. It is better organised, so that the tents actually have a physicality to them. They have a little stone outline that they can put them in. There is a lot more security. It is much easier to manage.
Q66 Chair: Why are some people in Roj and some in al-Hol? Is that the luck of the draw?
Paul Jordan: Yes, pretty much. With some of the repatriations, quite a lot of people get moved to Roj before they are then repatriated, because it is just a little bit easier to take people out of Roj than out of al-Hol. Sometimes, some countries have been able to negotiate with the Kurds and say, “Can we have some people moved across to Roj?”
Q67 Chair: For those who might be watching and interested in this, being in Roj does not necessarily mean you are going to be repatriated.
Paul Jordan: That is correct. They both are facilities to hold the people, basically. The reason why al-Hol had such an influx was the fall of Baghuz. Baghuz was the last standout of Islamic State. It was defeated. That was the territorial defeat. Everyone flooded out of that very small town and al-Hol is very close to it. The Kurds said to the men, “You are going on the back of a van to prison,” and to the women and children, “In you go. Shut the gate. Keep them in there.”
Q68 Blair McDougall: The UK funds some of these camps and prisons. Are the inmates aware of that and does that increase the risk to the UK from these individuals?
Paul Jordan: It would not increase the risk. They would not be too aware of UK funding. There is not the classic “delivered with UK aid” sticker.
Blair McDougall: There is not a Union flag on the outside of the prison, no.
Paul Jordan: The only thing would be that British citizens would perhaps see it as a bit of a hypocrisy of the funding, when there is such a firm position on repatriations. That is a definite area where the UK has been out alone in a very small, negative group.
Q69 Chair: Help us with that. Are all the Americans now back?
Paul Jordan: There are some Americans who remain, as with pretty much every country. I know that Kosovo repatriated and has all of its citizens and there are other countries that have attempted to repatriate all of their citizens. To give you an example, when I started in 2019, I started with 11 European countries—the UK and the EU—as a small group talking about this. At that point in time, all of them said, “We are not repatriating. We don’t care. We are not doing anything about it.” Now, all of that group apart from the UK has leaned into repatriations. Certainly all western and northern European countries, a lot of southern European countries, and even eastern European countries—a lot of Russians and Ukrainians have been repatriated—have taken the step to go, “We will repatriate.”
Really, it has only been those who have refused repatriation, so there are a couple of Germans, maybe some French, and in general those are what we deem difficult cases, whereby they have said, “No, I am not being repatriated,” and then they are not going to be rendered. In those cases, it might be that the mother is very radicalised.
Q70 Chair: Sorry, are we talking just about the women, or are we talking about women and men?
Paul Jordan: This is just about women and children, basically. They are either deeply radicalised, or they have concerns around their children, because when they get back a lot of countries are looking to prosecute, which is absolutely right. We have no problem with that at all. There has to be some sort of negotiation around what happens with the children, and some have said, “No, I am not happy with that.” There have been women from Germany, from Sweden, from others, who have been prosecuted. Again, this prosecution argument is not really a good one that can hold any weight.
In general, there have not really been any repatriations of the men, again apart from Kosovo. Kosovo did. That is the next thing for us to look at.
Q71 Chair: The American men are still there then.
Paul Jordan: The American men, yes. Again, in terms of western Europeans, Americans and Canadians, there are not a lot of them coming out. Something has to be done about them. That is what we are working with and what I am working with various states to try and look at next.
Going back to the US piece, it is important to recognise that the chances of the US putting people on planes and just sending them back to their countries of origin have gone up significantly with the new Administration. That could definitely happen. It has always been something that could happen, but now the chances of that have gone up significantly. What I have been telling states for the last 12 months, and certainly with the very quickly shifting sands in Syria, is, “People are coming back, whether you like it or not. It is just up to you whether you control that, or whether you have to deal with it when they are back.”
Professor Toros: It is important to note that most children are under the age of 10. Certainly, that is the case with the British nationals we know of. Although there is this worry and this legitimate concern of the radicalisation of older children, a lot of the children are very small. There are very small children who, from my understanding, engage in activities. There has been some level of informal primary education. There has been an attempt to do some level of formal primary education. I am sure they will build toy guns, but they will also try to build chess pieces. It is important to remember that some of these children are just children, and there is a danger of having an imaginary picture around these children that is not reflected in the majority of them.
Do you want me to go on to the question of the repatriation?
Chair: Shall we take Mr Barrett and come back?
Richard Barrett: Just to be fair and to be clear, the UK has brought back some women and children, although very few. Last year there was one woman and five children or something. Then in 2023 there were about three women.
Paul Jordan: It was something like seven or eight in total.
Richard Barrett: It is possible. That is all I am trying to say.
Q72 Chair: Yes, I understand. The complicating factor is if they are dual nationals. That has been the issue, has it not?
Professor Toros: Specifically on the repatriation, there is a tracker of these repatriations, and the UK seems to have repatriated in total 21 people, 18 of them children and three of them women. If you compare that to Kosovo, Kosovo is 104. Kyrgyzstan is 454. There is a very different scale in terms of the repatriation. To sort of follow up on what Paul was saying, the UK does sit as an outlier here in its policy of refusing repatriation.
There are specific cases. There was a recent case where a woman had her citizenship restored on appeal and asked to come back, and the Kurdish authorities essentially said, “We need the UK to say she can come back.” The UK Government refused to do so. There are a variety of blockages that have taken place at the UK level.
Q73 Edward Morello: Extrapolating from that in terms of the UK’s responsibility in this area and what the drivers are for saying no, is our rationale an outlier when we are saying no, or is it the same logic that other countries apply?
Professor Toros: The rationale was a rationale, to a certain degree, of security. There was concern about the return of these individuals. Even if they left as minors, there was a concern that they had been radicalised, that they had engaged in violence, that they were a threat. There was the concern that, because these crimes were committed abroad in places where evidence was difficult to gather, the prosecutions would be difficult. There was a very, very strong element of not wanting to engage in a policy that was seen as deeply unpopular and something that they could pay a political cost for. There is a strong element of that.
We came two years ago and we said, “This is a pressing issue. The danger is that Syria will not remain as it is, that the situation on the ground will change, and that will make the question even more pressing.” That is exactly where we are today. We are in a situation where, in terms of humanitarian aspects, legal aspects and security aspects, this question is that much more pressing than it was two years ago.
As Paul was saying, we have examples in other countries of managed multi-agency programmes of repatriation of women and children, which have led in some cases to successful prosecutions of women who have engaged in violence, as well as reintegration and programmes to assess the needs of these people and reintroduce them into their communities. This has worked in other countries. Germany had repatriation co-ordinators at regional level who worked with a variety of agencies to do this. We have good practice out there. We also have bad practice out there. We have things to learn that we do not want to do, but we do have examples of how this can work.
Q74 Chair: But the men have not been repatriated from any country.
Professor Toros: For many countries they have not, but a lot of these countries are now seriously considering repatriation because of the successful prosecution of women. Two returnees were sentenced in Norway this weekend to four years and two years in prison for being members of a terrorist organisation. The successful prosecution of people who are deemed to have carried out crimes or joined a terrorist organisation gives credence to the argument that, if men were repatriated, this would be possible as well.
Q75 Edward Morello: The issue here goes back to the point about what the threshold is for proving your ability to evidence that they have committed a crime, because it goes back to this political will issue. If you bring somebody back who has just spent the better part of a decade being radicalised in a Syrian prison, whether they went in as radical or not, and suddenly you cannot pass the bar of evidence required to prove that they should be incarcerated in the UK, all you now have is somebody who is extremely radical and free in the UK.
Professor Toros: There are two questions there. One is that, as Paul was arguing, if these prisons or detention camps fall apart, which is a genuine possibility, this return most likely will happen anyway, but just in an unmanaged, uncontrolled way. The second argument is that this country has a very elaborate counter-terrorism, countering violent extremism and preventing violent extremism system. That includes what used to be called control orders and now are T-PIMS, which allow for cases in which, where there is not the evidence needed for successful prosecutions, people are put in orders that allow the state to control their activities.
Q76 Edward Morello: You could just strip them of their citizenship and pretend this is now somebody else’s problem somewhere else in the world.
Professor Toros: The difficulty with that is that the UK has stripped the citizenship certainly of a lot of women and we assume of a lot of men, although we do not actually know, but their children are British citizens. You find yourself in a situation where you have the obligation of repatriating British citizens who are held in conditions that are cruel, inhuman and degrading. Yet, having stripped the parent of the citizenship, you then have to convince someone that it is not in the best interest of the child to stay with the only parent they have been with for the past five years. Stripping of citizenship makes things more complicated rather than simplifying the situation.
Paul Jordan: From a policy perspective, that is all well and good to say, “From a security perspective, it removes the problem for us,” but it is incredibly isolationist, in a horizon where our ties to the US might not be as obvious or distinct and we might need other partners. We are outside the EU now, and we need European security partners and others. If we are very isolationist on this security policy, then what will happen, and what has happened along this piece, is that countries will look at the UK and say, “Can we really rely on it to be a decent security partner that holds itself to the standards it supposedly holds itself to?”
Q77 Edward Morello: Also, if we want countries to take foreign nationals in Britain back, we have to accept that we have to take British nationals in foreign countries back. That is just the quid pro quo.
Paul Jordan: Absolutely.
Richard Barrett: It is a legal obligation, of course, as well. If I could just broaden it out a little bit to what you were talking about with the first panel, what is the UK’s relevance to the future of Syria? We have to think, “What sort of role can we play? How can we engage with this?” I would have thought one of the areas where we should engage is in dealing with the British citizens who are, for whatever reason, in camps in north-east Syria. The one thing that we can offer the new Syrian Government is this idea that the rule of law works and community action can cope with security problems. It is not, taking anyone who looks like a threat, putting them in prison and forgetting all about them, like Assad did.
Indeed, during the Syrian civil war, there were quite a lot of British Government-sponsored programmes to try to encourage people in north Syria to understand about the rule of law, not just swapping one warlord for another, the engagement of women in particular and this sort of thing. It is all of that piece. Britain can perhaps still provide some sort of soft power example of how you can manage security without using a sledgehammer all the time.
Paul Jordan: The UK would not and certainly has not said to other countries, “Don’t take your people back. Just strip them of citizenship if you can and, if not, just ignore it.” They have encouraged other countries to take people back. I am sure there will be programmes in receiving countries where they will look to support that. There are things such as Prevent, where the UK is seen as very high up in terms of CVE programming, et cetera.
Richard Foord: Sorry, what is a CVE programme?
Paul Jordan: Countering violent extremism It is on this counter-terrorism lens. It appears a little disingenuous when UK policymakers interact with states in different ways than they want them to interact.
Chair: We just want to be completely clear about the security situation with regard to prisoners. Phil wants to ask some questions about that, because we have touched on it, but we should sort of focus on it a little bit.
Q78 Phil Brickell: Yes, moving on from repatriation but back to the prisons, there has been a concerted and co-ordinated effort by Islamic State to conduct jail breaks to release its fighters from some of the prisons in north-east Syria. How damaging do you see those being, Mr Jordan, first, for regional security but also vis-à-vis the UK’s security?
Paul Jordan: Obviously, they could be potentially very damaging. Islamic State, ISIS, will definitely use, and has been using, security vacuums that have happened in different parts of Syria where there have been ongoing battles. Certainly in northern Syria, north-east and north‑west, where Turkey has continued to encroach and the SDF has responded to that, ISIS has gained more ground.
As you say, it has looked at reinvigorating what it calls the “breaking the walls” campaign, whereby it looks to break people out of prison. Richard mentioned the one in 2019 to 2020, where there was quite a significant one. What actually happened in that prison break was that when there was a security response to it, a lot of the younger males, who were part of this whole piece we were talking about earlier, were used by older male detainees and told, “You are front and centre, so you will get shot before me.” Again, this all interlinks with the issue of particularly the youngsters, the children, because they will be involved in this very dramatically.
In terms of the threat to the UK, there are two real threats, going back to the original question. There is the physical threat of ISIS being able to carry out operations either in the UK or on UK interests, but also there is the ideological threat of ISIS being a recruiting tool, of being seen as an option, of enhancing extremism. The camps and prisons are very useful for ISIS to do that. It uses that a lot as a recruitment tool. It uses that to spread its propaganda. It uses that to say, “Look at how the UK and the west are treating their own citizens. Look at how they are treating Muslims,” et cetera.
Q79 Chair: Did it use the prison breaks as propaganda too?
Paul Jordan: Absolutely, yes. A lot of people escaped from that and it took a while for a lot to be captured. Not all of them were captured. There were people who were in the wind and rejoined. There will always be that issue as long as there are those prisoners with no kind of progression. That is the whole piece of this: that those detained in the prisons at the moment are not really going to follow any judicial procedure. They are just there being detained. There will always be the threat, for as long as they are there, that they will be broken out.
Q80 Phil Brickell: How sustainable do you think it is that the current SDF control of those detention centres, those prisons, continues as it is, given what you have told us about the very precarious situation on the ground?
Paul Jordan: The prisons are much more likely to be protected because of the coalition, US and other troops in the region that will want to take action if there is a planned operation from Islamic State towards a prison, as happened. That large-scale prison break was actually detected previously, and the coalition and the SDF managed to intervene and wrap up all those cells. Then, a few months later, the same operation happened. Basically, they had planned just in case there was a security operation. They had a back-up team that then operated.
There is a lot of planning; there is a lot more opportunity for planning at the moment. That is why there is a definite possibility with the Turkish incursions. The SDF is continually moving troops away from the camps and the prisons, so the level of security is going down in those areas and the threat is going up.
Richard Barrett: There was a prison break in Raqqa in July. Five Islamic State prisoners were able to get out and free. Of course, they would be regarded as heroes going back to base, as it were. The American assessment of the security of these detention centres was that a quite a high number were distinctly insecure and needed considerable work to bring them up to scratch.
Q81 Chair: Yet the guards have not been paid.
Richard Barrett: Quite. Guards not being paid does not help, of course. Prisons being very full does not help either. The refusal of access to NGOs does not help. They still need to be fed and so on.
Islamic State is very happy, in a way, to keep women under these very bad conditions, and children too. That helps its propaganda. It is quite a conservative society, if I may call it that, where the men should be providing and the women should just serve the men, but of course women in Islamic State did much more than that. It would be much more interested, I am trying to say, in breaking out the men than breaking out the women, because the women are actually serving their purpose by being there. The anxiety expressed by the Americans about the security of these male detention centres is a very well-based one.
Q82 Richard Foord: I am curious to think a little bit about the consequences of having UK nationals repatriated. I wonder if each of you could comment on community resilience back here, and how you think the UK and society here could deal with the repatriation of some of these individuals.
Professor Toros: We do not know exactly how many we are talking about, so it would be wonderful if we could formally ask, because we do not know the exact number, but Reprieve estimates that there are about 60 UK nationals between men, women and children, most of them children, and most of them under the age of 10, which puts this into perspective. We are not talking about hundreds of people. It would not be a great strain on financial resources. We are talking about a very limited number of people.
A multi-agency response is what would be ideal in this circumstance. You are dealing with security assessments for the public, but also for the returnees. They may be returning to situations that are difficult, potentially. You need to assess their health. We have seen that there are very serious cases of malnutrition, of illness, et cetera. You need to assess their levels of education and their mental health. You need to assess their social needs in their communities. What kind of reintegration process is needed within the community? This seems like a lot, but again we are not talking about many people.
Most of the people we are talking about are small children, which maybe does not simplify the question, but it reduces the elements that need to be dealt with. This country has the social services and the expertise that is needed to deal with this question. We were talking about preventing violent extremism, countering violent extremism, the Prevent programme and Contest. All of this has been worked on for more than two decades now. There is a very elaborate, sophisticated, problematic—there are problems with it—system out there that can be used to address a managed return.
Paul Jordan: Just adding to that, it is important to say that UK citizens have come back already, not just those small number of repatriations, but, from 2011 to around about 2016, British citizens did come back who had been fighting in that. There is a lot of experience of dealing with this already.
Q83 Chair: Sorry, these are people who were not put into camps. They just went out, fought and came back on their own?
Paul Jordan: They came back on their own, so it was not a repatriation. They turned up.
Q84 Chair: Do we have any idea how many there were?
Richard Barrett: About three‑hundred and something.
Paul Jordan: Yes, there were a few hundred. You will not have it officially, but it is hundreds, basically. I have been involved at local level in helping with returns. There is a very sophisticated strategy for this particular thing, for people coming back in these types of situations. It has been running for a while. Prevent, which does have its detractors and its negative elements, does have a structure to it at the local level. Councils have some autonomy in that.
There is always the thought of how communities are going to react and what is going to happen if they come back. In general, communities just get on with it. They have much more important things to think about, particularly now with so many other things that people have to think about. Generally, these people are just reintegrated fairly quietly.
Q85 Abtisam Mohamed: What support has been given to the small group of nationals who have been repatriated? Are we aware of any support that they have been given?
Professor Toros: In my understanding, they have been given hardly any support. They arrived at the airport and it was, “Off you go.” There has been very little structured support upon their return in the UK.
Q86 Abtisam Mohamed: In terms of prosecutions?
Professor Toros: None, to my knowledge, but they are all children, or 18 of them are children. Only three women have been repatriated. We are talking about minors, potentially very small children.
Q87 Chair: Are these minors who have left their mothers behind?
Professor Toros: No, the UK had a policy that they did repatriate orphans and unaccompanied minors. That was the position of the previous Government. There were no prosecutions also because of that. In other countries, it was far more structured. In France, systematically the woman would be arrested upon arrival and then go through an investigation. Some of them were prosecuted; some were not.
Q88 Chair: Do you mind if I just clear something up? I thought the position was that there had been an offer by the British that, if the women gave up their children, their children would be repatriated.
Professor Toros: That is not my understanding.
Paul Jordan: It is for some, basically. The position moved from orphans and unaccompanied to a case-by-case basis, and the case-by-case basis was exactly that.
Q89 Chair: I see. That might be my case there. Thank you.
Richard Barrett: European countries were very reluctant to split women from their children.
Paul Jordan: I should say that the Kurds were very reluctant to do that as well. A lot of countries wanted to take it in terms of rights of the child and say, “We want to separate them from their parents, because your parents brought you here and that is obviously not very good for you,” but the Kurds were very difficult initially and said, “We do not want children separated from mothers,” which was understandable. The main basis for that was that they did not want to be stuck with the mothers.
Q90 Abtisam Mohamed: You referenced earlier how ISIS would use as propaganda the way in which citizens have been treated. Do you think, on that basis, all women and children should be repatriated?
Paul Jordan: My view is totally that women and children should be repatriated, and that something has to happen even with the men as well. For prosecutions, definitely, it is more difficult for the women, but there have been prosecutions, as Harmonie mentioned, in Sweden, Germany, France and the Netherlands.
Q91 Abtisam Mohamed: Do you think them being there is a greater risk to us, long term, than them being here?
Paul Jordan: Absolutely, it is a greater risk in all terms. In terms of the physical security risk of them being able to execute an operation, if certain things happen and things slip up, they are already able to carry out pretty threatening things and kill people in the camps, et cetera, so how is that not a threat to other citizens? There is a huge case of them killing people in the camp, and we are just saying we have nothing to do with it. That is still an issue that the UK has responsibility for.
The ideological side of the threat is much more significant while they are in the camps. As Richard mentioned, ISIS is very happy for women and children to be in the camps. If there was a breakout and all the women and children turned up and said, “Great, look after us now,” it would not be able to. It is quite happy to say, “You guys look after them. If they die, it does not matter, because we can then say, ‘Look, your people are dying because of the conditions.’ If they do not get food, again, that is down to you.’” Everything is very much on the countries, and ISIS does not have to do anything but use that as propaganda.
Professor Toros: We are in this very odd and possibly unique situation where the head of counter-terrorism of the incoming Trump Administration, Reprieve, Jonathan Hall KC and CENTCOM all agree on something. I do not think it is going to happen again, but it is happening now. They all agree that repatriation is not easy, but it is the better policy. It is better to manage it rather than to all of a sudden find ourselves with the camps being no longer guarded and not knowing what is happening to these people. That is true across so many people.
Chair: Thank you for your time. We do appreciate it. If there is anything that we have missed or if when you are going home you think, “We should have said this”, do write and we will take your written evidence as much as your oral evidence. Thank you for your patience and for your time today.