14
Examination of witness
Alex Crawford.
Q1 The Chair: Welcome to today’s meeting of the Joint Committee on Human Rights. This is the ninth meeting that has been held by the committee. We consist of 12 members, six from the House of Commons and six from the House of Lords, and it is our mandate to examine matters relating to human rights within the United Kingdom, as well as scrutinising every government Bill for its compatibility with human rights. Current inquiries include an examination of the Mental Health Bill. Thematic inquiries include inquiries on supply chains and their links to modern slavery, for which the deadline for written evidence is 14 February, and on transnational repression, for which the deadline for written evidence is 24 February.
Today, we return to the third of our thematic inquiries, which is about the atrocities committed by Daesh/ISIS in Syria and Iraq, and the failure to prosecute many of those still in the prison camps, but also the status and well-being particularly of the children who have been caught up in what the Foreign and Commonwealth Office has now declared to have been a genocide against the Yazidi community. The UK has obligations to prevent, investigate and prosecute international and war crimes, so questions relating to such obligations fall within this committee’s remit. Furthermore, that children, especially those who are British citizens, are detained in camps in Syria, raises questions about the UK’s obligations towards them, and that too falls within our remit.
To help us as we consider these questions today, we are fortunate to have been joined by Alex Crawford. Alex Crawford OBE will share her views on the conditions on the ground in Syria. She will focus on issues such as the availability of legal and consular support, particularly for children, and the living conditions in camps and prisons.
Alex Crawford is a special correspondent with Sky News and has been special correspondent in Sky’s Dubai, Delhi, Johannesburg and Istanbul bureaus. She has been named journalist of the year on five occasions by the Royal Television Society and was appointed to the Order of the British Empire—OBE—in the 2012 New Year Honours List for services to broadcast journalism.
Her work has been recognised by the Foreign Press Association, I think on at least four occasions, and she has been cited by the Bayeux war correspondents award for her reports from hostile environments for every year since 2007. Alex has personally visited camps and prisons in Syria several times. My colleague Baroness Kennedy and I have been present on other occasions where she has spoken powerfully and movingly about the conditions there.
I will quick off the questions. After the fall of Daesh, thousands of individuals were detained in open-air detention camps for their potential involvement with Daesh. Alex, you have been into those camps and talked to the people who were detained there, including British individuals. Can you tell us how those camps were set up, who runs them and how they are run?
Alex Crawford: Thanks very much for the invite. I was covering the rise of ISIS/Daesh before the camps were set up. The camps were set up in 2016 as a temporary measure and did not have very many people in them. When ISIS/Daesh fell, in 2019—I was there in the lead-up to it—there was an enormous amount of destruction as the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces went through. We were on the perimeter of Bāghūz, which is a small slither of territory that ISIS/Daesh still held at that point. It was about two miles in area. It had shrunk from an area the size of Britain to this very small area.
You could see just in that area, which we had eyes on using our cameras, that it was filled with women and children. You could clearly make out an awful lot of women in burkas and small people, and there were tents. There was a lot of activity, and it was obviously packed full of people. In the weeks that followed, they set up a humanitarian corridor, and you could see right from the start that the bulk of the people coming out were women and children.
Right at that point, which was before the SDF forces declared that they had taken over that territory and that ISIS territory had been crushed, there were coaches of people, the bulk of them women and children. Many children were without guardians. They seemed to be completely on their own, and the SDF forces were gathering them up, holding their hands, and taking them and putting them on these coaches. They were separating the men and the young men and putting them to one side, where they were fingerprinted and taken off somewhere—we were told to prisons.
Then there were the women, younger children and babies, either accompanied or unaccompanied. I spoke to them at that point, before they were taken on the coaches, and there were a lot of foreign nationals among them. I did not speak to any British people there, but there were plenty of French people, for instance. In the houses that were being destroyed and left behind, there was lots of foreign material, such as foreign books and diaries written in French.
We followed them to these detention camps, as they were called. The Kurdish authorities which run them are very sensitive about them being called prisons or jails, but they are very much set up along those lines. You cannot get access to even the area, because there are a number of checkpoints leading up to it which are manned by Kurdish soldiers from the SDF or military police from the Kurdish semi-autonomous region that they call Rojava. There are a number of checkpoints before you get there, so you cannot just rock up to the camps.
They grew in huge numbers. Over a period of six years, they grew from maybe 19,000 people or less to, at one point, 70,000 people. They are all in tents. They have no facilities. There is no electricity or running water. Water is delivered in water tanks. Medical facilities are extremely basic—there was one clinic that I saw. There is very little or no opportunity for education for the children. Some 60% of the population are children; a number of them have been born there.
For the last two years, I have been particularly documenting the Yazidi, mainly women and their children, who are still in there. While the bulk of the people who are in the camps are there because they were found in ISIS/Daesh territory, and that is how they ended up in the camp, clearly many of them—I have interviewed them—were not Daesh.
It is difficult to know the numbers, but there was one Yazidi woman who was captured by Daesh when she was 14 in 2014, when it stormed Sinjar. She was released from al-Hawl only last year, where she was being held captive. She said that at one point she was put up for auction. When she was captured, she was still a child. She was bought by one particular emir and she said she was raped on a daily basis for two years. That was just part of her captivity.
When Daesh fell, she might have thought she would have some sort of freedom or release from this captivity, but she was swept up with the thousands of people who were taken to al-Hawl. When she was in there, she was raped, attacked and abused. Like many of the women who I spoke to in there who were in this situation—again, it is difficult to talk about numbers—she felt coerced into marrying one of the other people in the camp, who we can assume may have had strong connections to Daesh, because he disappeared and managed to get out. She was coerced into marrying him. She had two children, both from Daesh rapes. It was only when the SDF Kurdish-led authorities mounted raids that she felt the courage to unveil herself as Yazidi. She was taken off and went through the whole examination process as to whether she was really Yazidi.
They have done two raids on the camps in the last 18 months. To give you an example of how incredibly dangerous al-Hawl is in particular, and what a hotbed of radicalisation and danger it is, in those raids—this particular one last year went on for four days and nights—they uncovered tunnels, shackles in the tunnels, rocket-propelled grenades and a whole arsenal of AK-47s, homemade bombs and grenades. The numbers of tents are bigger than some British towns. A huge community is there. There are unpaved roads and dusty, higgledy-piggledy tents all over the place, some connected with tunnels.
We knew that there were some Yazidis in there. We had pictures of Yazidi women. We knew which tent they were in, but the SDF and Kurdish authorities could not track them down. As they went through all the tents, the women would be moved further and further on. It is an absolutely hellish situation, with a lot of very combustible factors.
The Chair: Alex, you have painted a horrific picture. I think there will be no one on this committee who has not been deeply moved by what you have said. We will, if we may, ask you some further questions to try to delve deeper, so that we can understand what more now needs to be done, what mistakes were made in the first instance, what lessons are to be learned and what the international community should be doing. There will be a lot of things that we would like to ask you about.
Q2 Lord Dholakia: Can I ask you about whether individuals detained, either in prisons or open camps, had access to legal or consular representation? You mentioned children in particular. Were there were opportunities for children to be accompanied by an adult when they were being interviewed?
Alex Crawford: None of the people I spoke to, whether adult males, adult females or child males, had any access to legal assistance. In fact, that was a common theme. They said, “I can’t talk to my lawyer. No one has spoken to me”. I got access to at least three British or Irish prisoners in around about 2019 or 2020. Two of them were British and one of them was Irish. I am still in touch with the family of one man who was a pharmacist from Birmingham. All of them came in one by one. The conditions of the interview were that we were not meant to ask them about the conditions that they were held in. We could not say where we did the interview. It was not done, on this occasion, at a prison. They were brought to us, blindfolded and handcuffed. During the course of our interview, there were at least three uniformed people in the room from the Kurdish authorities.
However, it was done in English, and they did not stop us. The three people all talked about conditions without my prompting. They talked about how it was very cold. There was a British guy from Birmingham who was a pharmacist—I have his name here. His brother has led a demand for justice for the family, because he ended up dying in the prison. They found out about it only a year later; he died in 2023. I interviewed him in 2019. He was Mohammed Anwar Miah, a pharmacist from Birmingham. He was so cold then; it was the middle of winter, and he was shaking. They were all very thin. They looked very unkempt. They spoke about very poor food and very poor conditions, and how none of them had had access to legal representation.
The Chair: He died in 2023.
Alex Crawford: That is what his brother told me today. I spoke to him just before I came to the inquiry. He said that it took a year for them to notify him. They never had any contact with him. He got in touch with me when he saw my report and recognised his brother. He did not even know where his brother was; he never had any contact with his brother. The only notification he got of his brother’s death was when two British policemen came and notified him.
These two British men, his brother and a doctor, told me that the only people they had been visited by were people they described as being from the British intelligence. They did not know their names. They did not know who they were. They repeatedly asked to be returned to Britain, to me, and they passed it on to the men who interviewed them. They said that there were a lot of other foreign nationals in the prisons with them—French, American and Australian. They thought that there was some American presence at the prisons.
Q3 Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws: Alex, no honour that you have received does enough justice to the work that you have done as an international journalist and war correspondent. I pay tribute to you for your work.
You have described the circumstances, and I have seen many of your pieces of film, interviews and so on. I wanted to ask you about the change that is now taking place. We have now seen that, from a background of Islamist conservative thinking, comes the new leader of Syria. It happened, in the way that these things happen, very speedily. He is making a promise of pragmatic governance and respect for minorities. He is making promises that we have to take on face value at the moment. Do you think that there will ever be accountability of Daesh fighters for international crimes under this new Administration? I share your interest in what happened to the Yazidi women and the terrible crimes that they experienced. What chances are there of there ever being an addressing of the serious, grievous and genocidal crimes that took place?
Alex Crawford: That is a really interesting question. I spoke to Mr Julani during the Turkish-Syrian earthquake. We managed to get across the border into Syria, which at that point was not being tended to by the international aid groups. There were facing very difficult geographical challenges at that time, and Syria obviously added another layer of difficulty because it was a warzone. But he turned up.
I had made repeated visits to Idlib, which was under HTS control at that time, so I got to know a number of his key personnel. For many years, he would not talk to me because—his workers said this, anyway—I was a woman. It was quite a change when he turned up during the earthquake and presented himself for interview.
He says himself that he has undergone a great journey, because he used to be al-Nusra when al-Qaeda switched to al-Nusra, and then there were branches that split off into Daesh/ISIS. But his group fought ISIS. There are definitely tribal and different groups. If we take what he is saying at face value then there would seem to be a big motive from him and his followers for avenging what a rival group committed.
Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws: We are talking about Daesh. They would see themselves as distinct from Daesh and the particular strand of ideology that Daesh adopts. But what about the behaviours of Daesh? Do you know what the attitude of HTS to the treatment of the Yazidi would be?
Alex Crawford: Daesh’s interpretation was extreme, and it is not recognised by many other sections of Islam at all. It is a very extremist group. It is probably the most extreme group that we have ever encountered. Its interpretation is actually pure evil. Some of the documents that we found of its teachings of what should happen to Yazidi women are absolutely horrifying. It did not even regard the Yazidis as human, and therefore anything could happen to them and it would not matter.
Mr al-Sharaa, as he now wants to be known, is taking a very different approach. One key challenge, from what I can see, will be trying to keep all those groups together. A number of his followers, from my experience, can be quite extreme, but he has obviously taken a different path and wants to take a different route. It is a bit of a million-dollar question. He is there now and appears to want to talk to people. He wants to talk to female journalists now. He wants to get his message out to Britain and America. The message seems to be: “I want to have a unified Syria. I do not want a semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan. I want everyone who is Syrian to be Syrian and to be part of the new Syria”. That is what he is saying at the moment.
The Chair: It seems to be one of those classic questions about whether the leopard can change his spots. Behaviour in Idlib does not necessarily bode well.
Lord Murray of Blidworth: This is just a very quick question, if I may. You have described the condition in the camps when you were last there. Do you know what impact two particular factors are having on the situation on the ground at the moment? The first, which we touched on just now, is the change of Government in Syria, and the second is the position with USAID and the international funding of the camps. I wonder whether you have any comments on that.
Alex Crawford: I got in touch with the camp manager of al-Hawl around about the time that the US executive order was issued, which was 25 January, I believe, through my Syrian colleague who is out there. They were completely taken by surprise by it. Just that morning, 300 people did not turn up for work. The camp is extremely dependent. It runs on that aid that comes in.
Lord Murray of Blidworth: Do you mean US money?
Alex Crawford: Yes. It had a catastrophic effect immediately, because 300 people who were providing water, food and medicines just did not turn up for three days.
Before that, when the regime fell, they were already under pressure. They have been saying for many years that they were struggling to cope on their own and felt that the international community who had taken part in the fight against Daesh—of which there were something like 80 countries—was not taking responsibility for the aftermath and for many of their citizens who were still in those camps or in the prisons. It was being left to the fairly poorly funded Kurdish authorities and SDF to run the show, with some help from mainly the Americans, who are definitely involved in the running of some of the prisons.
As I say, they do not like the camps to be called prisons, but in some ways they are almost worse than prisons. You cannot go in there. Even the people who are guarding it, the SDF soldiers, cannot go in there and travel around the camp unless they are in armoured personnel carriers, wearing flak jackets and carrying guns. Even when they do that, if they turn their back, they might get a knife in their back, which I have seen. One of their officers had a knife in his back. He survived, but that is what they are up against. When we went out with them to film some of the camp and talk to some of the women, it was the children who started turning on the SDF female officers, who hid behind barriers while we were filming because the children started throwing stones and shouting at them. They are running feral.
The Chair: The next question is about whether we can delve deeper into the conditions in the camps.
Q4 Baroness Lawrence of Clarendon: Thank you for being here. My question is about the living conditions. I know you have mentioned quite a bit about that. You were saying that, even though they are perceived to be camps, you felt that they were more like prisons. Did you identify any human rights concerns on the ground while you were there? Could you tell us a little about that, please?
Alex Crawford: There are multiple human rights concerns. They have none at the moment. There is no right of freedom. There is no right to access to legal representation. There are no rights for anything. They do not even have the connectability with their relatives; they have to wait to get access to mobile phones so that they can contact their relatives. It is usually the relatives who then contact the lawyers and pass on information, including telling them, “Don’t talk to journalists. Don’t say that”, especially after what happened to Shamima Begum, when she lost her citizenship. There was a heightened degree of paranoia and insecurity among them.
To return to your question, which I do not think I answered, after the fall of the regime security was even more compromised. They had to increase security because they were worried about a breakout from inside. There is almost anarchy. It is barely controlled anarchy in the camp, because it is filled with very angry, frustrated, cooped-up people, some of whom have now been there for six years now. Many of the children—I do not know how many—have been born there. They are very young—younger than six—so many of them have been born there in, to be honest, very dirty, disgusting conditions.
Baroness Lawrence of Clarendon: Personal hygiene is one of those things that does not even bear thinking about, given what is happening in the camp, especially for women. Personal hygiene would be non-existent.
Alex Crawford: In al-Roj, it is a tiny bit better. They are still in tents. They have put a lot of the foreigners in there. It is still dusty, unpaved roads, all tents and no running water. There are little stalls that they set up, where they barter and exchange goods, but life is pretty miserable. I think a lot of them feel abandoned by their various countries.
Baroness Lawrence of Clarendon: The impact on you while you are there, seeing all of that, and given that there is nothing much you can do apart from tell the story and get the messages out, must have been quite extreme.
Alex Crawford: The camps are filled with hopelessness and helplessness, and a really strong anger and frustration. It is a seething anger, where they do not seem to much like anybody because there is nothing there. They thought they were going there temporarily—when they came out of Bāghūz, they thought it would be for a short time.
I was surprised about the number of Australians who were in al-Roj. A lot of them spoke about how worried they were for the younger children, especially the males, who are taken off as soon they look as though they are physically getting older. They get taken to what are called rehabilitation centres, which are junior prisons.
I have to say that the Kurdish authorities and the SDF, in all the times I have gone, repeatedly call for the international community to step in and help them. They repeatedly say that they cannot cope. They repeatedly say that they have no money, and no back-up, and that they have been left with the problem. In the most recent interview I did with one of the key SDF commanders, he said, “The British Government, the French, the Arab countries are all not fulfilling their responsibilities to their citizens”, and that there is, “a heavy burden on us and they need to find a solution, either repatriate their citizens or help us establish a tribunal so we can hold them to account here”.
That, of course, is the other implicit threat that they keep making: that they are going to hold courts. It has not happened yet. When I was there last, about eight months ago, they were threatening to hold the first courts. They have been sending a few hundred back to Iraq, which at the moment has a moratorium on executions, but none of these courts has judicial oversight. They are not open to examination. I do not think that many people would see that as proper justice.
Q5 Alex Sobel: Thank you, Alex. We have all seen your coverage of this and your visits to the camps, speaking particularly to international citizens in the camps, including British and Irish citizens, many of whom have said that they had no involvement at all with Daesh and the crimes. However, it is clear that there are a lot of people in the camps and prisons who were involved with Daesh. Do you believe that there might be a risk that people detained in these camps and prisons, if released, might commit international crimes? We were obviously all appalled about what happened to the Yazidi people. Is there a concern that that might happen again?
Alex Crawford: Definitely the Yazidi people feel that. They feel very strongly, which is why so many of them have not returned to Sinjar, Kocho and the areas around there. There has been no repairing of their homes or the buildings that were destroyed by Daesh. It is as though it has just stood still in time. It is literally like Daesh left the day before.
The SDF authorities very much believe that there are ISIS/Daesh cells reemerging and operating in and around Deir ez-Zur and Bāghūz. At the moment, when there is so much instability around that area because of what has been happening in the whole of the Middle East, that has led to a ripple-down effect of destabilising that area even more. It is a little unfair for me to be asked to say whether people may commit crimes in the future. I would not be comfortable in deciding whether they may commit crimes.
Alex Sobel: You are saying that the Yazidi themselves—
Alex Crawford: The Yazidis are definitely terrified of Daesh returning. They feel that they have got no justice. Declaring it a genocide is obviously a big milestone for them, but it has not led to anything: there have been no reparations; their homes are not safe; they cannot return there. Many of them are living in tents. It is like they have gone from one hell to another.
All I would say about whether or not anyone is likely to commit a crime is that right now the conditions are ripe for that. There are thousands of people who feel abandoned by their various countries, living in really untenable conditions and in a situation where they feel that they have no rights. There are eyewitness and anecdotal reports of rapes, beatings, sexual abuse and Daesh groups running the show. The increasingly unstable SDF and Kurdish semi-autonomous authorities almost have their fingertips on the control of it, and they are feeling very insecure and worried about the future and what is going to happen.
Alex Sobel: Is that because of Turkey?
Alex Crawford: It is because of Turkey and the new set-up. Mr al-‑Sharaa has already said that he does not envisage a semi-autonomous region. They are thinking, “Okay, so what happens to us then? What happens to all these rights that we thought we’d set up, to our authorities that we set up and to the courts that we’re running?”
The Chair: Innocent people are often caught up in all of that, especially the children you mentioned. I know that Sir Desmond Swayne, Member of Parliament, wants to ask you about that.
Q6 Sir Desmond Swayne: There is a moment in the public inquiry that followed the massacre at Amritsar when General Dyer is asked about the truly desperate plight of those survivors who were injured, to which he replied that he was prepared to provide assistance to anyone who applied. It put me in mind of this statement from the Government that says, “Where British unaccompanied minors and orphans are brought to our attention, we will seek to facilitate their return to the UK where feasible”. I wonder how feasible that is and how a child would go about applying for such a service.
Alex Crawford: That is a really good point and thank you for reminding me about that, because a lot of the people in those camps feel that it is unmonitored. When I went to the camp, when we heard that Shamima Begum might be there, they went through every single list and said that there were no British people there. They went through hundreds and hundreds of lists. I waited there for hours, and they absolutely said, “There are definitely no British. We have some Russian and some other people, but no British”. A few weeks later, Anthony Loyd went in there and she was there.
That is a really good point. A lot of these people came out with no documentation. A lot of the children came out with no parents. They are caught up in this vortex of not being able to talk, reach out or find help from anyone. It is actually quite desperate.
I am sorry to keep referring to the Yazidis, but they are a very good example of a larger-scale problem. They set up DNA testing with relatives to try to track down the bodies and remains that were being turned up in the mass graves—which have still to be excavated. No one is really tracking it. No one is finding where any of these people are, who they are or what has happened to them. No one is following the relatives’ and survivors’ documentation to try to find them.
It is a bit of a spaghetti mess of ends that no country has really got on top of. In fact, the impression is that it is something they would rather forget. Like with the British pharmacist from Birmingham, one gets the impression that perhaps they are hoping the problem will go away. In his case, he died. That is one problem solved.
The Chair: Let us press Sir Desmond’s question a bit further, if I may. We have the Minister of State saying to us that, where these “minors and orphans are brought to our attention, we will seek to facilitate their return to the UK where feasible”. It is an extraordinary statement really. Who is supposed to bring this to their attention? How would they go about bringing them back to the UK? What would be the outcome of that?
Alex Crawford: I did not find any evidence that there was any British group that was trying to track down or locate missing British citizens or missing children, or even to take responsibility for them. I have not come across any such British group, either organised or unofficial. The rehabilitation centres, as they are called, which are small, are also run on the lines of a secure facility, with barbed wire around the top, armed guards on the roofs and outside, and no easy access inside. The children inside—because they are all under 18—are speaking English, French or European languages. They do not even have much easy access to their relatives. A number of them I spoke to last year were talking about how no one had contacted them.
One boy had been taken there by his father—it is usually the father who takes them. They get taken away from their mothers and dumped in these rehabilitation centres, where there is an opportunity to rehabilitate them; I saw music and geography lessons, and there are attempts to de-radicalise them. But there is no future after that. What happens next? A lot of them just languish there for years. This one boy was taken to Syria when he was 10 years old. He said that he was American. This is what he said: “I don’t know what they’re calling us—cubs of the caliphate and stuff like that—but no one is coming by to see, have they changed, who is being good, who is not. They’re just putting everyone in one category and saying these are just kids from IS and that’s it”. He said that no one helps them.
Another one in the prisons—this was an adult prison—said that he had been there since he was 17 years old, and it was now four years on. It is difficult enough if you are an adult. It is almost impossible if you are a child; you do not even have your parents, because your father has been killed or is in prison and you are separated from your mother.
Q7 Peter Swallow: Thank you so much for the evidence that you have provided. It paints a really striking picture. On the issue of gaps in evidence, you talked about struggling to identify who is in each camp. There is also a question about justice and seeing that those who are culpable for crimes are held to account, which obviously requires the collecting and preservation of the evidence needed to bring individuals to justice. While you were there, did you see evidence of anyone collecting that evidence, or of any capacity whatever within the domestic justice system to deal with the vast number of crimes that have been perpetrated?
Alex Crawford: I did not see any evidence of that. I saw small evidence of the Yazidi community trying to locate people who had been missing for 10 years. That in itself felt quite desperate and a bit of a shot in the dark. That was the community who seemed to be doing it, and it seemed to be done more out of providing hope rather than any expectation.
The constant message that I kept getting from the Kurdish authorities and the SDF military was that they feel very much alone and that they are doing it on their own. There is an increasingly frustrated and ardent criticism of the international community for not stepping in and helping out.
Peter Swallow: For clarity, your understanding is that that has not changed at all with the change of the Syrian regime.
Alex Crawford: I do not think so. They are in quite a state of sorting everything out at the moment. That may come later, but I do not think it is their top priority right now. One of their main priorities seems to be to maintain security right now for themselves—the people who have assumed power—and to foster international relations and lift sanctions. That seems to be the main focus of attention.
The Chair: Alex, we are drawing towards the end of this extraordinary session, where you have laid bare for us the horrors of what has taken place in Syria and northern Iraq. I was fortunate enough in many ways to meet Baba Sheikh. I went to Sinjar and saw for myself some of the depredations that had occurred there. I was horrified to hear other accounts of gay people being thrown off the tops of buildings.
I met people from some of the Christian minorities there and other minorities. The figures I have been given on the depletion of Syria’s Christian community state that there were 1.5 million there in 2004 and there has been an 80% decline to 300,000. In Aleppo, it was 12% of the population down to 1.4%. In Raqqa, which was the headquarters of ISIS, there were 11,000 down to 100, with 200 churches destroyed.
In a letter to the committee, a Minister in the Department for Justice said, “The authorities of the state in whose territory an offence is committed are best placed to prosecute the crime”. Are they in a situation, even in the Kurdish autonomous region, where it would be possible to prosecute such a crime? Given that there might be the death sentence, for instance, in some of those jurisdictions, where would that leave our commitments, for instance, to justice without capital punishment? Can you unpack that a little for us?
There is another statement he makes as well. He says, “There is no consular support available to British nationals from within Syria”, as a justification really for saying that we are not doing anything feasibly—to pick up the earlier statement from the Foreign Office. We do not have anybody there to do it anyway. Is it time that we did?
Alex Crawford: It would seem to be way over time. If those camps are accessible by mere journalists then they are definitely accessible by politicians and consular staff. Even if the rest of Syria has been slightly off bounds, certainly north-east Syria has not been. It has been a difficult route to get there, but that no longer exists now. It is definitely high time that there was consular and government representation, or more definite efforts to get to the bottom of it.
There is not even an exact number of how many British citizens are actually there. It is an approximate number. The assessment of how many children or British-connected children are there is only an assessment, based on whether anyone claims them or someone has some documentation. As I said, the bulk do not. There is a real feeling among the Kurdish authorities—and I would imagine there will be a growing feeling among the Syrians—about an abrogation of duty of care to your citizens.
To go back to your first question, we have seen in Iraq already that they have executed people. Even with a moratorium, and even if the Kurdish authorities have not gone anywhere near that, that is definitely an implicit possibility if Britain, other European countries and the rest of the international community do not reclaim their citizens and help out in the aftermath. That could be, as the SDF commander told me, through helping them in setting up a tribunal so that they can deal with it properly there. That seems to me to be an admission that they cannot deal with the problem without the international community and international legal and financial help.
It is not just the legal judicial system of running a court that is to everyone’s liking. It is also, if they are found guilty, how they are then looked after. In what conditions are they looked after? How would British citizens feel about fellow British citizens not getting a proper judicial hearing or not paying their dues in the way that they would want them to? Those are lots of questions that have not yet been answered.
The Chair: Or addressed at all.
Alex Crawford: Yes.
The Chair: We have people festering in these camps. There is no way at the moment of bringing them to justice. There has been the suggestion in the past—and it has been put to us as a committee—that having an international tribunal to deal with this might be the best way of handling it, and that perhaps that could be done in a state such as Jordan, for instance, within the region. I wondered whether that is something that you had heard any talk about. Is it something that you think might commend itself to the Yazidi community, particularly given the thought that people will not, with impunity, be able to get away with these crimes that you have been describing to us?
Finally, I would ask you about our obligations as a country under the 1948 convention on the crime of genocide and the duty that we have to predict, then to protect and to punish. We do not seem to do any of these things very well. I wonder what your view is about our obligations in the United Kingdom and the duties that fall on us as a result of the things that we have signed up to. Are we negligent? Are we failing in our duties?
Alex Crawford: Absolutely. At the moment, we are failing because we are not doing anything. We know for certain that there are British citizens there and we do not know whether the ones we know of are the only ones. We know that there are British citizens there and we do not know for certain that there are not others. I have just told you about one British citizen who died in a prison that was known to be rife with tuberculosis and about which there was anecdotal evidence about torture, beatings and maltreatment. At least one British citizen has died there. At the moment, I do not think there can be anyone who thinks that Britain is working to the best of what it can do right now, because it is just not.
The Kurdish authorities are absolutely adamant that they cannot cope. They cannot cope. They are in a really insecure region and in an increasingly unstable situation for themselves. I guess that British citizens and politicians might want to look at what happens if that all falls apart. We do not know what is going to happen. If we look at the various scenarios, one option is that they get dealt with there by the authorities, with no proper oversight and not to the judicial standards that perhaps the British would want.
Another option is that they get released because, finally, the Kurdish authorities cannot look after them, and so release a lot of very frustrated, potentially radicalised people who now have a reason to hate the very country, or string of countries, that have turned their backs on them.
Another option is that you end up seeing British citizens being dealt with in a much more severe way, without a proper judicial review, and they end up getting the ultimate punishment, which is execution. How would British citizens or parliamentarians feel about that, given their obligations to safeguard a number of these people who went there as children?
The Chair: Alex, you have certainly planted many thoughts in our minds. What do British parliamentarians and the wider public think about all these questions? It is clear that this is a breeding ground for yet more terror in the future if we leave it untreated and do nothing about those circumstances. You have laid bare the failure to take this issue properly seriously, to do anything on the ground or to hold people to account, and the dangers of impunity.
I will take away with me from the evidence that you have given us the phrase “hopelessness and helplessness”, and how, as you said, people have been moved from one hell to another. It is our obligation and duty to try to find alternatives to that. We have been really helped in that process by you, with the evidence you have given us today. You stand in the very best traditions of British journalism. We are all indebted to you. Thank you for being with us today.
