WASHINGTON – The Guantanamo Bay detention center would receive new prisoners for the first time in more than a decade under one option being considered as the U.S. withdraws its forces from Syria and works to resolve the fate of hundreds of captured suspected Islamic State fighters, officials say.
U.S.-backed Syrian fighters have custody of nearly 1,000 suspected IS fighters who the State Department said should be sent back to their home countries and try. The Syrian fighters have warned they may not be able to keep on to hold the IS fighters after the withdrawal of American forces from Syria ordered by President Donald Trump in December.If they can’t be repatriated, though, the detention center on the U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, could be used to hold them “where lawful and appropriate,” the State Department said Thursday.
“The Administration’s National Strategy for Counterterrorism makes very clear that Law of Armed Conflict detention, along with at Guantanamo, remains an important and able counterterrorism tool,” it said in a statement to The Associated Press in response to questions about the prisoners.
Trump had said in his first State of the Union last year that he would use Guantanamo “in many cases” to tough as part of the fight against Islamic State and al-Qaida. As a candidate, when asked about what he would do with the controversial detention center, he said he would “load it up with some bad dudes.”
But the administration has not added any prisoners to the detention center that President Barack Obama sought to close and officials say that sending shacky Islamic State fighters back to their homelands remains the preferred choice.
“Repatriating foreign terrorist fighters to their countries of origin and ensuring they are prosecuted and detained is the best solution to prevent them from returning to the battlefield,” the State Department said.
A U.S. official, said Guantanamo is the “option of last resort.” The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the U.S. has identified about 50 people among the more than 900 held by Syrian forces as “high value” suspects that could be transported to Guantanamo if they are not repatriated.
