How Rojava became Europe’s unofficial prison
Syrian government forces, moving under Turkish pressure and amid de facto coordination on the ground, have attacked Kurdish-led SDF positions in northeast Syria, including around key detention sites in Rojava. During this latest escalation, al-Shaddadi prison and other ISIS facilities became contested space, with Kurdish officials accusing regime units of deliberately enabling escapes: security collapsed during clashes and withdrawals, and detainees escaped in significant numbers. This is not an abstract humanitarian drama “far away”; it is the direct consequence of European governments refusing for years to take back their own ISIS nationals held by the Kurds.
After the territorial defeat of ISIS in 2019, the SDF and the Autonomous Administration in North and East Syria ended up holding thousands of ISIS suspects in prisons and tens of thousands of ISIS-linked family members among them foreign nationals, including Europeans. By January 2026, reporting put the prison-and-camp universe at more than 10,000 ISIS-linked detainees across facilities, with al-Hol alone having held tens of thousands (about 44,000 in 2024), and around 24,000 still there as Syrian forces moved in, overwhelmingly women and children. Beyond the camps, thousands of ISIS-affiliated detainees remain held across multiple facilities.
Instead of repatriating their nationals, many European governments—led politically by France but including Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and others—chose to outsource the problem to an under-resourced, unrecognized Kurdish polity under constant military threat. France is emblematic: hundreds of French nationals travelled to Syria and Iraq to join jihadist groups, yet Paris pursued a slow, politically cautious “case-by-case” approach that left many people — including minors — in limbo for years. UN bodies (UN Committee on the Rights of the Child) have found France in breach of children’s rights for failing to repatriate French children from life-threatening camp conditions. Separately, the European Court of Human Rights, while rejecting a general right to repatriation (i.e France could not be forced into a general duty to repatriate under the Convention), did find France violated Article 3(2) of Protocol No. 4 in this context by failing to provide adequate safeguards against arbitrariness (refusals were handled without formal decisions or judicial review), and required France to re-examine repatriation requests promptly and properly.
The Rojava authorities repeatedly warned that if they were attacked and left without meaningful international backing, they could not guarantee long-term secure detention of ISIS prisoners. Those warnings materialized in January 2026. As Damascus reasserted control over parts of the northeast and the SDF pulled back under ceasefire and pressure to “integrate,” detention sites became contested space and control shifted.
At Al-Shaddadi prison, the scale of the breakout has been disputed: early claims ran as high as roughly 1,500 escapees, while subsequent reporting—citing U.S. and Syrian officials—put the figure far lower (around 120–200), with many later recaptured. Regardless of the precise number, the core point stands: the system’s security depended on a besieged local partner, and once that partner was forced to retreat, the perimeter failed. At al-Hol, Kurdish forces withdrew and Syrian government troops entered a camp that still held about 24,000 people in January 2026 — many of them women and children linked to ISIS, including foreign nationals whom European states refused to bring home.
For years, Paris, Berlin, Brussels and others argued that repatriating ISIS detainees and their families would create a security risk on European soil. In reality, that choice created three far greater risks:
- Risk of mass escape and re-mobilization. Holding ISIS suspects in makeshift prisons in an active warzone was always fragile. The latest breakdown at Shaddadi—and the wider scramble to move detainees—shows how quickly the arrangement can fail, with fugitives potentially rejoining clandestine networks in Syria, Iraq and beyond – including Europe.
- Risk of radicalization in camps. Al-Hol and Roj have long been described by rights groups as incubators of extremism, where coercive ISIS networks persist and children grow up amid deprivation, trauma, and ideological pressure. Many of these children hold European nationality; leaving them there for years and then treating them as inevitable “future security threats” is not counter-terrorism—it is manufacturing it by neglect.
- Risk of loss of legal control. As Damascus takes over camps and prisons and the U.S. begins transferring detainees to Iraq, European states lose what little leverage they still had. The U.S. said it had begun moving detainees (starting with 150) and that up to 7,000 could ultimately be transferred — a scramble that underlines how quickly the “outsourced” system is collapsing. Once European nationals are in the hands of Damascus, Iraqi courts, militias, or dispersed ISIS cells, the possibility of controlled prosecution, monitoring, or deradicalization under European law shrinks dramatically.
Repatriation with prosecution at home—under national anti-terror laws, with long sentences, monitoring, and structured deradicalization programs—would have kept European citizens within a framework of law and intelligence oversight. Instead, by leaving them in Rojava and then abandoning the Kurds to drones, offensives and coercive political deals, EU governments ensured that some of those same individuals will disappear into underground networks, cross porous borders and pose a less visible but more unpredictable threat to European publics.
French officials have long tried to square the circle: boasting about “targeting ISIS operatives” abroad while avoiding any commitment to systematic large-scale repatriation of French nationals from Syrian camps. This posture lets Paris claim toughness on terror while quietly relying on Kurdish forces—now under attack—to guard those whom French courts could legally prosecute at home. Other EU capitals followed the same pattern: minimal, politically timed returns; legal disputes; loud rhetoric about security; and near-total silence about the structural collapse of the detention system in Rojava (northeast Syria). The result is a double betrayal. First, of the Kurds, who bled to roll back ISIS and were then left to face Turkey, Damascus and Moscow with almost no European backing. The kurds are literally exposed—militarily, diplomatically, and economically—once they are no longer “useful.” Second, of European citizens, who were told that refusing repatriation would keep them safe, only to face a scenario in which detention sites are overrun, control is transferred, and detainees escape in the fog of war. And there is a further truth that Europe and the United States should state plainly: abandoning—and effectively betraying—the Kurdish-led forces that carried the ground war against ISIS is a moral stain on both. Abandoning and betraying the Kurdish people is a stain on both Europe and America. The SDF were the West’s most effective ground partner against ISIS, paying a devastating price, and has publicly commemorated roughly 11,000 of its fighters killed in the fight to dismantle ISIS’s territorial “caliphate.” Treating such allies as disposable jailers for Europe’s problem, and then walking away when the frontline shifts, is not realism; it is strategic and ethical failure.
If European leaders truly wish to protect their populations, the lesson from Rojava is brutal but clear: security cannot be outsourced indefinitely to besieged non-state allies while refusing to assume legal responsibility for one’s own nationals. Continuing to hide behind Kurdish prisons that can be overrun, transferred, or destabilized is not strategy; it is willful negligence that turns every new offensive in northeast Syria into a potential gateway for ISIS’s return—including to Europe.
