From Caliphate to International Criminal Tribunal? ISIS detainees raise complicated questions underneath global regulation

At the height of its power, Islamic State-controlled a populace of 12 million and a territory roughly the size of Great Britain. Last week, the very last vestiges of the jihadist institution had been scrubbed from northern Syria, its previously ambitious and violent guys looking haggard and defeated as they sat in dusty rows out of doors of Baghuz. The Syrian Democratic Forces, a predominantly Kurdish military-backed with the aid of the international Coalition in opposition to ISIS, declared navy victory on March 23 after the months-lengthy “Cizirê Storm” offensive to free up the closing fragment of the caliphate.
Though this is by no means the definitive quit of ISIS, the significance of the liberation of Baghuz need to now not be underestimated. The importance of the victory was perhaps greatly exemplified with the aid of photographs of woman infantrymen throwing the black jihadist flag to the floor and raising in its location the flag of the YPJ, the Women’s Defense Units of the SDF. The symbolism of the sort of moment, against the backdrop of ISIS’s brutal sexual enslavement of Yazidi girls and weaponization of rape as a device of war, turned into misplaced on no person.
Sexual slavery is most effective considered one of several global crimes ISIS is accused of committing, among them the genocide of Yazidi and Christian minorities and different barbaric acts amounting to conflict crimes and crimes towards humanity. The important goal of the anti-ISIS Coalition needs to now be turning injustice to the sufferers of ISIS crimes, a challenging undertaking that ought to account for each political realities and nation duties under worldwide human rights law. The pursuit of justice for ISIS crimes is an undeniably worldwide issue: according to the co-chair of the Syrian Democratic Council, of the at the least fifty-seven,000 human beings in SDF detention camps, more than 12,000 are ‘foreigners’ from forty-eight special countries.