A bipartisan group of US senators put forward a bill to give a senior official the ability to coordinate the US government’s approach to ISIS detainee and displacement camps in Syria, where tens of thousands of refugees as well as those accused of being tied to the terrorist group are housed.
The reintroduction of the “Syria Detainee and Displaced Persons Act” comes days after a devastating earthquake struck parts of Turkey and Syria, with the death toll topping 20,000 people as of Thursday.
The proposed legislation builds on the establishment in a 2019 bill of the ISIS detainee coordinator position – a role which has not been filled – and is led by Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, along with lead Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat, and Ranking Member Sen. Jim Risch, an Idaho Republican, are fellow cosponsors.
Last October, Ian Moss, a deputy coordinator at the State Department’s Bureau of Counterterrorism, said the US assessed that “the situation in northeast Syria detention facilities and displaced persons camps to be both a security and humanitarian crisis that will continue to worsen if nothing is done to address the situation.”
The bipartisan bill aims to empower a coordinator “to synchronize the whole-of-government effort” to address this crisis, according to a press release.
Specifically, the bill would elevate the coordinator position to a senior level one, renew the coordinator’s mandate until 2025 and expand it “to explicitly include all inhabitants of the camps, not just fighters and ISIS-affiliated individuals.”
It would “establish that it is the policy of the United States to repatriate and – where appropriate – prosecute inhabitants of the camps with the intent of closing them as soon as…
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