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Dr. Mironova is a research fellow at Harvard University. For her award-winning book, From Freedom Fighter to Jihadist: Non-State Armed Groups Human Resources (Oxford University Press, 2019), she personally interviewed hundreds of ISIS and Al Qaeda fighters and was embedded with the Iraqi Special Operation Forces (Golden Division) for 9 months during the Battle of Mosul.
Since 2015 she has covered numerous conflicts in the Middle East for Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy, and her op-eds have appeared in the Washington Post and New York Times. She also conducted research on the ground in other active conflict zones, including Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Ukraine, Georgia, Sudan, Congo, and Myanmar.
The Challenge of Foreign Fighters: Repatriating and Prosecuting ISIS Detainees
From the U.S. and the U.K. to Iraq and Syria, the way countries are handling the repatriation and prosecution of accused ISIS members echoes the policies that drove their citizens to seek a utopian Islamic State in the first place. Not only are the policies that pushed people to start joining the group in 2013 continuing, but in many cases they have increased in both scale and scope. While the current repatriation and prosecution policies are arguably counterproductive, they may also be fueling future terrorist activity and support for radical anti-government groups. To reduce the chances of such negative consequences, foreign governments must switch gears and adopt an entirely different approach before it is too late.
After the fall of ISIS in 2019, many relatives of fighters who were detained or killed, including 10,000 families of foreign fighters, were housed in camps like Roj and al-Hol in territory controlled by the Syrian Democratic Forces. Like any closed society, the foreigners’ annex in al-Hol has its own dynamic and life there is much more complicated than is often portrayed.
