Ankara will return from Monday the foreign members of the Islamic State (IS) group held in Turkish prisons, said Friday the Turkish Minister of the Interior. "We are telling you that we will send them back to you and we will start from Monday," Süleyman Soylu was quoted by the state-run Anadolu news agency as saying.
The Turkish minister did not specify which countries were affected by this measure. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Thursday that more than 1,150 IS members are currently incarcerated in Turkish prisons. Ankara regularly calls on European countries to take back their nationals who have joined the ranks of the IS in Syria, but they are reluctant to recover them, especially for security reasons and unpopularity of such a measure.
Still shadows
On Monday, Süleyman Soylu said Turkey would return foreign IS fighters to their countries even if they removed their nationality. But it is not clear how Turkey could go about sending a person back to a country from which it would no longer be technically a national.
Long suspected of allowing the jihadists to cross its border to join Syria after the start of the conflict that has torn this country since 2011, Turkey, hit by several attacks committed by the IS, joined the anti-jihadist coalition in 2015. But Ankara has been accused in recent weeks of weakening the fight against dispersed IS elements by launching an offensive on 9 October against the Kurdish militia of the People's Protection Units (YPG), spearheading the fight against the jihadist organization.