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The Counter-ISIS Coalition Has Much to Do after Baghdadi's Death
(Washington Institute for Near East Policy) Charles Thepaut and Matthew Levitt - The Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS, a framework supported by 81 countries that was created in September 2014 in response to the Islamic State's conquest of large swaths of Syria and Iraq, will meet in Washington on Nov. 14. The coalition's primary local allies in this fight have been Kurdish peshmerga and federal troops in Iraq, and Kurdish and Arab SDF troops in northeast Syria, with the U.S. providing the most substantial support to these troops. The coalition's most urgent task is designing a coordinated response to the detention and prosecution of ISIS detainees. President Trump has demanded that European countries repatriate and prosecute their citizens who joined ISIS. Yet European publics largely oppose repatriation. While around 200 of the 11,000 ISIS detainees are European, most are Syrians and Iraqis who could rebuild ISIS in both countries if left to their own devices, much like al-Qaeda in Iraq which went underground in 2007-2009 before reemerging as ISIS in 2011. Charles Thepaut, a French diplomat, is a resident Visiting Fellow at The Washington Institute, where Matthew Levitt is director of the Program on Counterterrorism and Intelligence.