BEIRUT: Dozens of international experts gathered in northeastern Syria on Saturday to discuss how to manage thousands of suspected Daesh members crammed into Kurdish-run prisons and camps.
French lawyers and US-based analysts were among those attending the three-day conference on the challenges still facing the region after Daesh’s territorial defeat, organizers said.
Officials of the autonomous Kurdish administration in northeastern Syria, which is hosting the conference in the town of Amuda, were also due to take part.
In March, Kurdish-led fighters overran the last pocket of the extremists’ cross-border “caliphate” with support from a US-led coalition.
Now, the Kurds are struggling to cope with the thousands of alleged Daesh members they detained during the battle.
They include around 1,000 suspected foreign fighters held in jail, and some 13,000 family members in overcrowded camps.
With no local court equipped to deal with the large number of extremist suspects, the Kurds have pressed their home countries to take them back.
But Western governments have been reluctant to repatriate them or put them on trial at home.
“There is global consensus that action urgently needs to be taken to deal with the thousands of foreign Daesh fighters and affiliates, plus Daesh-linked children, currently detained in northeast Syria,” the organizers of the three-day conference said.
“However, there is near-total lack of consensus as to what this action will look like.”
Syria’s Kurds have called for outside help to set up an international tribunal.
Iraq has offered to put suspected foreign extremists on trial in Baghdad in exchange for millions of dollars, officials told AFP in April.

DUBAI: Qatar’s ruling emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani will meet with US President Donald Trump in Washington on July 9 to exchange views on the latest regional and international developments, Qatar’s state news agency said on Saturday.
The White House said in June the visit would deal with economic and security ties as well as counterrorism issues.
Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt severed ties with Qatar in 2017, in one of the worst diplomatic disputes in the region in years. They accused Doha of support for Islamist militants and Iran, charges it denies.

UN: The UN Security Council condemned Friday a deadly attack on a detention center for migrants near Libya’s capital and called on the warring parties to urgently de-escalate fighting and commit to a cease-fire.
The UN’s most powerful body also called on the parties to rapidly return to UN-mediated political talks.
The council press statement on Friday was the first approved by all 15 members since Libyan National Army leader Field Marshal Khalifa Hafter launched a military offensive in early April aimed at taking the capital, Tripoli.
The Security Council also expressed “deep concern” at the worsening humanitarian situation in Libya and at conditions in detention centers, which it stressed “are the responsibility of the Libyan government.”

VIENNA: The UN’s nuclear watchdog said Friday it will hold an emergency meeting on Iran’s nuclear programme next week, days after Tehran breached one of the limits set in a 2015 deal with world powers.
The meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)’s board of governors, which follows a US request, would be held “on 10 July at 14:30,” an IAEA spokesman said.
Earlier, the US mission in Vienna said in a statement that the American Ambassador to International Organizations Jackie Wolcott had requested the special meeting to discuss Iran’s breach of the amount of enriched uranium it could stockpile.
The IAEA confirmed earlier this week that Iran had breached the limit of 300kg for stockpiles of enriched uranium as stipulated under the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).
The US statement described the news of the breach as “concerning”.
“The international community must hold Iran’s regime accountable,” the statement added.
Iran has said that as of Sunday it will begin breaking another key limit set in the JCPOA, which restricts the enrichment level of its uranium stockpile to 3.67 percent.

ATHENS: Greek authorities have seized what they described as the world’s largest single haul of super-charged amphetamine Captagon pills from Syria worth more than half a billion euros.
Coast Guard and drug enforcement officers seized three containers full of the amphetamines, the financial crimes unit (SDOE) said on Friday. The operation involved 20 officers and landed 5.25 tons of the drug — 33 million Captagon pills — found in the containers shipped from Syria.
“It is the largest quantity that has ever been seized globally, depriving organized crime of proceeds that would have exceeded $660 million (587.45 million euros),” the financial crimes unit said in a statement.
Captagon is one of several brand names for fenethylline hydrochloride, a drug compound belonging to the family of amphetamines, stimulants of the central nervous system.
In the 1960s the drug was prescribed to treat narcolepsy and depression but by the 1980s the medical community determined that Captagon’s addictive properties outweighed clinical benefits and it was banned.
However, Captagon is a popular narcotic in the Arabian Peninsula and in war-torn Syria.
Syria became a major amphetamines exporter and consumer as the trauma of its civil war fueled demand and the breakdown in law and order created opportunites for producers.
Greek authorities were trying to determine if the shipment’s final destination was China, SDOE said, without providing further details.