UK Should Take Back British ISIS Members in Syria, Gorka Says

Sebastian Gorka, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for deputy assistant to the president and senior director for counterterrorism, speaks during an interview with The Epoch Times in Washington on Dec. 17, 2024. Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times

President-elect Donald Trump’s pick as director of counterterrorism, Sebastian Gorka, has said that the UK should take back a number of UK nationals who were in the ISIS terrorist group and who are now being held in Syrian prison camps.

There are believed to be 30 or so British nationals still in Syrian camps, including Shamima Begum, who lost her final appeal against the UK Home Office’s decision to strip her of her UK citizenship on national security grounds.

In an interview with The Times of London in which Gorka was asked if the UK should be forced to accept the repatriation of ISIS members, Gorka said, “Any nation which wishes to be seen as a serious ally and friend of the most powerful nation in the world should act in a fashion that reflects that serious commitment.”

Trump Wants ‘Special Relationship’

“That is doubly so for the UK, which has a very special place in President Trump’s heart, and we would all wish to see the ‘special relationship’ fully re-established,” Gorka said.

In November 2024, it was announced that Gorka, who served as deputy assistant to the president during the first year of Trump’s first term, will reprise that role beginning Jan. 20 and will also take on the role of director of counterterrorism.

Last month Gorka, in an interview on EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders,” described Trump’s foreign policy approach as eschewing both isolationism and interventionism, and instead favoring a strategy Gorka termed “surgical strength.”

Although the Biden administration called in 2021 for the UK to repatriate ISIS members from northern Syria, arguing that it was a “moral responsibility,” it never sought to exert pressure on London.

Between 2014 and 2019, when ISIS ruled a large swath of territory in eastern Syria and northern Iraq, it attracted recruits from all over the world, many of whom were killed.

In 2019 the State Department estimated that 40,000 people had traveled to the Middle East to join ISIS from almost 100 countries, and that of these, 2,000 foreign terrorist fighters had been captured by the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces.

The State Department stated at the time, “As of December 2019, the United States repatriated a total of 23 U.S. citizens from Syria and Iraq—eight adults and 15 children—and the Department of Justice charged six of the adults with a variety of terrorism-related crimes.”

Since the collapse of ISIS in 2019, many members have returned to their home countries in Europe, the Middle East, or Central Asia voluntarily, while others remain imprisoned in Syria or Iraq.

In February 2023 Jonathan Hall, KC, the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation in Britain, said in a speech: “About 900 UK-linked individuals travelled to Syria and Iraq. Of the 450 or so who did not return to the UK, and only a fraction remain in prisons and camps. There are no official figures, but estimates are of about 60 UK-linked children, with a fewer number of women and an unknown number of men.”

The most infamous British ISIS member was Begum, a so-called jihadi bride.

Begum was 15 when she left her home in London with two friends—who were both later killed—and traveled, via Turkey, to Syria in 2015.

She married an ISIS fighter and had children with him, but he and the children all died, and she was eventually found in a Syrian refugee camp in February 2019.

The then-UK home secretary, Sajid Javid, stripped her of her citizenship on national security grounds, and she lost a challenge against that decision at the Special Immigration Appeals Commission in October 2023.

‘Author of Her Own Misfortune’

In February 2024, Begum lost a final legal challenge against the UK government’s decision to strip her of her British citizenship, with three Court of Appeal judges ruling that she was “the author of her own misfortune.”

Shamima Begum being interviewed by Sky News in northern Syria on Feb. 17, 2019. Reuters

Gorka’s comments come after outgoing Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said U.S. troops need to stay in Syria to prevent ISIS from reemerging as a threat in the region.

Austin, speaking at Ramstein Air Base in Germany, said that if the United States left Syria unprotected, “ISIS fighters would enter back into the mainstream.”

“I think that we still have some work to do in terms of keeping a foot on the throat of ISIS,” he said.

Responding to Gorka’s comments, a British government spokesman said: “Our priority remains to ensure the safety and security of the UK. We will continue to do whatever is necessary to protect the UK from those who pose a threat to our security.”

PA Media and the Associated Press contributed to this report.