Gen. Frank McKenzie, the outgoing head of U.S. Central Command, said that he wished during his tenure that CENTCOM did a better job of convincing countries to repatriate captured Islamic State fighters.
McKenzie spoke to reporters for the final time in his role on Friday morning, warning that a failure to repatriate captured ISIS fighters would ultimately lead to “ISIS 2.0 down the road.”
“One area in Syria that I wish we had been more successful in is motivating international partners to repatriate ISIS prisoners from their countries,” the commander added. “It’s a burden that the [Syrian Democratic Forces] had primarily dealt with on their own in the only long-term solution. Actually repatriation. We also need to reintegrate the thousands of [internally displaced people], many of whom are family members of ISIS fighters. We can get them back to their communities in order to prevent vulnerable children from being indoctrinated into the ISIS ideology.”
He assumed command of CENTCOM in March 2019, “after the defeat of the so-called caliphate in the end of its ability to hold territory in Iraq and Syria,” McKenzie said, also noting that the U.S. military conducted two successful raids on then-ISIS leaders Abu Ibrahim al Hashimi al Qurashi and Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, both of whom killed themselves as U.S. forces closed in.
While those raids were meant to cripple ISIS’s leadership infrastructure, ISIS was able to recoup some losses with a drawn-out prison break and subsequent battle at the Hasakah Prison in Syria earlier this year.
McKenzie stressed that the “principal reason” for the United States’s presence in Syria is to support the SDF while it does “the actual heavy lifting of the fighting.” The SDF however is facing “a very large and concerning displaced person population” and an “even more concerning prison population including over 2,000 hardcore fighters, and we’ve seen the dangers of that as recently as the Hasakah prison break of just a few weeks ago.”
This lack of repatriation of captured ISIS fighters plagued the U.S. during its chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan.
An operative of ISIS-K, the offshoot of ISIS that’s based in Afghanistan, Abdul Rehman al Loghri, was among the thousands of prisoners who were freed from the Parwan prison at Bagram and at the Pul-e-Charkhi Prison once the Taliban overthrew the U.S.-backed government in mid-August ahead of the withdrawal.
Loghri, days after being released, detonated a suicide bomb outside the airport gates in Kabul where the U.S. and other Western allies were conducting a noncombatant emergency operation for Americans, third-country nationals, and Afghan allies who could be at risk under a Taliban regime. Thousands were left behind, even though roughly 120,000 people were evacuated. Thirteen U.S. service members died in the bombing, as did another roughly 170 civilians.
“Not a day goes by that I don’t think about August of last year,” McKenzie said, adding that the troops who lost their lives will remain “a loss” that “I will regret for the rest of my life.”
Earlier this week, he told the Senate Armed Services Committee the Department of Defense believes the terror group will have “external attack capability” between “12 to 18 months,” which is a more delayed timeline than the six to 12 months Colin Kahl, the undersecretary of defense for policy, presented to the committee back in October.
McKenzie declined to explain the change in assessment, while a CENTCOM spokesperson previously told the Washington Examiner that “Gen. McKenzie’s remarks before the SASC is based on his assessments as the CENTCOM commander and stands as delivered.”
The U.S. intends to rely on its over-the-horizon strike capabilities, though not having sources gaining real-time intelligence makes it more difficult. “This is difficult, not impossible,” he told the committee, later acknowledging the U.S. has not launched a single over-the-horizon strike since leaving Afghanistan.