Trump demands Europe take hundreds of ISIL fighters - Aljazeera.com

US President Donald Trump has demanded that Europe take in hundreds of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) fighters captured in Syria, threatening that the United States would otherwise be forced to release them.

"The United States is asking Britain, France, Germany and other European allies to take back over 800 ISIS fighters that we captured in Syria and put them on trial," the president wrote in a flurry of social media posts on Saturday.

"The Caliphate is ready to fall. The alternative is not a good one in that we will be forced to release them.

US-backed Kurds launch final push against ISIL in Syria

"The US does not want to watch as these ISIS fighters permeate Europe, which is where they are expected to go.

"We do so much, and spend so much - Time for others to step up and do the job that they are so capable of doing. We are pulling back after 100 per cent Caliphate victory!" he wrote.

Al Jazeera's Imran Khan, reporting from Gaziantep near the Turkish border with Syria, said that the latest statement from Trump puts pressure on US allies in Europe.

However, he said that it remains to be seen whether or not ISIL is completely defeated.

Trump caused widespread concern among US allies in December when he suddenly announced that the US would withdraw its troops from Syria and that Islamic State had already been defeated.

Critics warned that the armed group remained a threat and that a pull-out could lead to a resurgence, with US allies in the region not equipped to handle the threat alone.

The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a US-backed Kurdish-led militia, launched an offensive last week to dislodge ISIL from the village of Baghuz, the only area still under its control, near the Iraqi border.

As the SDF advanced under heavy US airstrikes in recent days, a stream of civilians have also fled the few areas that remain under ISIL control, along with defeated fighters trying to escape unnoticed.

Sleeper cells

Though ISIL fighters still hold out in a pocket of central Syria's remote desert and are believed to have gone underground as sleeper cells in Iraqi cities, their territorial rule is, for now, almost over.

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It ends a project launched from a mosque in Mosul in northern Iraq in 2014, when Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi seized advantage of regional chaos to proclaim himself caliph, suzerain over all Muslim people and land.

He set up a governing system with courts, a currency and flag that at its height stretched from northwest Syria almost to Baghdad, encompassing some two million people.

Meanwhile, Turkey, which regards the SDF's strongest component, the Kurdish YPG, as terrorists, has threatened to march deeper into northern Syria to drive it back.

On Friday US Army General Joseph Votel, who oversees American forces in the Middle East as head of Central Command, said the end of ISIL could lead to a more dispersed, harder-to-detect network of fighters waging guerrilla warfare.

That should require continued help from Washington, he said.

SOURCE: Al Jazeera and news agencies

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