(AFP) Germany vowed Monday to prosecute German IS fighters but warned that it would be “extremely difficult” to organise the repatriation of European nationals from Syria, after US President Donald Trump called on allies to take back alleged jihadists.
Syria’s US-backed Kurdish forces, which are battling Islamic State group jihadists in their last redoubt in eastern Syria, hold hundreds of suspected foreign IS fighters and the calls for their reluctant home countries to take them back have grown in urgency.
“We must be able to ensure that prosecution is possible,” Defence Minister Ursula von der Leyen told Bild daily.
Underlining the difficulties, however, of putting the ex-fighters on trial, the minister noted that there is “no government in Syria with which we have a sensible relationship.”
