Canada's Foreign Fighter Problem: How Should the Federal Government Manage Suspected ISIS Members Held in Syria?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Since the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) fell in 2019, the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES) has arbitrarily detained tens of thousands of accused ISIS fighters and their families in Northern Syria. Among those detained are Canadian citizens. Although Canada has repatriated Canadian women and children from AANES custody, its policy approach to date has been inadequate. Canada must take action to develop a cohesive policy for the approximately 17 Canadians remaining in AANES custody. In this paper, I will evaluate four potential policy options available to the Canadian government. First, that Canada could take no action and maintain the status quo. Second, that Canada could support AANES in bringing ISIS fighters to justice directly in Northern Syria. Third, that Canada could support the International Criminal Court (ICC) in prosecuting ISIS fighters. Fourth, that Canada could repatriate the Canadians held by AANES and, where applicable, prosecute them directly in Canada. Considering the global security and human rights concerns presented by the status quo; as well as the inherent challenges with prosecuting low-level ISIS members at the ICC and AANES’s standing as a non-State entity, I will argue that the best policy option for Canada is to repatriate its detained citizens and prosecute them domestically where possible. I will contend that, while repatriating Canadians held by AANES is not without considerable evidentiary concern, this approach advances human rights and global security objectives. Additionally, it allows Canadians involved with ISIS to be held accountable for their actions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.036 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.013 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".