Baladi News
Baghdad and Washington are in talks to transfer and place on trial tens of thousands of suspected Isis fighters and their families from detention centres in Syria to prison camps in Iraq, with Iraqi officials seeking a multibillion dollar fee to receive remnants of the terror group captured over five years of war.
Baghdad has asked for a $10bn (£7.6bn) fee up front, then $1bn per annum to receive the detainees, the Guardian newspaper reported.
The size of the mooted price tag has led some in Washington and London to view it as a rebuff of a US plan, rather than a willingness to take a stake in a politically sensitive and dangerous operation, just as a war-weary Iraq had begun to recover.
Discussions about what to do with Isis members, among them thousands of foreign men, women and children, have been pushed intensively by US officials, who have also lobbied coalition partners to remove their citizens from two cramped detention centres in Syria’s north-east, which one former senior US official described as a “volcano”.
Other Iraqi pre-conditions include no access for humanitarian workers to any facilities on Iraqi soil, or objection to the death penalty.
The US state department did not respond to a request for comment.
Source: The Guardian