The US has still not revealed its intentions for its first high-profile Islamic State detainee, two days after the Umm Sayyaf was taken captive in Syria.



The woman, whom the US described as the wife of Isis member Abu Sayyaf, was seized during a special operations raid on Saturday and according to the White House, she is being held in US military custody in Iraq.

Doubt cast on role of Isis leader killed by special forces in Syria Read more

But her capture raises a host of thorny policy questions for the Obama administration, which has taken few terrorist detainees and prosecuted those it has taken in US federal courts. Under Obama, US forces had not previously made any battlefield detentions outside Afghanistan, and the US military has closed its detention facilities there and in Iraq.

Asked what will become of Umm Sayyaf, Colonel Steve Warren, the interim top Pentagon spokesman, said “we have no announcements to make”.

Human rights advocates, recalling the legacy of legal and physical abuse in US wartime detention facilities, are starting to press the Obama administration to charge Umm Sayyaf with a crime in federal court or release her.

“If the US has sufficient evidence that Umm Sayyaf has violated US law, it should charge her and bring her before a judge promptly, and provide her with access to an attorney and medical treatment. If there isn’t sufficient evidence to charge her, she should be released,” said Andrea Prasow of Human Rights Watch.



“Given the widespread use of torture in Iraqi prisons, the US should not transfer her to Iraqi custody; doing so would violate the Convention Against Torture.”



Karen Greenberg, director of the national security program at Fordham University Law School, said she expected that any resolution of Umm Sayyaf’s detention would follow her interrogation by US officials. The Obama administration would not confirm on Monday if or whether Umm Sayyaf has or will be interrogated by its high-value detainee interrogation group, but the Daily Beast reported the group is questioning her.

“As long as the United States is going to be the country that is trying terrorists, whether or not they have specific threats against the United States, then it makes sense to bring her into US courts, bring the evidence before a judge, and to charge her,” Greenberg said, noting that pre-charge interrogations for terror suspects “hasn’t disrupted the ability to prosecute them”.

On Saturday, Warren told the Guardian the administration would not transfer Umm Sayyaf to the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay. CNN reported that Umm Sayyaf is an Iraqi national, but Human Rights Watch has documented extensive abuse, particularly against women, in Iraqi interior and defense ministry jails, making a transfer to Iraqi custody a problem for US compliance with international obligations.

It is unclear if prosecuting the Isis captive is a priority for the administration. Nor is it obvious if Umm Sayyaf has committed a crime under US federal law. A White House statement on Saturday confidently called her a “member” of Isis who had played an unspecified “important role” in Isis terrorism, but could only speculate that she was “complicit in the enslavement” of a young woman freed in the US raid.

Mary Ellen O’Connell, a professor of international law at the University of Notre Dame, said that under international law, the US is technically required to hand Umm Sayyaf over to the government of the Syrian dictator, Bashar al-Assad. “We don’t want to do that, obviously,” she said.

“The next best thing,” O’Connell said, would be to rely on the International Committee of the Red Cross for “removing her to a place of detention, in a place where she will be treated according to international humanitarian law, and I would ask the International Committee of the Red Cross to make that transfer”, perhaps to a detention center in Jordan.

In announcing the raid and capture on Saturday, White House and Pentagon statements said US troops entered eastern Syria for a “capture” mission. But Pentagon and White House representatives have yet to explain how they launched a capture mission without a plan for what to do with the captive.

Lt. Col. Myles B. Caggins III, the Defense Department spokesman for detainee policy, said: “We are working to determine an ultimate disposition for the detainee that best supports the national security of the United States and of our allies and partners, consistent with domestic and international law.”