About the Forum

WHAT

The Forum is hosted by the Rojava Center for Strategic Studies (Navenda Rojava ya Lêkolînên Stratejîk, or NRLS), a research center based in North East Syria, who organised last year’s Forum on Ethnic Cleansing and Demographic Change in Afrin.

WHO

125 guests from 15 countries across three continents will join the discussion, including: Dominique Inchauspé, registrar of the International Criminal Court and International Court of Justice at The Hague; and Peter Neumann, founder of the International Center for the Study of Radicalisation. International anti-terrorism experts, diplomats, lawyers, and religious, military and political experts will all attend the conference, speaking alongside members of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and Autonomous Administration of North East Syria (AANES) who have led the ongoing struggle against ISIS in the region. International press will also be in attendance.

WHERE

Qamishlo Canton, North East Syria

WHEN

6 to 8 July 2019

HOW

You can follow @RojavaIC on Twitter for live tweet updates in English – Arabic updates are over at @NrlsAr. We’ll also be emailing out a daily summary and press pack for journalists and researchers following the Forum remotely, and you can get in touch with Rojava Information Center (RIC) for any further assistance you need to follow or report on the Forum.

WHY

Following ISIS’ territorial defeat by the Syrian Democratic Forces on 23 March 2019, the world’s attention turned elsewhere. But regionally and internationally, the ISIS threat is growing day by day. In North East Syria, ISIS sleeper cells are carrying out daily attacks with increasing frequency, claiming scores of kills each month.

Most seriously, there are up to 13,000 ISIS fighters currently detained in North East Syria – 1000 of them foreign nationals. There are over 13,000 foreign ISIS women and their children in camps across NE Syria, plus many thousands more local and Iraqi ISIS members, families and sympathisers. There is little international movement to resolve this issue, either in terms of repatriating foreign ISIS fighters or in terms of political, legal and financial support to the Autonomous Administration as it struggles to deal with this immense burden.

As such, NRLS has organised the International Forum on ISIS to study the ethnic and cultural genocide perpetrated by ISIS against the peoples of the region and in particular the Yezidi community; provide suggestions that could address the security threat posed by ISIS on the internal, regional, and international level; and discuss the best ways of dealing with the remaining cells and eradicating ISIS’ fundamentalist ideology to preserve peace and stability in the region.

AcceSs the complete Press Kit