Prisoner Releases Will Empower Extremist Insurgencies

In analysis published by the Institute for the Study of War and the American Enterprise Institute's Critical Threats Project, Eva Kahan, Rahma Bayrakdar and Omer Niazi argued that a wave of prisoner releases across two continents was likely to strengthen Salafi-jihadi movements precisely as Western counterterrorism capacity was contracting.

The authors set those releases against a broader retrenchment: planned American drawdowns in Afghanistan and Iraq, a possible end to the US enabling role behind French operations in the Sahel, and the strain the pandemic had placed on missions already stretched thin. Governments left holding large detainee populations, they noted, frequently lack both durable detention facilities and functioning de-radicalization programs.

Two cases anchored the argument. Under the February 2020 agreement between Washington and the Taliban, the Afghan government undertook to free 5,000 Taliban detainees in exchange for 1,000 of its own; by that August most had been released, including several hundred convicted of serious violent offences. The Taliban offered assurances about their future conduct, but no mechanism existed to enforce them. In Mali, the post-coup government released 180 prisoners to the al-Qaeda-linked JNIM in exchange for four hostages — among them fighters from other groups, which the authors argued would deepen JNIM's alliances as much as replenish its own ranks.

Their wider concern was precedent. Mali's ousted president cited the Afghan deal in defending negotiations with JNIM, and senior United Nations and African Union figures pointed to the same agreement as a model for the Sahel.

Read the full analysis at the Institute for the Study of War →