Shafaq News– Washington/ Baghdad

The United States on Thursday urged countries to repatriate their ISIS nationals after Iraq began receiving detainees transferred from unstable detention sites in Syria.

Speaking to Reuters, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio stressed that non-Iraqi ISIS militants would remain in Iraq only temporarily, describing Baghdad’s decision to hold the detainees in secure facilities as a “necessary step” following security breakdowns in northeastern Syria.

Iraq is on the front line of efforts to prevent an ISIS resurgence, he said.

Read more: Exclusive: Iraq takes custody of “first-line” ISIS, Al-Qaeda leaders from Syria

Earlier, the US military revealed that it had transferred 150 suspected ISIS members from Syria to Iraq, with the operation potentially expanding to about 7,000 detainees. Iraq’s Supreme Judicial Council later announced it would begin legal proceedings against those transferred.

Following clashes with government forces that killed dozens of people, including civilians, the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, which for years guarded prisons and camps in northeastern Syria, withdrew from the sites that hold more than 10,000 ISIS fighters and tens of thousands of women and children linked to the group, according to estimates from the United Nations.