What should be done with the women and children of the Islamic State?

BEIRUT – Many of them were barely in school age when their parents took them to the Islamic State (IS) caliphate in Iraq and Syria. Thousands of others are born there.

Children are the most vulnerable area of ​​the remnants of the Islamic State community: what remains of the more than 40,000 foreign fighters and their families from 80 countries to help build the caliphate. Many of them are currently held in camps and prisons in eastern Syria, Iraq and Libya.

"What did these guys do?"asked Fabrizio Carboni, a Red Cross official, after witnessing the misery surrounding him during a recent visit to the Al Hol camp in Syria." Nothing. "

However, even for children, foreign governments whose citizens are abandoned in camps and prisons have trouble deciding what to do with them.

According to the investigators, the Islamic State employed children as scouts, spies, cooks and bombers, and sometimes as fighters and suicide bombers. The propaganda videos showed young children who beheaded and shot at the prisoners.

Some have had years of indoctrination in EI and, in the case of older boys, military training.

"They are victims of the situation because they have acted against their will," said Peter Neumann, director of the International Center for the Study of Radicalization at King's College London, "but that does not mean that, at least in some cases, be a risk. "

If it is difficult to determine what to do with children, it is even more difficult to decide what to do with women and men.

There are at least 13,000 foreigners detained in Syria, including 12,000 women and children. According to various estimates, this number does not include 31,000 Iraqi women and children detained in that country. 1400 others are held in Iraq.

However, only a few countries – including Russia, Kosovo, Kazakhstan, Indonesia and France – have intervened to bring back some of their citizens.

The debate is more pressing than ever.

In overcrowded camps in eastern Syria, women and children of IE fighters die of heat stroke or hypothermia, malnutrition and diseases. The children are too exhausted to talk. The women who have resigned from the group live in fear of being attacked by those who are not.

The local militias who run the camps say that they can not stop the citizens of other countries forever.

On the other side of the Iraqi border, government authorities are quick to bring justice to those accused of belonging to the Islamic State, by sentencing hundreds of people to death at the capital. outcome of trial of a duration often not exceeding five minutes.

However, most foreign governments are reluctant to accept them and end up as international outcasts that nobody wants, neither their country of origin nor their jailers.

"Who wants to be the politician who decides to repatriate a person who, in two years, will explode with a bomb?" Said Lorenzo Vidino, director of the program on extremism at George Washington University.

The fact, Vidino said, is that few extremists come back to carry out attacks in their home countries. However, exceptional cases, including the 2015 attacks in Paris, which claimed the lives of 130 people and two of the deadliest terrorist attacks in Tunisia, have made the idea of ​​politically toxic repatriation in many countries. At least one of the attackers in Sri Lanka was a Sri Lankan terrorist trained by the Islamic State in Syria.

Some countries, such as the United Kingdom and Australia, have revoked the citizenship of those suspected of having joined the Islamic State abroad and effectively abandoned them, as well as their families. children in indefinite detention without charge. which are now potentially stateless. Only the United Kingdom has canceled the pbadports of more than 150 people, according to Sajid Javid, Secretary of the Interior.

Although bringing them home may present an obvious danger, it would be the same if they were left in the camps. Seamus Hughes, deputy director of the program at George Washington University, has always said that it is the fighters who have gained experience with an extremist group.

"Do we ignore the problem because it is easier in the short term?He said, "If that's the case, it will become a long-term problem. "

However, bringing them home requires foreign governments to answer virtually impossible questions, such as the distinction between those who have committed crimes and those who have not committed crimes, and those who still represent a threat.

The enigma has been more difficult to resolve with regard to the tens of thousands of women and children affiliated with the Islamic State group.

The widely held view that ISIS women were pbadive prisoners, "confessional women" seduced to join the caliphate and marry their fighters, collapsed as the This proved the brigade of Caliphate morality or, in some cases, took up arms in combat.

"The rhetoric of the media and politicians is that they wash their brains, cheat and are in love or do not know what they're doing."said Meredith Loken, an adjunct professor at the University of Mbadachusetts at Amherst, who studied women who join violent extremist groups. "However, even if they do not take up arms," ​​he said, many of them "actively contributed to the group".

According to the experts, some women were pbadive comrades of the fighters while others were violent fanatics. And there are also those who have been both victims and perpetrators.

Women like Shamima Begum, a British teenager, and Hoda Muthana, a young woman born in the United States, have attracted media attention in recent weeks, in part because it's very difficult to get the job done. evaluate the role they played and the risks they pose.

Begum was unrepentant when a journalist found him in a Syrian camp in February; He asked to return to the UK for the sake of his son, while claiming that the 2017 attack at Manchester Stadium, where 22 people had died, was justified. Muthana, meanwhile, said he regretted his adherence to the Islamic State and claimed that he had been "brainwashed".

Experts argue that bringing ISS members back to prosecution or surveillance is smarter, safer and, in most countries, more humane than letting them get stuck in the desert or entrusting their pursuits to Iraqi justice system.

The Trump government has called on foreign governments to repatriate their citizens, although officials have hinted that some of the detainees who can not be repatriated could be sent to Guantanamo Bay military prison.

"These are its citizens and, for better or for worse, they are responsible for the disaster they cause."said Tanya Mehra, a researcher at the International Anti-Terrorism Center in The Hague.

Leaving IS supporters in the camps or letting Iraqi justice take care of them can only delay imminent settlement, say the experts.

"If you leave them there and lose the thread, they will try to come back sooner or later and you will not know what happened to them," Mehra said. "At least, it's a controlled risk if you bring them back."
Lilia Blaise collaborated on this report from Tunisia and Oleg Matsnev from Moscow.

* Copyright: 2019 The New York Times News Service