Iraq holding wives, children of IS fighters

BAGHDAD: Iraqi authorities are holding 1,400 foreign wives and children of suspected Islamic State (IS) fighters after government forces expelled the group from one of its last remaining strongholds in Iraq, security and aid officials said.

Most came from Turkey. Many others were from former Soviet states, such as Tajikistan, Azerbaijan and Russia, Iraqi army and intelligence officers said.

Other Asians and a “very few” French and Germans were also among them.

The wives and children are being held at an Iraqi camp south of Mosul.

Most had arrived since Aug 30, when Iraqi troops drove IS out of Mosul.

One intelligence officer said they were still verifying their nationalities with their home countries, since many of the women no longer had their original documents.

It is the largest group of foreigners linked to IS to be held by Iraqi forces since they began driving the militants from Mosul and other areas in northern Iraq last year, an aid official said.

Thousands of foreigners have been fighting for IS, or Daesh, in Iraq and Syria.

“We are holding the Daesh families under tight security measures and waiting for government orders on how to deal with them,” said Colonel Ahmed al-Taie from Mosul’s Nineveh operation command.

“We treat them well. They are families of tough criminals who killed innocents in cold blood, but when we interrogated them we discovered that almost all of them were misled by a vicious Daesh propaganda.”

Reuters reporters saw hundreds of the women and children sitting on mattresses crawling with bugs in tents without air-conditioning in what aid workers called a “militarised site”. Turkish, French and Russian were among the languages spoken.

“I want to go back (to France) but don’t know how,” said a veiled woman of Chechen origin who said she had lived in Paris before.

She said she did not know what had happened to her husband, who had brought her to Iraq when he joined IS.

A French woman of Algerian descent said she had been tricked by her husband to come with him via Turkey into Syria and then Iraq when he joined IS last year.

“He said ‘let’s go for a week’s holiday in Turkey’. He had already bought the plane tickets and the hotel.”

A security officer said the women and children had mostly surrendered to the Kurdish peshmerga near the northern city of Tal Afar, along with their husbands.

The Kurds handed the women and children over to Iraqi forces but kept the men – all presumed to be fighters – in their custody. – Reuters