Mothers left behind as Russia reclaims children raised by jihadists
Youngsters separated from Isil militant parents are returned to Dagestan in unprecedented repatriation
Six-year-old Sumaya and her teenage sister Zagidat used to mark every day they spent away from their mother on a calendar, hoping for a reunion. “Six months later, they tore it up, and we spoke no more about it,” says their grandmother, Patimat Gazimagomedova.
Suymaya and Zagidat, 13, have been living with Mrs Gazimagomedova in Russia’s predominantly Muslim region of Dagestan since their return from Isil-run Iraq in February last year. Their mother is in an Iraqi prison.
They are two of hundreds of children that Russia is bringing back from squalid prisons and camps in the former caliphate, in what could be the world’s largest repatriation effort.
While the UK is torn over the future of about 60 British children in a similar situation, Russia is already in the middle of its operation.
At least 3,000 Russian nationals went to fight alongside Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) militants in Syria, and a third of them came from
Dagestan, a region of three million. Moscow’s original repatriation programme was halted at the end of 2017 after security services argued that women who came back with the children were too much of a risk. So the authorities resumed the programme a year later, this time focusing on children.
“Children are not to blame and shouldn’t be responsible for the immature choices of their mothers and even their fathers,” said Marina Yezhova, Dagestan’s ombudsman for children’s rights, who has overseen the repatriation of 98 children since 2017.
Dagestan has a list of 1,118 youngsters in Syria and Iraq eligible for return.
The North Caucasus region was a fertile recruiting ground for Isil, with a culture of violence instilled after more than a decade of fighting between Islamic insurgents and federal forces.
Just a few years ago, the government would send in armed police to lock down entire neighbourhoods and raid houses of suspected militants.
Multiple interviews and written testimonies suggest that Russian security services went as far as to encourage some of the locals to flee just before 2014 when Russia hosted the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Vladimir Putin’s pet project.
Unlike her neighbours, Mrs Gazimagomedova, 63, never had any trouble with the authorities and neither did her two daughters, who left for Syria with their families about five years ago. The sisters, aged 40 and 38, were never religious or radical but simply obeyed their husbands, said Mrs Gazimagomedova.
Now that Sumaya and Zagidat are back in Russia – without their parents – they have a lot of catching up to do.
A government-assigned tutor helped Zagidat cover two years of lost schooling last year. She is now in the third grade but still two years older than her classmates.
“She was scared of people and wouldn’t talk to anyone when she got here,” said Patimat Abdullayev, a social worker at the school in Komsomolskoye.
Unusually for girls her age Sumaya, wears a purple headband that Muslim women typically wear underneath a hijab because it’s “comfortable” and it makes her feel “like an adult”.
When asked about life in Syria, Sumaya instead talks about her current interests – dolls and taking snapshots with her grandmother’s old camera.
Ms Gazimagomedova has now applied for custody of her other daughter’s three children who live at the notorious al-hol camp in Syria.
It was not just the youth from marginalised areas like Komsomolskoye who left for Syria.
Children from more affluent families with secular backgrounds were recruited as well.
Sadredin, a retired law enforcement official, lost his daughter to the caliphate. Just three weeks ago, his two grandsons were flown in from al-hol. “I don’t want my colleagues to know,” he said. “This is a shame for me.”
The boys, aged 12 and 10, are in good health but cannot read or write, according to Sadredin.
Their mother died in shelling and their father is missing.
The children are monitored by social workers and psychologists and new arrivals spend two weeks at a recreation camp where they undergo psychiatric evaluation.
Most of the children are too young to have been seriously traumatised, officials said, but psychiatrists found some of them to be suicidal or had repeated panic attacks and learning difficulties.
Officials from neighbouring Chechnya helped repatriate a dozen women from Syria in 2017, stunning the federal government. The Chechen authorities have since been sidelined from the programme but ombudsman Kheda Saratova still advises women desperate to get their relatives back.
Back in Komsomolskoye, children play in the schoolyard near a one
‘Children are not to blame for and shouldn’t be responsible for the immature choices of their mothers and even their fathers’
‘Children are not the problem it’s the environment they live in and there is no guarantee they won’t push to dismantle a secular state’
storey building – a mosque built by a private benefactor.
Nasikhat Muradisova, a school administrator, shrugged at how unusual it was in Russia to find a place of worship on state school grounds.
“At least we’re keeping an eye on the kids here,” she said.
And while the authorities continue to work to bring back the children from the terrible conditions in Syria and Iraq, Ms Yezhova cautioned that the risk of radicalisation remained even back in Dagestan.
“Children are not the problem, it’s the environment they live in,” she said. “No one can guarantee that they won’t share a call for dismantling a secular state in favour of a theocracy.”