Children Of ISIS, Taken In By Russia

GROZNY, Russia — Every day, Belant Zulgayeva worries as she watches her grandchildren play their violent games, what she calls their “little war.” They rarely talk, but they run around, hide and, occasionally, slam one another to the ground with ferocity.

Ms. Zulgayeva is part of an effort by the Russian government to bring home and care for Russian children like her three grandchildren, who were raised by Islamist militants in the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL.

As the American-led coalition and Syrian government forces captured cities that had been held by the Islamic State, they found among the ruins a grim human wreckage of the organization’s once successful recruitment drive: hundreds and perhaps thousands of children born to or brought with the men and women who had flocked to Syria in support of ISIS.

While Russia, which has so far returned 71 children and 26 women since August, may seem lenient in its policy, its actions reflect a hardheaded security calculus: better to bring children back to their grandparents now than have them grow up in camps and possibly return as radicalized adults.

“What should we do, leave them there so somebody will recruit them?” said Ziyad Sabsabi, the Russian senator who runs the government- backed program. “Yes, these children saw terrible things, but when we put them in a different environment, with their grandparents, they change quickly.”

European governments have shown little sympathy toward adult males who joined ISIS. Rory Stewart, the British international development minister, told the BBC that “the only way of dealing with them will be, in almost every case, to kill them.”

But most European countries,