Turkey repatriates 200 children of ISIS members
ISTANBUL — Nine-year-old Nisa flashes a rare smile at the memory of her mother kissing her the last time they saw each other. Barely a month back from a prison camp in Iraq, she lived for five years in the Islamic State’s caliphate after her father took the family from Turkey to join the terrorist group.
Now, she is one of more than 200 Turkish children the government has repatriated from Iraq. She was handed over to her maternal grandparents in Istanbul, who know only snippets of what she has been through.
“Her eyes were full of fear,” said her grandmother Bedia, who asked that the family’s last name not be used.
Turkey has been slow to take back citizens who joined the Islamic State as it extended its rule across Syria and Iraq in 2014. More than 12,000 foreign women and children are detained in Syria and Iraq. This poses a difficult quandary for their home countries, most of which have refused to repatriate their citizens. Under pressure from anxious relatives, Turkish officials have changed their tune.
They began to help the families negotiate Iraq’s legal bureaucracy and secure the release of at least some of the children being held in a jail near Baghdad.
How to sort the terrorists from the victims is a question many countries are still grappling with, though some seem content to leave the women in Iraq and Syria.
Eight hundred Turkish women and children are still believed to be detained in Iraq. Most of the adults have already been tried and sentenced in Iraq in a process that human rights organizations and the United Nations have criticized as summary justice.
The 188 recently repatriated children left behind 84 mothers who are still in detention, 26 of whom have been sentenced to death, according to a judge familiar with their cases in Baghdad.
Huseyin, a pastry chef in the town of Denizli in Turkey, traveled four times to Baghdad to rescue his 2-year-old grandson, Halit.
“He had malaria and scabies,” Huseyin said.