The corridors of Baghdad's Rusafa Central Prison are filled with frightened children on the day their mothers are on trial. Then they return to the women's prison, where they have been living for the last year and a half.
They sleep on thin mattresses in overcrowded cells, where they are bored, hungry and often sick. They are foreign children of the Islamic State.
Among them is Obaida, the two-year-old son of Chechen woman Laila Magomedovna Gazieva. She was arrested in late 2017 while fleeing the IS stronghold of Tal Afar in northern Iraq and six months later was convicted of belonging to the militant Islamist group.
On the day Gazi was sentenced to life in prison, a dozen other young women were sentenced, court records show. Obaida is with her mother in a women's prison in Baghdad, according to Russian government data. About 1.100 children of the Islamic State have been caught in the wheels of Iraqi justice, sources familiar with the prison system told Reuters. The youngest, like Obaida, stay with their mothers in prison. At least seven of those children died because of the poor conditions, according to the prisoner's story, embassy documents seen by Reuters and sources connected to the prison. At least three women also died.
Several hundred older children are being prosecuted for crimes ranging from illegally entering Iraq to fighting on the side of IS. About 185 children between the ages of nine and 18 have already been sentenced to terms ranging from a few months to 15 years in juvenile detention in Baghdad. Seventy-seven convicted children are girls.
These children have been betrayed by their parents who took them to a war zone, from the age of four they grow up in the toxic ideology of militants and, in many cases, the countries they came from abandoned them for fear that they represent a future threat.
Nadja Rainer Hermann, a German woman in her early XNUMXs who is serving a life sentence for belonging to IS, told Reuters that her two-year-old daughter spent days on a damp mattress in a dirty and cramped cell in a women's prison. "I'm afraid she might get sick and die," she said. She added that the older children are angry and frustrated because of the detention.
Iraqi government officials declined to comment on the foreign women and children in Iraqi custody or on prison conditions. Iraq has said it wants to help those who are innocent to return to their countries. Gazi spoke to Reuters in September 2017 when she and her son, then a baby, were being held in a camp near Mosul in northern Iraq. She hoped she could return with Obaid to France, where she lived before traveling to Iraq. But she doesn't have a French passport. "I don't want to stay in this camp, or in this country. The thought of what will happen to us terrifies me," she said.
Gazieva, who was 28 years old at the time, was sitting on the floor of a large tent. On her lap lay Obaida, his tiny body sweating under the Iraqi sun. He was crying and he was hungry. Gazieva said that she did not have enough milk to feed him.
Gazi was among 1400 women and children crammed into tents in the dusty camp. She spoke to her son in Russian, while dozens of young mothers with their children spoke in German, French and Turkish. They sat in groups on piles of blankets. Armed guards walked among the older children. The Iraqis had no idea what to do with their prisoners. They are an unprecedented legal and diplomatic challenge for Iraq and about two dozen foreign governments. Although there was nothing unusual about men going abroad to fight, this was the first time that so many women and children had joined them. There is no universal law governing repatriation, says Clive Stafford Smith, founder of the humanitarian human rights organization Repriv.
Gazijeva said that she accidentally ended up in the territory of the ID.
At the age of 17, she fled to France from the separatist violence in Chechnya. Then, in 2015, after divorcing her because she thought her husband was not pious enough, she went to Turkey with some Russian women she "met" on the Internet. She left her three children in France, thinking she would return soon.
Gazieva said that the women convinced her to drive down the coast and that she realized late that they had entered Syria. She was afraid at first, but later came to like the Islamic State. After a few months, she married a Chechen IS fighter and moved to Iraq.
For a while, life in the so-called caliphate was good, Gazi said. Obaida was born in a hospital in Mosul with the help of Iraqi midwives hired by IS when the Iraqi city was firmly under its control. Foreign fighters and their families had an elite status in that city. They were given more decent housing - stolen from their Iraqi owners - and better food and medical care.
"Life was like in France, except that here I could practice my religion in peace. My mother didn't understand, she said I had changed. But I am the same as before, except that I wear a niqab," she said. A few months after Obaida was born, Iraqi and American forces began a campaign to take control of Mosul. By then, Gazi was widowed and lived in the northern city of Tal Afar, where she fled the fighting. She said that life was good there, except for the bombing. "But when I was a child, there was a war in Chechnya, so I got used to it."
The situation changed in August 2017. Iraqi forces captured Mosul and the fight moved north. Women, children and the remaining IS men were fleeing Tal Afar across Kurdish-controlled territory towards the Turkish border. Diplomats and friends who had crossed the road earlier told them that the Kurdish peshmerga fighters would let them cross into Turkey. Instead, they were forced to surrender.
Families and relatives of IS militants after surrendering to the Peshmerga in IraqAfter several days in Kurdish custody, Gazi was handed over to the Iraqi authorities in Mosul, along with her son and other women and children. They were transferred to Baghdad in late 2017, where they were joined by foreign women and children detained elsewhere in Iraq. Iraqi authorities are holding up to two thousand foreign women and children, sources familiar with the prison system said.
Gazi is one of 494 foreign women found guilty in the Rusafa court between the end of 2017 and August 2018 for belonging to or assisting IS. They come from more than 18 countries, mainly Turkey, Russia and the countries of Central Asia. Up to 20 women were sentenced to death by hanging for belonging to the IS or participating in its activities. Judicial sources said that none of those sentences have been carried out yet.
The women's prison in Baghdad was not equipped to handle the arrival of so many women and children. It is overcrowded and there are many sick people, said prisoners and diplomats who visited the prison, as well as sources familiar with the situation there. Medical care is scarce and most mothers and children have scabies and are malnourished. They did not have enough clothes for winter conditions. Some women cut up the clothes they came in to make hats and socks for the children.
Aid agencies are helping the Iraqi government provide basic necessities for women and children, including clothing and milk, but funds are limited and foreign governments are slow to help.
Reuters reports that it is difficult to establish the identity of the women and children due to conflicting testimonies and unreliable documentation. Many women gave up their IDs when they pledged allegiance to the IDF. Family ties, nationality and identity are mostly established on the basis of interviews with detainees. Iraqi authorities are conducting DNA tests in some cases.
During the battle for Mosul, Iraqi security forces found around 90 foreign children wandering the battlefield alone or being guarded by foreigners. In most cases, they were identified and returned home. However, some were so small or too traumatized to tell the humanitarian workers who they were, so a dozen of them, unidentified, were placed in an orphanage in Baghdad.
In September 2017, then-Iraq Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said his government was "in full communication" with the countries the children came from "to find a way to bring them back." However, as reported by Reuters, those negotiations stalled by January 2018 and Iraqi authorities began legal proceedings. Children over the age of nine are criminally responsible under Iraqi law, compared to 11 in the US and 14 in Germany. The children's cases are dealt with by the juvenile court, where they face three possible charges: illegal entry into Iraq carries a maximum sentence of one year in custody; five to seven years in prison for membership in the ID; assisting the IS in carrying out terrorist activities can bring up to 15 years.
Some of the accused children participated in attacks on Iraqi forces, blowing up checkpoints and making explosive devices.
In Syria, foreign children languish in camps while European governments argue over their fate. On March 15, France announced that it had returned several children from northern Syria. They were orphans or separated from their parents. The largest number of children in Iraqi custody are of Turkish origin. Turkish diplomats are monitoring the health of the children and providing medicine, a Turkish official said. Efforts are being made to return home Turkish citizens who are not charged with any criminal offense, and priority is given to children, he added.
The other children are from Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and there are also some from Jordan, Syria, France, Germany and Trinidad and Tobago.
Stafford Smith of the Ripriv group says that states "have a legal responsibility for their citizens, especially the vulnerable, such as children, who have ended up in custody through no fault of their own."
Reuters, however, citing diplomats and knowledgeable sources, states that some countries are procrastinating. Some children born on the territory of ID do not have valid birth certificates, which makes it difficult to prove their nationality.
Some governments do not show much willingness to accept women and children. There is little public sympathy for the children of extremists. "It's a sensitive issue given the public reaction," said one Western diplomat. "We are talking about the return of the children of the people who are responsible for bombing our cities". BIH does not have a clear plan for the families of ID fighters either
Hundreds of people from Europe are believed to have gone to fight on the side of the extremist group in Syria and Iraq.
However, with the decline of the IDF, more and more of them are seeking to return home.
The authorities of Bosnia and Herzegovina recently announced that they are preparing to return two of their citizens suspected of having fought for IS in Syria, who are currently in custody in a Kurdish camp in the north of that country.
According to the data of the intelligence service of BiH, 241 adults and 80 children in 2012-2016. went from Bosnia or the Bosnian diaspora to Syria or Iraq, where 150 children were born.
100 adults remained there, including 49 women, while at least 88 were killed or died. About 50 returned to Bosnia, including seven children.
Several women with children have asked the Bosnian authorities to allow them to return home, but there is still no clear plan for them because the children do not have Bosnian citizenship.
"Caliphate" defeated
US-backed forces announced yesterday that they had captured the last shred of IS territory in Syria and eliminated its rule over the self-proclaimed "caliphate", but the threat remains from jihadist cells around the world.
Originally an offshoot of Al Qaeda, IS has seized large swaths of Iraq and Syria since 2014 and imposed a reign of terror, but was eventually reduced to the village of Baghouz.
Children of IS members in the Syrian village of Baguz on March 14"Today we declare the destruction of the so-called Islamic State organization and the end of its control in the last pocket in Baghuz," said the commander of the Syrian Democratic Forces, General Mazlum Abdi at the victory ceremony.
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