What does citizenship mean when thousands of American, French and British children have been abandoned to their fates in the desert?
By
Ms. Moaveni is a writer and an analyst with the International Crisis Group.
- New York Times, Sept. 5, 2019
AL HOL, Syria — No one thought baby Ibrahim was going to make it.
The 18-month-old boy, Belgian by birth, was malnourished, dehydrated, and vomiting every half an hour from a stomach bug. In Al Hol, the refugee camp in northeast Syria where he was staying, the heat regularly reached a relentless 100 degrees by midmorning, there was scant medical care, and fresh water, when it arrived, usually teemed with bacteria. Video of Ibrahim, listless and throwing up, had made its way from this desolate desert patch of Syria to his aunts in Belgium, who had shared it with doctors there. “I’m going to be honest, this baby is going to die,” one said. Another thought it would only be a matter of hours. A Belgian mission to rescue and repatriate orphan children arrived in the camp in June and made Ibrahim their top priority. But Ibrahim did not appear on the camp officials’ prisoner list. No one had heard of him. What had happened to the baby on verge of death?
The camp where the footage was taken, Al Hol, holds 73,000, mostly women and children formerly associated with ISIS, living together under squalid tents, lacking access to basic sanitation, clean water or food supplies. As of July, at least 240 children had died either in the camp or en route. The week I visited early this summer, a 4-year-old boy drowned after tumbling into a fecal pit. A few weeks before that, a 7-year-old burned to death in a tent. All his family back home received was a photograph of his charred body. The still-healthy ones run feral within the camp’s confines.
Al Hol, originally built in the early 1990s to house Iraqis fleeing the first Gulf war, is called many things these days, among them “the camp of death,” “a test from God,” “a mini-ISIS caliphate,” and “Guantánamo in the desert.” Most of its inhabitants arrived early this year, escaping the fighting around Baghouz, ISIS’ last stronghold; during the most intense period, around 10,000 women and children arrived on a single day. These included the Islamic State’s most devoted adherents — those who were willing to eat weeds and sleep under trees until the group lost its final sliver of territory.
The foreign-born children in the camp number nearly 8,000. They were either taken by their parents to Syria or born there of the serial mandatory matches between fighters and muhajirat, or migrant women, that became the Islamic State’s chief recruiting lure and its most cruel imposition on women.
Today these children are lost — sometimes literally. They are currently growing up among women who would see them as the next generation of jihadists in waiting. Children of some nations, particularly Russia, Turkey and some Central Asian republics, have gone home more quickly, but Western children have not fared as well. Some have been abandoned by the countries where they are ostensibly citizens. Others can’t be tracked down, even by countries that would take them in. Their prospects of returning to the West soon look bleak, but what everyone believes, quietly, is that many will make it back eventually.
I visited Al Hol in late June to interview women in the camp, hoping to gain a measure of those detained, their commitment to jihadism, and what risks they might pose to their home countries, as well to other women and children living alongside them. I came away wondering about the fraying, endangered notion of citizenship, and what it really means to be a citizen of a Western democracy, when a combination of fear and political expedience has resulted in the abandonment of thousands of children to this sprawling ISIS prison in the desert.
The denouement of the ISIS caliphate was always going to be messy. But no one quite imagined the web of entanglements that converge today at Al Hol. The foreign women and children at the camp exist in a legal limbo, held in territory that is controlled not by a state, but by the Syrian Kurdish militia that fought alongside the American coalition against ISIS and is now seeking to build an autonomous statelet. They are there because the majority of the 54 governments they hail from refuse to take them back.
Among them are British, American, French, German and Canadian children. The vast majority are very small, under 8 years old. Two American orphans from Florida reportedly passed through the camp earlier in the year; their mother had abducted them and taken them to Syria. Before dying herself, she entrusted them to a fellow hard-core ISIS woman from Britain. Their father has heard the woman then concealed the children’s identities and smuggled them out of the camp, taking them to Idlib, a province controlled by rebel groups dominated by jihadists. Hiding children and changing their names is easy in Al Hol; finding out the fates of those who’ve disappeared is difficult.
Determining the precise number of children in the camp, along with their paternity and nationality, is also difficult. The camp prisoner lists are incomplete and do not align with governments’ lists of their citizens; there are people in the camp who are not on any list, and people on lists who do not appear in the camp at all. Many women lack passports, which were burned or confiscated upon arrival in ISIS territory. Some are claiming paternity of children whose parents have died, to maximize their own chances of repatriation; in this, they have been given hope by Syrian Kurdish authorities, who have refused to separate mothers, those claiming to be mothers, and children. Others, like the British woman who kidnapped the two American orphans and took them to Idlib, are claiming children who are not theirs because they view them as the next generation of jihadists, who must not be returned to the “Land of Unbelief.”
Though their mothers are confined to a guarded annex and only allowed out under armed guard, the foreign children roam freely across the camp. There is no school and nowhere for them to play, so they pass the time by tormenting each other.
The afternoon I visited, I heard a keening cry from a side ally near the foreigner annex. A small girl of perhaps 7 or 8 was sitting atop a pile of humanitarian food aid boxes, clad in the black abaya and jilbab of a grown woman, but in miniature, trying to fend off a bunch of boys trying to steal a box of aid couscous. She wept as she tried to repel them.
A few yards away, some younger children were playing shootout games with guns they had fashioned out of inflated purple medical gloves. Occasionally, a woman walked past carrying a lifeless baby or toddler, getting bottled water from the market or attempting to access a clinic. It is unnerving how malnourished babies begin to look like birds, so much skin draped against bones arranged at pointy angles.
This summer, the idea that Al Hol is not just a humanitarian blight, but also a flashpoint for ISIS resurgence, has been gaining ground. An August report by the Department of Defense warned that ISIS is likely to seek to recruit there, and that residents of the camp are potentially susceptible to its “messaging, coercion and enticement.” Some of this signaling may emanate from a push in Washington, repeated by President Trump now twice, to get European governments to repatriate their ISIS fighters, as well as women and children.
Today, the place feels very much a continuation of the ISIS caliphate. Every woman living in the foreigner annex wears a full-length black abaya, the robes that the militants required in their territory; some still wear black gloves and niqabs or even full face veils, obscuring the eyes.
I found it difficult to assess whether violent, dangerous women were a small but frightening minority, as some women suggested, or a more sizable number; many of those working in the camp are sworn enemies of the Islamic State, and would view any angry, conservative Arab woman who had landed herself there as an ISIS loyalist.
What many residents of the camp told me is that everything changed with the mass arrivals of women from Baghouz. Older residents of the camp who had started relaxing their covering, forgoing the face veil or wearing lighter colors, quickly reverted to all-shrouding black. The arrival of the Baghouziat, as they are called in Arabic, transformed life in the camp for its existing inhabitants, who had rejected and fled ISIS months or even years earlier.
Almost immediately upon arrival, they began demanding that women obey all ISIS rules of comportment. They whipped women they saw smoking. When women gathered to hear music played by camp officials, they castigated them, promising that hellfire awaited those who listened to haram pop. When night fell, they punished women they witnessed misbehaving by burning down their tents. In late spring, one woman knifed a camp guard, who later died. “They run hisba patrols in the camp,” one official said, referring to the all-female morality police brigades that roamed ISIS cities. “We only control the cordons.”
The children who have spent much of the year in this place hail from dozens of different countries, and each roaming pack of them — featuring shocks of white blond hair, Asiatic eyes, Somali features — is so multicultural that it feels somehow by design, as though curated for a brochure. The children remind me of the ISIS social media posts of 2014, when recruiters beckoned young Muslim women in the West to a promised land where skin color, race, and tribe did not matter.
What I witnessed was the Belgian mission’s second visit to Al Hol. The 11-member team included psychologists, a pediatrician, a surgeon, and the head of Child Focus, the NGO overseeing the effort. Gerrit Loots, the psychologist leading the team, said the children’s modes of play and behavior had deteriorated significantly since his first observations. The children’s attention spans were shorter. When he gave them toys to play with, they wielded them in frustration; overall, they played less cooperatively. “Their behavior reflects what is happening in that camp,” he said. “The psychological tension, the hopelessness, it is all expressed in their well-being.” Part of the urgency in getting the children back home, he explained, lies in not prolonging their already delayed development: “We need to ensure that the gap doesn’t increase to the hopeless point, where they won’t be able to function in our schools.”
The Belgians examined 41 children, all of them dusty, dirty, but open and excited to be meeting the team, who brought care packages from relatives back home. Most spoke Dutch or French, but had never been to school. One 7-year-old in Ain Issa, another camp holding foreign women and children, drew the team a picture, but was unable to write his name.
I asked two women in Al Hol, a German and a Swede, whether they would welcome a school in the camp. They both bristled at the idea. One said: “It depends on what they were teaching. If it was literally just Arabic, then maybe.” The other: “Why would I let my children be taught by people to whom this land doesn’t even belong?” Some of the women complained about the camp guards. The guards are rude to them, they said, they speak to them in angry tones, they use tasers on them, they didn’t allow the celiac woman to keep her gluten-free food. “Each of these guards has probably lost a cousin or a relative in the fighting against ISIS,” I said to them. “They bring a history to this situation too.” The two girls looked at me blinkingly, as though the idea made sense but had never occurred to them; their expressions reminded me of the university students I teach. I remembered I was talking to teenagers.
Back home in Belgium, when reports run in various papers about the orphans’ return, Loots and his team are inundated with hateful emails. One receives angry messages via his daughter’s Facebook account. The term “ticking time bomb” crops up in much of the communication. The idea that children of jihadists are somehow tainted and destined to be violent themselves is both fantastically wrong-minded and extremely common. In northeastern Nigeria, women returning from the jihadist insurgency Boko Haram found they and their children were rejected in communities, even if they had been abducted into the group; the idea that their children had inherited the “bad blood” of their fathers led to such intense stigma that aid groups recorded numerous instances of infanticide. In European media coverage, these children mostly live in headlines as “ISIS babies.”
Although the fate of adult women in the camps remains highly uncertain, caught up in the web of European governments’ fraught domestic politics and security fears, many acknowledge that orphan children will eventually be brought home. A number of courts across Europe, essentially overriding their government’s calculations, have ordered that children be repatriated. Many countries have argued that doing so is difficult to impossible. In January, the Pink Floyd founder Roger Waters lent his jet to help rescue two Trinidadian children from Al Hol, puncturing those claims. Since then, the trickle of orphan removals has remained steady but still slow. Meanwhile, the children simply wait, watching women give birth in tents to babies who often die within days, learning to live with the shrapnel embedded in their bodies, learning nothing more of life than the ISIS caliphate and this camp prison that mimics it so very well.
Azadeh Moaveni is a senior gender analyst at the International Crisis Group and the author of the forthcoming book, “Guest House for Young Widows: The Women of ISIS.”