Former IS families face neighbours’ hatred returning home

RAQQA (AP):

Marwa Ahmad rarely leaves her run-down house in the Syrian city of Raqqa. The single mother of four said people look at her with suspicion and refuse to offer her a job, while her children get bullied and beaten up at school.

She and her children are paying the price, she said, because she once belonged to the Islamic State (IS) group, which overran a swath of Syria and Iraq in 2014 and imposed a radical, brutal rule for years.

Ahmad is among tens of thousands of widows and wives of IS militants who were detained in the wretched and lawless al-Hol camp in northeastern Syria after US-led coalition and Syrian Kurdish forces cleared IS from the region in 2019.

She and a growing number of families have since been allowed to leave, after Kurdish authorities that oversee the camp determined they were no longer affiliated with the militant group and do not pose a threat to society. But the difficulties they face in trying to reintegrate back in Syria and Iraq show the deep, bitter resentments remaining after the atrocities committed by IS and the destructiveness of the long war that brought down the militants.

There also remains fear of IS sleeper cells that continue to carry out attacks. IS militants in Raqqa on Monday attacked and killed six members of the Kurdish-led security forces, known as the Syrian Democratic Forces. The attack came following a surge of SDF and US raids targeting IS militants in eastern Syria.

Near Ahmad’s house, an IS slogan, ‘The Islamic Caliphate is coming, God willing’, is graffitied on the wall of a dilapidated building.

It’s an ideology that Ahmad once believed in. She said she and her sister joined IS after their brother, an IS member, was killed in a US airstrike in 2014. She married a member of the group, though she said he was a nurse, not a fighter. He has been detained since 2019.

Ahmed said she now rejects IS. Her community doesn’t believe that though, and she claims it’s because she wears the conservative niqab veil that covers most of her face.

“Now, I have to face people, and many of the people in this society have been hurt by (IS),” Ahmad said, “Of course, it was not only the organisation that did so. We, the people who live in Syria, have been hurt by the Free Syrian Army, the regime, and IS, right? But they don’t say that.”

She said the neighbourhood bakery sometimes refuses to give her bread. Even her own father, who did not approve of her joining the extremist group, threatened a shop owner who employed her that he would accuse him of communicating with IS if he didn’t fire her.

After IS overran Raqqa, large parts of northern and eastern Syria and western Iraq in 2014, the group declared a so-called Islamic caliphate over the territory. Thousands came from around the world to join. Raqqa became the ‘Caliphate’s’ de facto capital.

US-backed Kurdish-led authorities battled for years to roll back IS. Finally in March 2019, they captured the last sliver of IS-held territory in Syria, the small village of Bahgouz. Ahmed’s husband was captured by the SDF at Bahgouz, and Ahmed and her children were sent to al-Hol camp.

Ever since, what to do with the women and children at al-Hol has been a conundrum for the Kurdish-led authorities. Most of the women are wives and widows of IS fighters. Thousands of Syrians and Iraqis have been released and sent home, as well as a number of foreigners.

Still some 50,000 Syrians and Iraqis, half of whom are children, remain crowded into tents in the fenced-in camp in a barren stretch of desert. Several thousand foreigners from dozens of countries also remain.