ISIS Women Who Returned

In May 2021 Denmark abruptly announced that it was going to allow three Danish women and their fourteen children to repatriate back from Syria. Up until that point, the government had adamantly refused to permit the women’s return, justifying its decision on the grounds that the women had “turned their backs on Denmark” and had thereby lost their rights. While the government made clear its willingness to take the women and children back from the “Kurdish-run prison camps” in Syria, the process was expected to take a year. In a statement, Minister of Justice Nick Hækkerup, Minister of Foreign Affairs Jeppe Kofod, and Minister of Social Affairs Astrid Krag noted: “The government’s attitude toward the [female] foreign fighters has not changed. They are in every way undesirable in Denmark, but it would be appropriate to evacuate three women with Danish citizenship and their children.” A remaining five Danish children would be offered the option to repatriate but without their mothers, whose citizenship was revoked. The government intended to prosecute the women and provide the children with state-supported social services for their well-being. Denmark anticipated that as soon as the women landed on Danish soil, they would be arrested, prosecuted according to the terrorism regulations, and remanded into custody.⁵

The Danish case encapsulates the typical attitude of Western countries toward repatriating women and children from al-Hol and al-Roj. The United Kingdom, like several other European states, pursued a policy of stripping citizenship from dual-national ISIS recruits—despite the US government urging countries to take their citizens back.⁶ Countries’ reactions have varied from accepting dozens of women and children (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kosovo) to refusing to let any residents or dual citizens return.

Most of the women who survived the onslaught and ISIS’s retreat to Baghouz in 2018 became “guests” of the Kurdish Defense Forces in the SDF-run camps. As the security situation in the camps deteriorated over time, foreign-born ISIS women and children experienced increasing uncertainty about how long the Kurds would be willing to keep them.⁷ If the Kurds decided to shut down the camps, there was a risk that the women might return to their countries of origin under the radar on their own. For Denmark, getting in front of the situation and establishing a process for the women and children to return was better than the alternative of letting the situation play out in an ad hoc manner.

The repatriation of returnees from ISIS-held territory has been fraught. Samantha Sally Elhassani returned to the United States in July 2018 in a military transport and pleaded guilty to providing material and financial support to ISIS. She was sentenced to six and a half years in prison.⁸ The US attorney for Indiana, Thomas Kirsch, charged that Sally had traveled to Hong Kong several times to deposit more than $30,000 in cash and gold in a safe-deposit box and from there went to Syria with her husband, Moussa, and brother-in-law Abdul Hadi to join ISIS. In doing so, she had put the lives of her children at risk.⁹ Sally had changed her story several times, initially claiming that she had been tricked by her husband, who had told her they were going to Morocco with a long layover in Turkey (for a cheaper flight), then arguing that she had only begrudgingly followed Moussa to Syria. The government charged that Sally was being prosecuted for her own actions and for endangering her children. The question of whether she was telling the truth was explored in the podcast I’m Not a Monster. The conclusion of the investigation into Samantha Sally’s life was that she was intelligent, thrill-seeking, and manipulative, and that one could never determine whether she was telling the truth or not. This skeptical view is also the view of her father, expressed in the podcast.¹⁰

In April 2019, Kosovo became one of the first countries to repatriate a significant group of its nationals voluntarily and publicly—mostly noncombatant minors and women but also some men.¹¹ This proactive repatriation approach was not without challenges. At the same time, it placed Kosovo at the forefront of efforts to rehabilitate and reintegrate women from Syria. Women made up around 15 percent of the foreign fighters from Kosovo, slightly more than the 13 percent average.¹² Some countries have been addressing the challenge of reintegrating women who joined ISIS and returned while others are mired in litigation, or the women are returned under cover of darkness and with no official acknowledgment of their repatriation. Several countries—like Denmark, the UK, and the United States—prevented the women from returning by revoking their passports.¹³ Although there may be some militant and operationally experienced women whom Western governments refused to allow back, the overarching goal should be to allow the women to return, face justice, and keep the number left in the camps to an absolute minimum. Kosovo provides a good template for success. The government repatriated almost all its nationals in 2019. According to a report from the International Republican Institute: “The men were detained at the airport by the police, while the children and women were quarantined at a dedicated reception center where, over the course of three days, they were screened for infectious disease and … [subjected to] psychiatric and psychosocial evaluations.” By August 2020, “three repatriated men and 27 repatriated women had been found guilty and sentenced for terrorism offences by Kosovar courts.”¹⁴

But most Western governments have done the bare minimum in terms of repatriation. It would be better if states did more.¹⁵ Kurdish forces will not keep the foreign fighter families forever, and it is preferable to control who returns, how, and when rather than wait for the Kurds to grow tired of keeping them and release everyone at once. The most obvious challenge of allowing ISIS women to return is the question of public safety and security. Since women joined ISIS for all manner of reasons explored in this book, we cannot assume they are all extremists, nor can we assume they are moderates. Included among the women are some extremely radicalized individuals.

We should also consider the fact that the women were likely traumatized by their experiences under ISIS. They may have wanted to leave but stayed because ISIS killed defectors. Some may have been genuinely disappointed by the reality of involvement that failed to meet their expectations of an Islamic utopia. Lastly, we cannot ignore the reality that a portion of the women were tricked or duped into going to the caliphate. The challenge is in knowing which women belong to which category. Some women and children may potentially remain ISIS supporters. The risks to public safety are salient even if only a very small number of individuals reengage with terrorist organizations in their home country. Even a very small number, if successful, can cause significant damage; dangers arise even if not every returnee is a security threat. We need better metrics and mechanisms to determine the risk of recidivism.

United Nations Security Council Resolution 2396 (2017) recognized the roles played by women as victims, supporters, facilitators, or perpetrators of terrorist acts and encouraged member states to develop comprehensive, tailored, and gender-sensitive prosecution, rehabilitation, and reintegration strategies. Because the systematic collection of gender-disaggregated data is incomplete, it is difficult to track and know with certainty what if any crimes were committed by women living in the so-called caliphate.

But reports have implicated the ISIS women in the trafficking of Yezidis. In one analysis of the Yezidi genocide, a survivor stated:

Foreign members [of ISIS] and so-called “Brides” willingly travelled to join Islamic State’s “Caliphate” after the genocide, and after enslavement of Yazidi women and children was already well publicised. They travelled with knowledge of, and in some cases may even have been incentivised by these crimes. Those now in Kurdish detention have shown little to no remorse for the plight of the Yazidis, and few have been pressed on the matter by journalists.¹⁶

Although state responses have varied, up to 8 percent of the 8,202 ISIS returnees had been recorded as female as of July 2018. A dataset compiled by Joana Cook and Gina Vale calculated that across eighty countries from which foreign fighters joined ISIS, women constituted 13 percent (around 4,761) of the total 41,490 who “emigrated.”¹⁷ Of those women who remained in the Islamic State until its final stand in the Baghouz region, many were devout, radicalized, and, to a degree, battle‑hardened. Where governments controlled the return process back to the country of origin, they were better able to manage the returnees, while those who returned independently did so unmonitored and unaccounted for. This explains the Danish government’s decision not to leave the women in the camps indefinitely.

Many countries, however, choose not to acknowledge their citizens’ return. The reasons for this are varied and are motivated by security or intelligence reasons, by political motivations driven by fear of public backlash, and by privacy and safeguarding concerns. When Norway permitted a woman and her children to return, it almost led to the collapse of the government coalition. Moreover, the political costs of a mistake can be very high. The optics of appearing soft on terrorism would be political suicide.

The post-return realities for the women also vary by country. Some of the women are arrested upon arrival, prosecuted, and imprisoned.¹⁸ By contrast, other women can receive de-radicalization and rehabilitation services and some measure of psychosocial and economic support to help them reintegrate. This allows the ISIS women to return to some modicum of normal life. All the women will face social stigma for the time they spent with the Islamic State.¹⁹ According to a UN Counter Terrorism Committee report: “There appears to be a risk of blanket stigmatization of all individuals associated with ISIL, whether as combatants, civilian employees, family members, or merely residents of ISIL-controlled territory. Such stigmatization is reported to have hindered the restoration of trust and social cohesion in areas retaken from ISIL.”²⁰

This is likely why some returnees arrived in secret and without great fanfare. Kazakhstan repatriated 137 to 139 women through its three‑part “Operation Zhusan” between January and May 2019. Upon their return, the Kazakh women were processed at a rehabilitation and reintegration center in Aqtau for a month. During this time they were questioned repeatedly by security services. While at Aqtau the women received medical care and any other services they required. The center employed specially trained psychologists and religious figures who conducted consultations daily. Those cleared by the security services to return to normal life were permitted to move back to their home regions after a few weeks, once they had registered with local law enforcement authorities.²¹ The American equivalent would be parole with probation.

Five Kazakh women who had been through the de-radicalization process were subsequently charged with terrorism‑related offenses.²² This means that no program, no matter how well planned and structured, can guarantee a 100 percent success rate. There have been a handful of instances of recidivism. One woman who repatriated to Indonesia reengaged with an ISIS affiliate and was re-arrested.²³ Many of the women from Southeast Asia were among the most radicalized in the refugee camps, according to interviews conducted by CNN.²⁴ Indonesian women were allegedly the most radicalized compared to the other foreign mujahidat. More research is needed on the differences in levels of radicalization correlated with places of origin.

It is not simply the danger of reengagement that must be reckoned with but the fact that the women have the potential to become involved at multiple levels in terrorist movements in the future. Some of the ISIS women in the camps were arrested for funding terrorism and offering material support before ever leaving al-Hol or al-Roj.²⁵ And as we saw earlier, within the camp annexes there were instances of organized rebellion and violence as extremist women attempted to impose ISIS-style Shari’a law in the camp.²⁶

Because so much of our data about ISIS war crimes comes from ISIS’s own propaganda posted online, there has been insufficient evidence detailing women’s roles in violent crimes. As a result, Western countries have found it difficult to prosecute female returnees. In fact, in the United Kingdom, most “returnees” returned home without sanction.²⁷

With the evolution in evidentiary tactics, some information has included digital material from the women’s social media accounts. This extends to posts that had already been deleted. While the women may have been active as online propagandists and recruiters, proof of their involvement in other activities, including violence on the front lines as executioners, failed or would-be suicide bombers, or members of guerrilla units (inghemasi), was not available because of ISIS’s restrictive gender norms. The handful of analysts arguing that women had frontline roles have failed to provide evidence to substantiate these claims.

Challenges of Rehabilitation

A November 2019 report from the International Crisis Group suggested that Western governments should “accelerate repatriation of their national children and women … [and] recognise the diversity of women’s backgrounds and repatriate those who are unthreatening.”²⁸ We do not know whether programs designed to rehabilitate ISIS returnees will succeed. Years later, it is still difficult to measure their success.

Part of the problem is that changing someone’s heart or mind is very different from changing their behavior. There have been exhaustive multiyear efforts to find an easy fix to the problem of radicalization. Most have failed miserably. We do not know whether programs for countering violent extremism or preventing violent extremism work. There have been some high-profile cases of British men reengaging in violence after having completed de-radicalization programs. On November 29, 2019, five people were stabbed, two fatally, at Fishmongers’ Hall in central London. The attacker, Usman Khan, had been released from prison in 2018 and had completed a program of de-radicalization. In fact, the two people he killed, Jack Merritt and Saskia Jones, had helped organize the de-radicalization event taking place in the hall, hosted by Learning Together, a prisoner education initiative run by Cambridge University.²⁹ Khan attended the event and then went on an attempted killing spree before being shot dead by police.

Because most of the survivors from ISIS are women, there is a need for gender-specific programs to rehabilitate them. This is because women suffer from conflict experiences in ways different from men. War exposes them to widespread and severe violence but also disrupts family and community. Women (and children) exposed to war must contend with significant trauma and loss within a context of disrupted social and community systems, all of which can place undue strain on the developmental process.

Women who emigrated to the Islamic State of their own volition may also suffer PTSD because of their experiences in Syria and Iraq, although the trauma is more layered and complex for those women who had no choice—women whose fathers, husbands, or brothers took them without their explicit consent.³⁰ Even for women who left the conflict zone, challenges have persisted. Their experiences in al-Hol or al-Roj further traumatized them. Conditions in refugee and IDP camps were and still are appalling. Inadequate shelter, overcrowding, unsanitary conditions, and disease are common. Food and drinking water are scarce and of poor quality, resulting in chronic malnutrition and dehydration. As COVID-19 spread, the situation in the camps deteriorated further. In addition, there is a risk of exposure to violence in camps because aid organizations are unable to provide the necessary staffing to keep camps safe, especially in the annex reserved for hardcore ISIS supporters.

The psychological impact of conflict can be devastating, yet it remains poorly understood and under-researched partly because we have viewed these women monolithically as aggressors and not also as victims. The most frequently experienced war traumas by survivors included being forcibly removed from one’s home (98 percent of survivors), witnessing one’s home burned (94 percent), and hiding to protect oneself from rape or death (90 percent). During conflict and afterwards, the women feared starvation (75 percent) or witnessed family members being tortured or experienced torture themselves (75 percent).³¹ Despite some of the women having freely chosen to travel to Syria, their traumatic experiences are no less powerful and long-lasting. The confusion between who is a victim and who is a perpetrator becomes muddied for many of these women, including those who have been refused repatriation. Many of the women who traveled to ISIS territory engaged in crimes. They would have been accessories to ISIS financial crimes perpetrated against Iraqi and Syrian civilians (for example, when ISIS fighters were given Syrians’ homes and possessions), and they provided material support for ISIS torture and executions. They engaged in trafficking of other women and children.³² But we have little actionable evidence of their involvement in terrorism.

One reason why there has been little sympathy for the ISIS women was their role in trafficking Yezidi sex slaves and children. The surviving Yezidis have related horror stories about how the women did not protect them (there was no sense of sisterhood for Yezidi girls among the ISIS women) and about how ISIS wives hated the Yezidis and blamed them for their husbands’ lust and brutality. One Yezidi survivor described the role that an ISIS woman played in her victimization; the depravity was akin to the fictional Handmaid’s Tale, with Arab women preparing the Yezidis to be raped: “An Islamic State member asked his wife and his friend’s wife to help him to rape me. His wife tied my hands and his friend’s wife tied my feet while he took off my clothes in front of them and then they went out, he closed the door and he raped me.”³³

Not just Westerners but Western women were complicit in the most cruelly misogynistic and sexualized crimes against other women and girls. In 2019 a twenty-seven-year-old German woman named Jennifer Wenisch who had joined ISIS was charged with “crimes against humanity” in Munich for abusing her Yezidi slave and the woman’s five-year-old daughter. According to the German court, she was responsible for murder in the death of the child, who had been kidnapped and enslaved alongside her mother. The child was left outside as punishment and died from exposure.³⁴

An article in the ISIS propaganda magazine Dabiq provided extensive justification for slavery (sabaya). This article was allegedly written by a female ISIS member, Umm Samayyah Al-Muhajirah. Umm Samayyah rebuked ISIS supporters who downplayed reports of Yezidi slavery: “I write this while the letters drip of pride. Yes, O religions of kufr altogether, we have indeed raided and captured the kāfirah women, and drove them like sheep by the edge of a sword.”³⁵

According to psychological studies, the wartime experiences of witnessing the rape of others, being raped, or hiding to protect oneself from assault were strong predictors of depression.³⁶ While the ISIS women did practically nothing to help the Yezidi sex slaves or protect them from their husbands, and some women like Samantha Sally actively helped the men rape young girls, these women were also traumatized by the experiences—albeit in different ways. It is difficult to explain how the shades of gray are many and why very little about these women’s roles was defined as good or evil.

To treat ISIS women effectively, culturally sensitive practices need to be implemented. This includes understanding the history of the individual’s country of origin, its cultural norms and traditions. In the case of the internally displaced persons and victims, it is essential to understand their reasons for emigrating in the first place. Since their narratives of distress might be imbued with culturally relevant terminology and symbolism, mental health practitioners from different backgrounds may need to depend on culturally informed caregivers and providers to function as culture brokers and provide insight into trauma exposure and idioms of suffering.

We can look to existing programs in other countries for general parameters for reintegrating women and children who formerly resided in ISIS territory. Kosovo and France offer some interesting contrasts. The number of French women and children who resided in Syria or Iraq is assumed to be around 750. A small proportion of the women and children began to return even before ISIS collapsed. Given their exceptional circumstances, it was appropriate to implement a support system adapted to the women’s and children’s age and circumstances—to consider the necessity of providing support and care upon their return. The reintegration program was based on collective rights, allowing the people operating the programs to marshal the state’s resources and services, to improve coordination across the local departmental councils for youth protection, and to be responsible for the support and care of the children. Most of all, French social services needed to amalgamate the existing legal devices to ensure that the mothers and minor children received support that addressed their specific situation. Public attitudes about reintegration in Kosovo diverged greatly from those in France. According to a survey from 2019, 53 percent of Kosovar respondents were unwilling to accept returning foreign fighters from Syria in their communities, but only 30 percent were opposed to returning women and children. In France, by contrast, a 2019 survey found that 89 percent of respondents opposed the return of adults, while 67 percent also opposed the return of children from Syria and Iraq.³⁷

Kristen Kao and Mara Revkin explored the attitudes of Iraqis regarding reintegration. On the basis of several years of survey and field research, they found that while direct exposure to violence was associated with a greater desire for revenge, the type of collaboration an individual had engaged in determined respondents’ preferences for punishment as opposed to forgiveness. In addition, women who had been employed by the Islamic State felt less welcomed by their communities than men. Widows of ISIS fighters, according to Kao and Revkin, “reported that they would rather remain indefinitely in camps for internally displaced persons because they fear for their safety and that of their children if they return to their former hometowns. For example, ‘Laila,’ whose brother’s house was attacked with grenades as a result of the family’s ties to IS, said, ‘I am afraid that if I return, my neighbors would kill me in my sleep.’ ”³⁸

Reintegration: Trauma Systems Therapy

The psychiatrist Stevan Weine has helped countries around the world, including the United States, reintegrate women and children formerly associated with ISIS. In his estimation there are three approaches that should be deemed part of a continuum. For Weine, the primary goal is prevention. This involves changing social norms and values at the grassroots level. This is followed by secondary prevention, in which civil society or state-level social services coordinate to prevent women and children from going in the first place. He suggests the creation of hotlines for parents who are concerned about possible radicalization. Other suggestions include creating off-ramps so that people starting along the pathway to radicalization (or, in this case, reengagement) have alternatives and options. Ultimately, Weine considers rehabilitation and reintegration to be a tertiary strategy in that reintegration for returnees is necessary when the first two strategies have already failed.³⁹

One possible success story involves Matthew, the son of ISIS bride Samantha Sally. In 2017, at age ten Matthew appeared in an ISIS propaganda video as “Yusuf” threatening to kill President Donald Trump. In the video, Matthew recited a prepared statement: “My message to Trump, the puppet of the Jews: Allah promised us victory, promised you defeat… . This battle is not gonna end in Raqqa or Mosul. It’s gonna end in you lands… . My father’s an American soldier who fought the mujahideen in Iraq.”⁴⁰

Matthew was repatriated in 2018 by the US military and was living, reintegrated, with his biological father. Matthew’s experiences as an ISIS survivor lend credibility to the argument I made in Small Arms that the women and children who were in ISIS are salvageable and should be repatriated to their countries of origin, where they should face justice and the children be given a chance at a happy and normal life.⁴¹

Experts in psychosocial treatment for wartime trauma recommend a multidisciplinary approach to address the returnees’ interrelated needs across multiple domains of development. It becomes crucial to reduce the environmental stressors and threat signals. This is where it becomes necessary to ensure that communities understand what is involved in taking the women back. The worst-case scenario is what I have discussed in this book regarding the Boko Haram captives who returned home only to be shunned and ran away to rejoin their Boko “husbands” in the Sambisa Forest.