ISIS’s European children: Humanitarian crisis baffles the Old Continent

Ahmed Lamloum

ISIS’s illusions and propaganda attracted elements from around the world during the height of its rise in 2014, and those deluded people left their homelands to move to areas controlled by the terrorist organization in Syria and Iraq.

Over time, these people married other ISIS members like them, and they had children who were forcibly taken out of Syria after the terrorist organization was defeated by Syrian forces and US-backed Kurds.

Crisis in Germany

Speaking to Deutsche Welle, Danisch Farooqi remembered his last conversation with his wife in the summer of 2014. He received a phone call from her telling him that she had taken their daughter Aaliya to Turkey. Farooqi tried to travel there and bring them back to Germany again, but within days his daughter was in Syria and her mother was married to an ISIS operative. Farooqi said he does not even know what his daughter has gone through and seen in recent years.

The defeat of ISIS has displaced thousands of its members and their families who came to Syria with them, including Aaliya, now 8 years old. They are possibly in Kurdish-run camps in northern Syria, but the German government fears repatriating German ISIS members.

Farooqi organized a public protest with some families sharing the same crisis in front of the German Foreign Ministry in Berlin last month, demanding that the German government make more efforts to return displaced children in Syria. The protesters carried banners bearing pictures of their daughters, sons and grandchildren.

German Foreign Ministry’s response

In a statement issued by the German Foreign Ministry recently on the crisis, it said that it is almost impossible to help any of them, citing the closure of the German embassy in Damascus, meaning it is still almost impossible to obtain any consular assistance.

“Syria has long been on the lists of countries that are strongly warned against traveling to. The federal government, in consultation with its partners, is considering options to enable German citizens and children in the first place, even in humanitarian cases, to return to Germany,” the Foreign Ministry statement added.

There are political parties in Germany and in Europe in general opposed to the return of these children in Syria because they believe they hold the ideology of their parents and spouses. This poses a threat to the security of Europe, as thousands of men and women from across Europe have joined ISIS.

Confused Europe

The issue of how to deal with ISIS returnees is a major dilemma in France, Britain and other European countries. For ISIS members captured in Iraq, there is already a judicial system in place to deal with and prosecute them as members of a terrorist organization.

But in Syrian territory controlled by Kurdish forces, there is no recognized judicial system to prosecute ISIS operatives. In January, a WHO report said 29 children died in the camps, mainly because of hypothermia and overcrowding, as well as a shortage of food, medicine and sanitation facilities.