Risky integration: Germany brings back ISIS women and children

Nahla Abdel Moneim

In light of fears of a risky return, Germany announced on December 20 that it had received ISIS brides and their children, after years of government rejection of this measure, in anticipation of the extremist ideological background that they may return to as a result of the psychological and behavioral distortion they suffered.

Returnees to Germany

Deutsche Welle quoted Foreign Minister Heiko Maas as saying that his country has returned five ISIS brides and 18 children, including seven orphans, from detention camps run by Kurdish forces in northeastern Syria, indicating that the returnees represent humanitarian cases, especially orphans and the sick. From his point of view, there was an urgent need to take them back.

Maas expressed his happiness at the return of the children and their mothers before Christmas, adding that this case demonstrates the government’s ability to restore more numbers during the next stage, pointing out that the return process was carried out in cooperation with Finland, which returned six children and two women to its lands. He thanked the government, stressing that the mission was precarious and that there was much preparation.

Media reports issued by the Federal Prosecutor’s Office indicated that one of the three women returning to Germany, Leonor, aged 21, was arrested upon her arrival at Frankfurt Airport on charges of belonging to a terrorist group, while the reports did not mention any information about the fate of the two returning women, Merv, a 24-year-old resident of Hamburg, and Jasmine, who lives in Bonn, while the German network reported that the Syrian camps still have 70 German adults as well as 150 children.

Security threat

The recent recruitment of German women and their children, despite the limited number, is a shift in the file, as the country refused for years to receive any of them until it was forced in May 2019 to reconsider with a court decision that the children should be returned after a lawsuit filed by grandparents to restore their grandchildren in the Syrian camps.

The German authorities indicate that about 1,060 citizens had left the country to join the ranks of ISIS, and so far only a third of them have returned. The authorities believe that 100 of them have directly participated in hostilities and taken up arms, and therefore many of them were classified as dangerous according to a scale designed by the Ministry of Interior to determine the extent of the extremists’ danger to domestic security through criteria related to their participation in terrorist acts, joining groups, training in weapons, or manufacturing explosives, and other risk factors.

In Germany, Angela Merkel was refusing to bring them in after the seriousness indicated by the security reports about their behavior, and that many of them did not leave the extremist ideology.

Germany remains in front of the litigation and trial problem. In light of the politicians’ demands to arrest all returnees and classify them as dangerous agents, the German judiciary cannot prosecute many of them because it needs clear evidence to judge them, and thus the chances of their integration into society remain fraught with risks. In 2018, the intelligence services warned of the return of children due to what they were exposed to of acts of violence that will affect them in the future.