UNO center will study how to bring home American wives, children of Islamic State fighters

Vivianne Reis — Mon, 30 Nov 2020 03:00:00 +0000

The 2019 collapse of the Islamic State caliphate, which once controlled vast swaths of Iraq and Syria, left tens of thousands of women and children — the families of dead or missing Islamic State fighters — languishing in refugee camps.

About 300 are Americans. Just 12 adults and 16 children have so far returned to the U.S.

A team of researchers with a counterterrorism center at the University of Nebraska at Omaha has received a two-year, $352,000 grant to study how best to bring home these American family members of former jihadists.

The grant, from the Department of Homeland Security, will allow the team to come up with a set of “best practices” for repatriating the women and children from the squalid desert camps, said Austin Doctor, a political science professor with UNO’s National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology and Education Center.

Doctor said at least 60,000 people live in the largest of these camps, al-Hol, alone, including 12,000 foreigners. Some of the adults remain Islamic State sympathizers.

“The camps are already bursting at the seams,” he said.

Doctor acknowledged that it might seem tempting to just forget about the Americans in the camps, considering the ruthless war of kidnapping, rape and murder waged by the Islamic State in the territory it controlled for much of the 2010s.

Women walk in the al-Hol camp, which houses some 60,000 refugees, including families and supporters of the Islamic State group, in Hasakeh province in Syria in May.

But many of the refugees have themselves been the victims of terror and trauma.

“Particularly when we’re talking about children, it’s important to remember that they weren’t volunteers,” he said. “We risk creating a new generation of terrorist fighters.”

Last week, BuzzFeed News reported on the case of 8-year-old Aminah Bradley, the orphan daughter of a Tennessee woman, Ariel Bradley, and an Iraqi man from Sweden.

The couple met online and traveled to the Middle East in early 2014, settling within the Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliphate, when Aminah was only a year old, according to BuzzFeed.

Her father joined the fight but was killed in battle. Her mother and little brother died, too, in an aerial bombardment. Ariel Bradley’s second husband was also killed.

“I only know that my mom died, and my dad died,” the girl said, according to a report in the Daily Beast. The article said Aminah had been rescued through the efforts of a former U.S. diplomat and a Canadian woman living in the refugee camp.

“We’re looking at children, people who should be viewed as victims,” Doctor said.

Doctor will lead a team that also includes two researchers from the George Washington University Program on Extremism and one from the International Centre on Counter-Terrorism in The Hague, Netherlands.

A fifth researcher, Omar Mohammed, is a historian and researcher from Mosul, Iraq, who wrote a blog while his home city was occupied by the Islamic State. He is now living in exile in Europe.

Doctor said members of the team will travel to Iraq to interview the people who are lending humanitarian assistance to refugees in the camps, and to the Netherlands to talk with leaders of a pioneering program that has repatriated some Europeans from the camps.

He said they will also interview groups in Nebraska that have helped international refugees adapt to the U.S., and others who have helped juvenile offenders return to society after they’ve been incarcerated.

“I’m excited about the Nebraska element,” Doctor said.

The team also will develop a curriculum for training the workers who will help those resettling from the camps.

“It’s really important that we do this right,” he said.

Source: The Daily Nonpareil

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UNO center will study how to bring home American wives, children of Islamic State fighters