In October, a 16-year-old boy in Russia was fatally shot after he wounded a policeman while trying to set several police cars on fire. It wasn’t his family’s first brush with the law. In 2001, his stepfather had was convicted to 14 years in prison for terrorism after he attempted to explode a gas pipeline, likely as part of an Islamist organization. The incident added new urgency to the question of what to do with the tens of thousands of children of Islamic State affiliates still in camps and prisons in Iraq and Syria. Almost everyone involved in repatriation issues, though, is busy using the children—already victims of violence and instability—to advance their own agendas.
In October, several Western governments, including Sweden and Germany, sent delegations to camps in Syria to speak to incarcerated nationals about whether they wanted to repatriate their children. None the women they spoke to agreed. On their social media accounts and in Telegram channels, many of them said that they made their decisions for their children’s own well-being—the kids needed to be close to their mothers. But in private, they added their concern that allowing the children to be repatriated meant their government would forget about the mothers themselves and leave them in the camps
