Should ISIS brides and children return to their home nations?

While the so-called Islamic State has been ousted from the territory once called its caliphate in northeast Syria, how firmly it remains dug into the minds of its former followers, especially those followers who crossed the world to join, remains a concern for many.

Concentrated in camps of northeast Syria not far form the Turkish and Iraqi borders, the former citizens of the ISIS state include men, women, and children. Fenced off from from the rest by their Kurdish keepers are hundreds of foreign women and children who were once inhabitants of the aspirant state and are now left adrift. Many are weighing a return to their countries of origin in the West.

But in doing so, they raise a host of issues for their native lands. Those include whether and how to reintegrate adults, who at least for a time were steeped in ISIS’s anti-Western dogma, and what to do with their children, most of whom are too young to even understand the political obstacles keeping them in a camp where

‘Everyone despises them equally’The argument for bringing them homeThe limits of disengagement