Iraq seeks to rehabilitate Islamic State families
Baghdad’s program to allow families of Islamic State adherents to return from a Syrian camp and to reintegrate them back into Iraqi society stirs controversy.
The Iraqi government decided June 6 to accept the return of 100 Islamic State (IS) families. The returnees are transferred to Al-Jada camp in Mosul from the al-Hol camp in northern Syria, which is home to about 30,000 Iraqi refugees.
These returnees are mostly children and adolescents who are not recognized by any state as they have no official civil status documents, which prevents them from entering schools and practicing their normal lives. Many also are mothers. Meanwhile, many Iraqi residents refuse to welcome back IS families. This has caused mutual retaliation and prevented the settlement of these families directly in their areas of origin.
The return of these families to Iraq also faced rejection at the official level. A Yazidi member of the Iraqi parliament, Vian Dakhil, called on the Iraqi government May 28 to “prevent the passage of IS convoys through Sinjar out of respect for the Yazidi victims.”
But the undersecretary of the Iraqi Ministry of Immigration and Displacement, Karim al-Nuri, told Al-Monitor, “The return of IS families was well planned. It involves a rehabilitation program based on educational academic curriculum, especially for young people. The program aims to entrench in the returnees the values of tolerance, mercy, peaceful coexistence with others, and acceptance of differences in opinions and beliefs.”
