The women of IS: Part three

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1:23At the end of February, the Syrian government announced the closure of the notorious Al-Hol camp that for seven years held families of the Islamic State group. It was just weeks after it took control of the camp from the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces. A video circulated showing the camp being empty, with parts of it engulfed in flames. A fraught chapter had come to an end. The next one is wrapped in darkness. What happened exactly no one knows because we didn't have any access there. The situation was chaotic. There was a call for IS sympathisers in Syria to take their cars or motorbikes and head to Valhul camp to help transport these women as well as to shelter them in their houses.

2:19There is lack of clarity over how many people were relocated, how many people fled. The international community was so keen to make sure that they don't leave the camp, and yet they just left in a very abrupt, sudden, chaotic, transitional phase. And we don't know where they are. In the final episode of this series, we take stock of how the recent power shift in Syria has thrown this geopolitical jigsaw into the air. We ask what happens to the detainees once they return home? How countries handle justice for the perpetrators and rehabilitation for the victims. And where could those fugitives be hiding?

3:09Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service. I'm Krassi Ivanova-Twig and this is the Global Jigsaw from BBC Monitoring, where we look at the world through the lens of its media, exploring the narratives, the propaganda and the disinformation.

3:40The difficulty in distinguishing victims from perpetrators created a balancing act for quite a few governments between security concerns and duty of care. For many IS-linked women, going home was far from the end of their ordeal. Let's take a look at Russia with our regional expert Claire Denning. There have been trials of women and sometimes there have been also criticisms of the evidence used against them in those trials.

4:18But the law was not applied even-handedly across different republics of Russia. A lot of women were just immediately sent to detention centres in Moscow, and some women were then under house arrest. There wasn't really a standardised approach, and the legal consequences of having been involved in IS are not consistent. Some of the women who were repatriated in 2017 and to Chechnya, they could live a fairly normal life. But that was by far the minority. And the majority of women who came back were placed in detention. Their children were taken away from them and sent to grandparents or relatives.

5:02And they were convicted on charges such as providing financial support for terrorist activity. A lot of them are still in prison. One striking case lays bare the injustices many women faced upon their return. A woman called Leila Gatagajeva was taken to IS by her mother and father when she was 12. And she was taken to Syria. She was married off at 13. At 14, she had a child. At 15, she had a child. then her husband died and she ended up in a Syrian camp. She escaped and then she handed herself in to the Iraqi authorities and still being a minor she got a five and a half year sentence there. Her two children were repatriated back to Russia and then she was repatriated after her whole sentence but when she arrived back to Russia she was put in prison again and convicted on charges of basically feeding and in some cases giving money to IS.

6:09The last that I heard of her was in 2024 and she's basically been in and out of detention centres and house arrest. In Russia, even showing sympathy towards anyone linked in any way to the Islamic State group is fraught with danger. Two female creatives paid a heavy price for shining a light on the reasons some women choose to join the group? In 2020, a play was premiered in Moscow called Finist Yasni Sokol, or Finist the Bright Falcon, based on the real sentences and interrogation reports of women who were repatriated from Iraq and Syria. It offers a nuanced look into the motivations of these women to join IS, their experiences whilst they were in Iraq and Syria, and then their experiences upon return home, and in particular, it zooms in on these moments inside the courtroom where they were being questioned for their actions.

7:23There was a lot of controversy. A far-right news outlet reporting that it was an instrument of information warfare against the Russian state, that it justified terrorism. You had other outlets saying that it was empathising with these women and also their frustrations with Russian men, which was part of the story of why they had been kind of lured into joining IS, according to the play.

7:57So there was massive uproar about a negative portrayal of Russian men. And there was a St. Petersburg outlet that described the show as having shown signs of radical feminism. So at the same time, you had critics claiming that the play was in support of IS and radically feminist, which are two things I don't think go together. But the ramifications of this social critique were grave. Directors Genia Berković and Svetlana Petrchuk were sentenced to six years in prison in 2024 on charges of justifying terrorism.

8:49In contrast, some countries in Central Asia stood out with a more humanitarian approach to repatriations, as we saw in our previous episode. So what actually happens to the women once they return home? Bryn Windsor from our Russia team has been following their progress. They would undergo medical treatment, they had consultations with psychologists, they spoke to religious specialists, there was temporary schooling for a lot of the children.

9:19There was a lot of bureaucratic work to be done because these children, they didn't have any birth certificates. And then gradually they were reintegrated into the community. In the case of Kazakhstan, they would have social workers monitoring, they were provided grants to help them reintegrate. Uzbekistan followed a similar program. Their program was called Operation Mer, which in Uzbek means compassion, love, kindness. And they reportedly returned about 530 individuals, again, mostly women and children. In the case of Tajikistan, there's a little less visibility. There were cases where the security screening led a lot of women to be actually redirected into the penal system and they were charged on extremist and kind of religious violence related charges.

10:06But I would stress at least in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, they were a minority compared to the people who were reintegrated into the community. A BBC investigation found that around nine out of ten women returning to Kyrgyzstan were put under investigation by the authorities.

10:25Central Asian governments are acutely security conscious for a reason. The region sits in the bullseye of the Islamic State group. Barry Marston is one of our jihadist media watchers. It's been very striking with developments in eastern Syria over the last month, the amount of propaganda and chatter we see from Central Asian sources, a vast amount. In a sense, often it eclipsed the amount that was going on in the Arabic social media sphere. Clearly very well connected with these camps, calls for fundraising, calls for mobilisation, calls to take action. Clearly, there is still a very substantial central Asian nexus, which just shows how relevant that part of the world was to what happened with the Islamic State, but continues to be relevant when it comes to jihad trends.

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12:28You are listening to the documentary from the BBC World Service. We'll now take you to the birthplace of the Islamic State group, Iraq. Before we explore what justice looks like there today, it's important to understand how Iraqis remember the years of IS rule. Mohamed Al-Jumaili, our Iraq expert, takes us through a few moments of collective trauma. Firstly, the Spiker massacre, the massacre of 1 ,700 young cadets, most of whom were Shia. In Spiker camp, these cadets were rounded up and brutally killed. Of course, the genocidal campaign against the Yazidis is also a key flashpoint during IS's campaign, where thousands of Yazidis were killed, thousands were taken as captives, and hundreds of thousands were displaced.

13:18Also, many Iraqi Sunni tribes in Anbar and in Nainawa, they suffered greatly at the hands of Ayas. Many of them were massacred and a Nimer tribe faced the brutality of Ayas. The capture of Mosul and Ayas turning it into the capital of its caliphate, the oppression that many people in Mosul faced, their rights were denied, summary executions in Mosul, Brutal punishments handed out to people who were deemed to be apostates. Non-Muslims were driven out and were taken in captivity as well in Christian communities. A number of historical landmarks were destroyed. Iraq has recently made major moves to bring its IS-linked families home.

14:03In addition, US forces have transferred more than 5 ,000 Islamic State group prisoners to Iraq. Human Rights Watch condemned the move, citing the risk of unfair trials, torture, and the ease with which the death penalty is handed down there. So the fighters transferred straight away to prison facilities far away from the Syrian border. That's where they would be tried and prosecuted. And they are generally sentenced to death and also many of them to life imprisonment. The women linked to IS too find little mercy. Asma Fauzi Mohammed Al-Kubaisi, the former wife of IS leader Al-Baghdadi, was sentenced to death.

14:46The less clear-cut cases are directed through the state rehabilitation system. Now for women and children, they're transferred to Amal Rehabilitation Centre, so that's near Mosul, where they kind of undergo extensive security screening to see if they've been involved in any IS-linked activities. and they also receive counselling, psychological support, skills training. The children receive education. It's limited, but it exists and it's a process that takes several months. Some of them stayed for up to a year. Women who have no real links with IS and hundreds have gone through the camp already and have been integrated into society.

15:26Iraqis were the largest contingent in the Syrian camps. Tens of thousands faced being repatriated, a task of enormous proportions and sensitivities. Reintegrating into local communities is a massive challenge because the Iraqi government, they distinguish between IS fighters and families of IS. On a societal level, especially for these communities who've suffered directly at the hands of ISIS, they see all of them as pretty much the same. They're all Da 'ashi, they're all IS. Sometimes they face isolation, they face ostracization. the memories of IS is still very raw for many Iraqis. Even victims, if they have that tag of IS families, there is a stigma around that.

16:12How is Baghdad trying to deal with it? There has been efforts by the Iraqi government where they bring in tribal leaders to try to facilitate that kind of reconciliation between these families and their tribes. Similar attempts at reintegration have been launched in Syria too. Mina Alami from our jihadist media team has been across them. So far there have been many cases of Syrian women and children who have been sent back to their communities and there was a certain legal process at the time and it was in mediation with the tribes and I think some of the tribes were the guarantors. Some of these women were reluctant to go back for fear of retribution.

16:56They were concerned about any kind of revenge attacks or retaliation. So some opted to stay.

17:06Thousands of Yazidi women and girls were kidnapped, trafficked, abused and forced to give birth. And once out of Al-Hol and Al-Rosh camps, they faced new challenges in trying to reunite with their own families back home. We heard a striking example of this in our previous episode. Mohammed now spells out the difficulties faced by Yazidi women whose children have fathers from the Islamic State group. Even if they are transferred into Iraq and Kurdistan, there are challenges about the legal status of those children and also as well as societal pressures. In Iraq, generally, the religious identification of children is patrilineal.

17:49So if the father is Muslim, if the father is Yazidi, they'll be classified as Yazidi or Muslim. So some of these children are not even recognised legally as Yazidi, which has its own legal implications. People speak about cases where Yazidis with children are pretty much told, you can come back into society, but you cannot come back with this child. They see this child as a remnant of IS fighters. And so tragically, they have to choose between reintegration or being with their child. So what is the solution for these mothers? The Iraq-Kharistan government, they have a specialised department for Yazidi survivors.

18:27They qualify for financial support and rehabilitation support. But many survivors have talked about how the support is often uneven, not enough, and that unfortunately a lot of these Yazidis find that their homes and their towns are still destroyed. So they're put back into displacement camps in Iraq. And that's not even to mention the severe trauma that these Yazidi women and children have faced. So unfortunately, the reality is that even after captivity, the suffering of these Yazidi captives carries on. It seems that Iraq's uncompromising approach towards the fighters of the Islamic State group is reinforced by strong views in society towards anyone connected with the group.

19:13like this woman who runs an orphanage for IS children. IS has left behind annihilation and the death of innocents. Where is the justice for all those innocents? I think that each and every one of IS people need to be sentenced to death. There is no real push to essentially rehabilitate these fighters. There is obviously a lot of anger in Iraq and that's what drives this kind of policy. The sentences handed out to IS prisoners are far more severe. The Iraqi government likes to publicize when it captures and puts on trial IS fighters. And often on TV, you see these confessions.

19:56It's kind of a way for the Iraqi government to show how we're handling this situation and we're giving them what they deserve. The recent developments in Syria and the use of transfer of IS prisoners, that has been treated with a bit of alarm, actually, in Iraqi media. and they're just worried that they're bringing in this security threat into their borders. So the focus is very much through that lens.

20:22So what's the sweetener for Iraq for taking back these dangerous individuals? The US trusts Iraq with these prisoners. It's a sign that Iraq is a reliable partner in terms of countering IS. So for them, I guess you can call it prestige. Iraq wanting to establish itself as a leading partner. And of course, the US will continue to provide support financially for these transfers. But I think for Iraq, they're driven more by the fear of the other side.

20:55Iraq doesn't trust the Syrian government to be able to manage these prisons effectively. As we saw last month, there were cases of ISIS militants escaping from prisons. that poses a far greater security threat to Iraq than actually bringing them in and controlling them themselves. In the eyes of the Islamic State group, the move of their detained fighters to Iraq has been highly undesirable. And that has clearly come across in the jihadist chatter. You can see IS and its supporters being very nervous about that because once they're in prison in Iraq, it's much harder to free them because relatively Iraq is a stable country currently and it's more difficult to infiltrate or to raid the prisons in Iraq than it is to do so in Syria.

21:40We've seen a very steep decline in Islamic State activity in Iraq over the last two years. In Syria, we've seen a similar decline, but to a lesser extent. There were dozens of attacks last year, over 100, I believe, But they haven't been able to capitalise on the changes in Syria in a way that they might have liked to. But they still remain a very distinct threat. Because the current government have been so willing to try and reach out to the West, they've joined the coalition against the Islamic State. In a sense, that is a gift for Islamic State propaganda in saying that this government has sold out.

22:25And the question is whether that propaganda in the long term is sufficiently successful for IS to replenish its ranks.

22:37You are listening to The Global Jigsaw from BBC Monitoring. And what happened in the last few weeks in Syria might well have played into jihadist hands. The handover of the Al-Hol camp from the SDF to the government of Ahmed al-Shara created a chaotic situation. Analysts are still trying to piece together what exactly happened in the aftermath. There was a brief window between when SDF withdrew and the government forces went in, when the camps were left, it seemed, with minimal supervision. And during that time, there were reports of some women who escaped the camps, including foreign women. After that, the Syrian government took over.

23:25No one seems to know exactly how many people escaped. The BBC World Service indicated the numbers could be high. World News from the BBC. The Syrian authorities have confirmed that thousands of women and children related to suspected Islamic State fighters escaped from a camp last month. Samia Khosni from our Middle East team has been making sense of these events through official statements and reporting in the Syrian media. Since the handover of the camp on the 21st of January, we've seen a lot of things happening. Things that accelerated the closure and the emptying of the camp. First of all, the Syrian government and the Kurdish-led forces traded blame.

24:17Syrian government said the Kurdish forces left the camp just six hours before the Syrian army arrived. The Kurds responded, dismissing these claims and saying that they were forced to leave, actually, because of direct attacks by factions linked to the government. and also accusations that the government has not been able to manage Al-Hol camp after the takeover. There is lack of clarity over how many people were relocated, how many people fled. In the chaos of the transition, the Islamic State group pounced on the opportunity to be seen doing what it has been promising for years, to free the women and children of Al-Hol.

25:08Initially, it was the high profile supporters online who were mobilizing support for the women. They said many foreign women had escaped. So there was a call for IS sympathizers in Syria to take their cars or motorbikes and head to the vicinity of Al-Hol camp to help transport these women and as well as to shelter them in their houses. and Ayas tried to invoke notions of Arab chivalry, of tribal code of honour, of the religious duty in the call for mobilisation. Ayas said dying at the gates of Al-Hol is more honourable than any kind of death. You have to sacrifice your lives to save and rescue the women.

25:51We've seen accounts on Facebook, on Instagram, on Telegram of women claiming to have been detainees at Al Hol Camp, who they say, please send us help, send support. There has been a lot of advice by very influential IS supporters online, how to blend in, how to keep a low profile. If you have a foreign accent, what do you tell people? Also, if you pass a checkpoint and you don't have identification, ID papers, what do you say? telling children not to repeat any IS slogans or make any threatening gestures. Online, it's been really busy with that practical advice, in addition to ongoing calls for donations.

26:36Life on the outside can be hostile when you are on the run. We've seen reports that some families left the camp only to return a short while later. But a few weeks after taking Al-Hol, the Syrian authorities moved the remaining residents to a new location.

26:57The government says that it has a school, public services, a health centre, and it promised to protect women and children and the elderly released from a whole and to provide humanitarian and psychological support. And is this a detention centre or is it more like a camp for displaced people? They call it a humanitarian centre. I don't think that people are detained there. There is lack of clarity over so-called rehabilitation programmes, a lack of transparency. The authorities didn't provide enough information about what will happen.