Following the fall of the last Daesh* strongholds in Syria and Iraq, some militants from Europe, their wives, and children are trying to find ways to get back home. This has become a problem for authorities in the countries they came from, who are now struggling to find a way to deal with returnees and their families.
According to the German Foreign Ministry, the country's government has brought back the first children of German Daesh* followers from Iraq. According to the German news agency DPA, several underage children have been brought back and placed with relatives. The German government announced that it is going to bring these children, sometimes referred to “cubs of the caliphate”, to their parents' home country at the end of 2017.
The Foreign Ministry declined to provide any further details on the matter, other than that it was a “high single-digit number” of returned children who had been brought from Iraq.
The most recent group of returnees reportedly includes a woman who fled Syria and landed at Stuttgart airport with her three children. Upon her arrival, she was immediately arrested over allegations of aggravated child abduction, the office of Dusseldorf's attorney general stated. The 32-year-old German woman from Essen, who has been red-flagged as a threat since at least 2017, went to Syria in autumn of 2015 with her three children against the wishes of the father. One of her kids died abroad,…
