Two or three times a year, I’ll head to Iraq to get a sense of where political and social debates might be heading. Whenever I go, I go commercial rather than insulate myself in the bubble of the military or the U.S. Embassy. It was during one of these trips, back in October 2017, when I noted Iraqi authorities were beginning to complain not only about the problem of captured Islamic State foreign fighters who professed remorse in the hope of returning to the United States or Europe but also about their babies. At the time, I wrote in the New York Post:
The fate of captured Islamic State fighters or immigrants has now once again hit the headlines. The Trump administration, for example, is refusing to allow an Alabama woman who joined the Islamic State to return to the United States. British authorities have likewise stripped citizenship from a woman who joined the radical group.
Many of these would-be returnees express remorse for their actions or deny that they played a lethal role for ISIS. None of this should matter: They joined a group dedicated to the destruction of their home societies and whether or not they directly killed someone is irrelevant. Terrorism extends not only to the triggerman but to the entire support network, just as culpability for murder involves all those involved in the conspiracy to commit murder.
Rather than waste forgiveness upon those who had a chance for a better life in a democratic society and turned their back upon it, any charity and generosity should be applied instead to the ISIS babies. It is unfair both to Iraq and Syria for these resource-strapped governments to be responsible for the children of those who illegally entered Syria or Iraq, especially when the fathers, too, were neither Syrian nor Iraqi. Indeed, authorities in Baghdad are correct to argue that Western countries have a responsibility for the misdeeds of their citizens.
Should the ISIS babies remain in Iraq and Syria, their lives will be miserable. In some cases, both their parents are dead or have fled. In others, their surviving parents may face the death penalty or extended prison sentences for their crimes. Either way, they will have no family legacies and will suffer under the stigma of their parents’ crimes.
With Russia and many other countries banning or discouraging adoptions, perhaps it is time for American and Europeans unable to bear their own children who seek to establish families to rescue the children of ISIS. If their birth parents are dead, there should be no impediment. Even if their birth mothers are alive but facing life in prison, foster statutes should apply just as they would in the West. Even if there is no imminent adoption, such children should return to the countries in which their parents once held citizenship: Life in a French, German, or Australian orphanage would provide greater opportunities than life in an Iraqi or Syrian facility, especially since neither Baghdad nor Damascus now have the resources to fulfill such children’s basic needs.
It would be profoundly immoral to let ISIS volunteers reinvent themselves, even though journalists’ desire for a compelling human interest story may allow them to try. Rescuing the children of ISIS, however, should be a cause worth embracing.
Michael Rubin (@Mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a former Pentagon official.
