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.