Iraqi authorities are holding more than 1,400 foreign relatives of suspected Islamic State militants in camps in the north of the country, Reuters reports.
Security officials and charity workers told the news agency that wives and children of suspected IS fighters are being held at a camp south of the city of Mosul, which was liberated by Iraqi forces at the end of August.
Army Colonel Ahmed al-Taie, from Mosul’s Nineveh operation command, confirmed: “We are holding the Daesh [IS] families under tight security measures and waiting for government orders on how to deal with them.
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“We treat them well. They are families of tough criminals who killed innocents in cold blood, but when we interrogated them we discovered that almost all of them were misled by vicious [IS] propaganda.”
The Norwegian Refugee Council, which is providing assistance at the camp, says the families are in “de facto detention” and urged the government to “swiftly move to clarify its future plans for these individuals”.
Iraqi army officers said many of the women and children no longer have their original documents, and were of as many as 14 different nationalities. A number come from Turkey, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan and Russia, along with a “very few” from France and Germany.
Senior security officials said the authorities are trying to find a safe place to house the families while negotiating with embassies for their return home, but that in the meantime they are not allowed to leave the camp.
Aid workers and the Iraqi authorities are worried about tensions between Iraqis who lost their homes, who are also living in the camp, and the new arrivals, “with many Iraqis wanting revenge for the hard treatment they received under IS’s interpretation of Sunni Islam”, says Al Jazeera.
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