There is limited money and resources in the world. What little can be spared should be focused on helping the children of ISIS victims, the Kurds and Zadidis and Christians they massacred and enslaved. The children of ISIS should be sent to Saudi Arabia, Turkey and other fundamentalist Muslim states. They created this mess, let them deal with it. The rest of the world owes them nothing.
25
Why aren’t the “ Pro-Life “ folks marching in the Streets, demanding that these Innocent Children receive proper food, shelter and Medical Care ? Hello ? Anyone ?
10
No, but their ISIS parents do. So until/unless foster care is arranged, I’d guess the children are best served by remaining with their parents (wherever their parents are currently being detained.)
3
I believe that taking the kids back is humane and decent. The parents can rot.
4
Thank you so much Mr. Gilmour for announcing your plan that the UN will fund and run a comprehensive plan to move, house and deprogram thousands of ISIS children. Knowing that you and the UN are in charge is so comforting given your astounding track record. Oops - you didnt say that - didnt think so . . . i mean that would all take some planning and thought and competence, all sorely lacking in Turtle Bay. No thank you, they can stay where they are, yes too bad for them, but it is too late they are too far gone. Just make sure you dont produce any more, that should be the priority.
8
I hear Finland is a great place. Maybe they can be relocated there.
2
Quite so. They should be taken from their violently insane parents and adopted, fostered, or put in orphanages before they are infected with deadly ideologies.
1
The old newsreels from the early 1930s show little Nazis, four or five years old, playing soldier and giving the Heil Hitler salute. Many graduated to the fanatic Hitler Youth and then the SS, and remained unrepentant even long after the war ended. Under no circumstances should these ISIS children be allowed in the U.S. or any other western country.
12
I love children and spent my life teaching them. However, I’ve also learned that children who are raised to hate learn that lesson very early in life. A few months ago, I watched a video of a child of ISIS. He was about three years old. I recall his face—it was full of hatred—with threats of coming after the rest of the world. It truly was one of the scariest videos I have ever seen.
I know this suggestion sounds cruel, but it seems to me that if we are to have any hope of saving these children, they should be separated at birth and raised in vetted, loving families. These women, for the most part, chose their own path. I wish with all my heart that we could rehabilitate them, but my common sense tells me that it will be next to impossible at this time.
24
@JC children as young as three can learn to love! You have no idea what you are talking about. Love a child and they will love you back. Your response to how to deal with these children is extremely cruel and scary!
1
@JC My gracious, a three year old can RELEARN any such lesson and build a foundation based on love if given stability and love. Three is not too late. Even for someone who is 18, it may not be too late.
2
If everyone who is wringing his hands over the fate of those poor kids would agree to adopt at least one,that would not solve the overall problem but would at least insure that at least 1 would have a chance at a decent life in the US or elsewhere in the developed world. 1 can't solve the problem in its entirety, but to improve the chances that 1 of the "gosses"would find out what it is to live decently, that would be something!When I arrived in a city in southern Mexico years ago to enroll as a volunteer in Visions in Action VIA first sight that confronts u is dozens of stray dogs roaming the dusty, merciless streets. "Bien,"1 can't give them all homes but 1 can save at least 1 and return to the States with the pooch which is how, with the help of a local dvm who looked after a stray whom I picked up, Daffodil made it to the US. And the vet, a Dr. Maldonado would would not accept any payment and even drove me to the airport and that is how Daffodil found a home, first in Port Washington and then on banks of the Middle River in Fla.So,saving one child's life is not the overall solution to those kids behind the cages, but like throwing a pebble into the water,and seeing the ripples, one "beau geste"might inspire others to do likewise!
3
@Alexander Harrison
I would happily adopt one.
This child would have to be young enough
not to have been radicalized.
How do I go about this?
3
While children are another matter, the adult prisoners of war are prisoners of war. POWs are interned until the war is over; this is both law and common sense. We didn't let Nazi Germany soldiers free before the war was over, not should we let Islamic State POWs free. If the war takes 10, 20 or 50 years, so be it. The Israel-Arab six days war took - six days; the European Thirty Years War took - thirty years. Let history play itself out before releasing soldiers to return to the battlefields of terror.
10
Saudi Arabia (the Wahhabis) created this mess. The world should put pressure on the Saudis to take total responsibility for cleaning it up.
32
@Nick McConnell
generally speaking, it's not a good idea to put the arsonist in charge of putting out the fire.
5
@Chris @Nick McConnell
Both of you made good points. What if western countries cleaned it up and sent Saudi Arabia the bill?
4
I agree with virtually everything in the article. But here is why it will not happen.
Suppose a John Smith (politician or civil servant) admits one such child and the child commits any crime, John Smith is politically dead, loses his job, etc.
On the other hand, if John Smith refuses to admit such a child and child commits a crime on the level of 9/11, nothing happens to John Smith.
With these incentives, who is going to take the risk!
4
NO NO NO NO NO NO NO.
I do not want the children of ISIS back here in the US.
I DO NOT CARE HOW INNOCENT THEY ARE.
Their mothers and their mother's families will never stop using them as pawns to get back here to the states.
They can go live with their father's families. With their mothers.
If the law allows them back, then the law should be changed to strip their enemy combatant mothers of their citizenship and prevent their enemy combatant mothers from ever returning here. Along with these children.
Whatever happens to them is the fault of their mothers.
Period.
42
@EK I’ve never read anything so heartless. Never.
7
@EK
The article is barely aimed at the United States, very few women have left the US to join ISIS. The author is a UN official for human rights and is suggesting international cooperation, most of which is aimed at countries like Kazakhstan repatriating their citizens. Failing to do so is not merely inhumanly cruel, it's ineffective. Left alone many of these children, if they don't die from the neglect, will grow to join the next ISIS, making us all less safe.
What you suggest would mortgage the safety of the future so that you don't have to deal with the threat posed by a malnourished 11-year old. Your cowardice, moral and otherwise, is astounding.
6
@EK Doesn't your Bible say something against the sins of the father, or in this case mother, cannot be visited upon the children?
I don't know how many Americans are there but clearly if we allow this to fester we will have produced our own terrorists a couple of decades from now. Like we are doing in Yemen with our proxies, Saudi Arabia and UAE.
2
I agree this is terribly shortsighted in preventing future terrorism and just plain wrong on humanitarian grounds. Perhaps a large, wealthy Arab country will step up and provide a funding and resettlement solution.
17
Missing in his list are children of mothers with records of violence. Does he countenance leaving them to be radicalized by these women? Persons with disabilities can be terrorist or radicals, so discretion is warranted here.
3
"Governments should also allow for the immediate return of terrorist suspects in cases where there is enough evidence to prosecute them in their national courts with fair trial protections without resorting to the death penalty"
Why shouldn't the U.S. pursue the death penalty against United States citizens that fought for ISIS? Is fighting against your country not treason? There can't be many things worse than actively bearing arms against your countrymen.
15
@Justin
You make a very good point.
It does make me wonder about those people flying the Confederate flag. Should the U.S. have pursued the death penalty against those people who committed treason in the aftermath of the U.S. Civil War? And if we had, by your reasoning, that should have changed recent American history for the better, correct?
3
I think the comparison is a bit obtuse. The Civil War was the bloodiest war Americans ever fought. The price in blood was paid many times over.
I don’t believe there are quite as many Americans that fought for ISIS as there were that fought for the confederacy. Don’t forget we killed American terrorist Anwar Al Awlaki and his son with a drone strike.
I think the lines and the times between the two are clearly delineated.
2
I agree that the children need to be released from the camps, to family whenever possible, wherever that may take them. As for the mothers... I remember a time, not too long ago, when I was visiting Istanbul a couple of days after the pregnant wife of a fallen ISIS fighter blew herself up near the Blue Mosque killing eleven elderly German tourists. These women are often as radicalized as their husbands, although now they will make themselves out to be the victims, under the cloak of motherhood.
31
These children left in behind and other ISIS children that are in captivity are time bombs in the making. The rage resentment and anger will build and build on itself and it will manifest itself in retributional actions when they grow up. Most will just whither away but some of them are going to hold us responsible for their lot, rightly or not.
They will plan and execute their revenge when they grow up and the price paid by us will be many times what we could spend to take care of them and move them away from that ideology. These children should at least be treated as we do with children of drug addicts.
3
"there can be little doubt that counterterrorism can only succeed if it is based on human rights." Please I need one example of this.Mothers made a decision to be part of a terrorist group.They did cause a lot of suffering to to other human beings. Some can be rehabilitated. Others will constitute a danger.Even people that are fully vetted, like the Saudi who just murdered soliders in Pensacola, cannot be fully trusted. We need to think really hard before admitting not the children, but the parents, for whom Mr Gilmours is indirectly advocating for.
22
The unresolvable dilemma of modern government social services everywhere: how do you punish, or at least not reward, the sins of the parents without harming the innocent children?
9
"They now find themselves abandoned in appalling conditions in rudimentary camps in Syria. Governments have to do better: This is not the way to treat children who are also victims of terrorism. Nor is it effective counterterrorism policy."
This is the ending of a civil that was in part agitated by foreign governments including the US. Bring the children to the US and other countries? OK, but say goodbye to them being reunited with their neglectful parent(s).
This is what the end result of "Assad has to go" looks like.
8
Thank you, Mr. Gilmour, for drawing light to this morally untenable situation.
I should point out, however, that the U.S. mainstream media, the Times included, originally framed the Turkish intervention in Northern Syria as "bad" precisely because ISIS fighters, and their families, would be set free.
12
Thank you. It's far too easy to forget the children we helped to imprison.
18