Tajik authorities are carefully concealing the whereabouts of women and children brought home from Syria and Iraq. Psychologists advise the authorities not to rush to return the children to their birth families.
Two grandchildren of Shokhida Khojaeva, a resident of Khatlon province, were returned from Iraq three years ago. Her daughter was sentenced to life imprisonment in Iraq.
One of the boys is now 9 years old and started second grade this year. The other is 7 years old and is going to the first grade. Both are in boarding school and are not allowed to leave without special permission.
Shokhida Khojaeva has met her grandchildren many times over the past three years. But all attempts to take them home have been unsuccessful.
“They are already used to life in Tajikistan. They remember almost nothing about what happened to them in Iraq, they only ask: When will they bring our mother back? My grandchildren asked me many times: “Grandma, when are you going to take us home? My heart bleeds, but I don’t know what to tell them. We hope one day they’ll let us take them home,” she said.
Since her daughter’s departure for Iraq, she said, she has been called repeatedly by law enforcement for interviews.
“They know very well what our living conditions are like, how we live. I don’t know why they don’t give us children,” Shokhida Hodjaeva said.
In 2019, Tajik authorities returned home the first group of child fighters from Iraq. There were 89 of them, ranging in age from 1 to 18.
They were all housed in the Kharangon rest home in the Varzob Valley, on the northern outskirts of Dushanbe. It was expected that they would soon be able to return to their families and relatives. But so far this has not happened.
On July 26, 2022, a second group of Tajik citizens – 146 women and children – returned from Syria. What became of them and where they were placed is unknown. CABAR.asia’s numerous attempts to meet and speak with the women brought back from Syria were unsuccessful.
At a press conference on August 2, Khilobi Kurbonzoda, head of the Tajik government’s Committee on Women and Family Affairs, told reporters that these women were not being held in a pre-trial detention facility, but in one of the country’s rest homes.
“We visit them every day and get information about their condition and talk to them. You understand their mental state, when they were at war for many years, they need a certain period of time to return to a normal way of life after returning from there,” Kurbonzoda said.
Law enforcement officials also said these children, and now women, need time to adjust to Tajik society and that specialists are working with them.
The Long Process of Reintegration
One Tajik psychologist, who has been working with children brought back from Iraq for the past three years, agreed to speak to CABAR.asia on condition of anonymity.
“At first, after their return, their vocabulary consisted of only a few words, such as ‘mujahid,’ ‘shahid,’ ‘murtad’ (‘apostate’ from Arabic) and ‘jihad.’
After several weeks of working with them, psychologists gathered the children in one room, gave them white paper and pencils and asked them to draw any pictures they wanted. Most of them drew two pictures. On the first one – a beautiful light house and a gloomy dark house, and on the second – a bomber plane and a passenger airplane,” the psychologist tells.
When the children were asked to explain what the drawings meant, they said that the light house was a home in Tajikistan, and the dark house was an Iraqi prison.
“The bomber is the same plane that dropped bombs on them in Iraq, and the other is the one that delivered them to Tajikistan. So these teenagers have already learned how to compare,” the interlocutor told CABAR.asia.
He said he hadn’t yet had any contact with the women from Syria brought back in July, but working with children and wives of ISIS (a terrorist group banned in many countries) fighters was a new experience for his colleagues. So they use different techniques and methods to help them return to normal life.
According to the psychologist, the best way for teenagers to return to society is the family, but this must be done with caution. His colleagues envisioned several ways to return these children to their relatives.
“In our conclusions, we suggested that the authorities hand over to relatives children under 5 years old, they do not remember anything about that life. But we should not be in a hurry to give children over 5 years old. First of all, we should thoroughly study their families, what is their way of life, their way of thinking. In other words, won’t the teenager, upon his return, find himself in an atmosphere conducive to extremism? At this point, we know for a fact that teenagers are supervised by the authorities in boarding schools. We have to be absolutely sure that they are not a danger to society,” said the psychologist.
CABAR.asia’s interlocutor predicts that the adaptation and reintegration of women and children brought from Iraq and Syria will probably take quite a long time – five to 10 years.
Fear of growing extremism
Since 2013, about 2,000 Tajik citizens have joined the militants of the banned Islamic State movement in Central Asia, according to official data. Some men also took their wives and children with them to Iraq and Syria.
According to the authorities, until 2017, most Tajik men were killed or went missing in action. Some Tajik women and children were also killed in the fighting. More than 500 Tajik citizens (women and children) were captured by Kurdish forces in Syria and held in camps. Forty-three Tajik women were sentenced to life or many years in prison by Iraqi courts.
Most Tajik women and their relatives have repeatedly told the media that they followed their husbands to Syria and Iraq by fraudulent means. However, these assurances do not seem to have convinced the security services, and the latter are not ready to return the women who were taken from Syria to their families.
Religious expert Faridun Hodizoda says that returned Tajik women have been living in society for five years, in a completely different ideological situation and should be de-extremed.
Both Khodizoda and the psychologist emphasize one important point: There are no qualified specialists in Tajikistan to work with women and children of fighters.
“They participated in the war, they were bombed, they experienced hardship in Kurdish camps. All of them, both women and children, have post-conflict syndrome. They have thousands of problems. They need to be worked with. But now no one knows what to do with all of this,” says Faridun Hodizoda.
High-ranking Tajik officials, including President Emomali Rakhmon, have repeatedly expressed concern over the danger of growing extremism in the country. Experts say one reason authorities are reluctant to hand over children and women returnees from Syria and Iraq to their relatives is fear of the spread of extremism in society.