The Biden administration has repatriated a family of 10 American citizens who were trapped for years in desert camps and detention centers in Syria run by a Kurdish-led militia that fought against the Islamic State, officials said.
The government also brought two half-siblings to the United States – only one of whom, said to be 7 years old, is an American citizen. The resettlement of the other boy, who would be 9 years old, is the first time the United States has taken in someone from the war zone who is not an American citizen.
The administration announced the transfer Tuesday in a statement from Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, who said there had been a “complex repatriation and resettlement” involving 11 U.S. citizens, five of whom were minors, and the “9-year-old brother elderly, non-U.S. citizen, of one of the minor U.S. citizens.”
He added: “This is the largest single repatriation of US citizens from northeastern Syria to date.”
The statement announcing the transfer did not identify the 12 people. But two officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive details, said the 10 were a family the New York Times reported on in September, consisting of a woman named Brandy Salman and her nine U.S.-born children, about 6 years old. to about 25.
The other two, authorities said, are children – one biological and one adopted – of a man named Abdelhamid Al-Madioum, who was repatriated in 2020 and pleaded guilty to charges of supporting terrorism. The Star Tribune of Minneapolis reported this month that her two children had been found and would soon arrive in Minnesota to be raised by their parents.
The fallout from the collapse of the ISIS caliphate – which continued to carry out terrorist attacks after losing control of its former territory – has led to a worsening problem in northeastern Syria, where tens of thousands of people remain effectively trapped in the custody of the US-led militia. Kurds, the Syrian Democratic Forces.
Around 45,000 people live in the displacement camps – the majority of them women and children. They include about 17,000 Syrians, about 18,750 Iraqis and about 9,000 “third-country nationals” from more than 60 countries, officials said. The militia also holds around 8,800 adult males in prisons during the war.
Most adult men are suspected of joining the Islamic State, including some who have traveled from Europe and the United States to Syria or Iraq. Some brought their families with them.
The United States has encouraged other countries to take back their nationals – prosecuting them when appropriate – and, in some cases, providing military logistical assistance. The same transfer operation that brought dozens of people to the United States also extracted six Canadian citizens, four Dutch citizens and one Finnish citizen who were returning to their respective countries, Blinken said. Among them are eight children.
Since 2016, when the ISIS caliphate began to crumble, the United States has repatriated 51 American citizens — 30 children and 21 adults, according to the State Department. This number accounts for the 11 citizens brought in on Tuesday morning.
Many nations – especially in Europe – have been reluctant to allow their citizens, especially men, to return, fearing that they pose a security threat. Some fear that under their legal systems, any incarceration for joining the Islamic State would only last a few years.
Even young children who were descendants of ISIS families are often stigmatized. As a result, large numbers of children have been left to grow up in brutal circumstances and are considered vulnerable to radicalization in the camps.
The Times reported last fall that Ms. Salman’s husband, who was from Turkey, apparently took the family to ISIS territory in 2016 and was later killed. Most of the family will now live with the mother in New Hampshire, and the Department of Health and Human Services, working with local social services officials, has developed a plan to help them integrate into society, officials said.
However, one of Ms Salman’s daughters, Halima Salman, who is now around 24 years old, is facing prosecution. In a criminal complaint unsealed in the Eastern District of New York on Tuesday afternoon, an FBI agent accused her of receiving weapons training from ISIS when she was about 18 years old.
The complaint cited a range of evidence, including several photos and other electronic files on a cellphone that the government recovered in Syria in 2019 and which belonged to a man she married there. She was arrested when the military plane carrying the group landed at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport on Tuesday morning, an official said.
In 2022 and 2023, investigators from Human Rights Watch and the United Nations separately interviewed one of Ms. Salman’s children, who is now about 18 years old.
He then lived separately from the rest of his family, in what the Kurdish militia describes as a rehabilitation or de-radicalization center for young people. Guards took him there in early 2020, he told investigators, as part of a contested policy of removing boys from the main displacement camps, Al Hol and Roj, when they reached puberty.
The teenager told investigators that his father had tricked the family into going to Syria – telling them they were going camping while in Turkey and only later revealing that they had crossed the border – and that his mother had largely kept the children because she was scared. The Times was unable to verify the details of that account.
The UN investigator also said the teenager expressed “great distress and concern” about his inability to communicate meaningfully with his mother, and showed the investigator paintings and drawings that depicted them together. He also talked about hamburgers and the lack of rap music, she said.
Human Rights Watch also featured the teenager – hiding his face and using a pseudonym – in a video about children stranded in Syria after their parents took them there to join ISIS. In it, he said: “It’s not just me. We are a lot of children, you know. Nobody wants to stay, just like growing up here without doing anything. That’s what we all feel.”
In the case of the two half-brothers, a court filing prosecuting their father, Mr. Al-Madioum, said that in 2015, when he was a university student and visiting Morocco with his family, he fled to join ISIS. .
He ended up marrying the widow of a killed ISIS fighter and fought in battle and was seriously injured, including losing part of an arm. He surrendered in March 2019 to Kurdish-led militia and was brought back to the United States to face prosecution in 2020.
A court filing also mentioned that he was with “his two young children” at the time of his surrender to the militia. But, the authorities clarified, only of the boys is Mr. Al-Madioum’s biological son. Al-Madioum apparently adopted the other boy when he married their widowed mother, who was apparently later killed.
There are many challenges to transferring people. The Kurdish militia does not have complete and accurate records on everyone it holds, and the mixed ancestry of many children has further complicated efforts to get countries to accept them.
Ian Moss, the State Department’s deputy counterterrorism coordinator, said in an interview that by taking in the nine-year-old boy who is not a U.S. citizen but has a connection to the country through his brother, the United States was seeking to lead by example.
“It is important for the purpose of reintegration that we do not separate families,” he said. “And as we continue to work to solve this problem, we need to think creatively about how to preserve family units. Inevitably, this means that – as the United States has done – countries will have to offer resettlement to individuals who are not their nationals.”
There has been some movement in recent years. In 2022, almost 3,000 displaced people were repatriated — or, in the case of Syrians, returned to their home communities within the country — more than had left militia custody between 2019 and 2021 combined. In 2023, more than 5,400 people were repatriated or returned to their home communities.
“As governments proceed to repatriate their citizens, we ask for consideration and flexibility to ensure, to the extent possible, that family units remain intact,” Blinken said.
He added: “The only lasting solution to the humanitarian and security crisis in the displaced persons camps and detention centers in northeastern Syria is for countries to repatriate, rehabilitate, reintegrate and, where appropriate, ensure accountability for wrongdoing.”
