ISIS jihadis who fathered hundreds of children in the crumbling caliphate have abandoned them to whatever cruel fate awaits them.
Most of these ISIS orphans are the children of foreign fighters or were brought to the territories by their loopy parents.
Tamim Jaboudi, who has been in a Libyan prison for more than a year, turns three next week.
According to the Associated Press, the boy’s Tunisian parents were obliterated in American airstrikes. His grandfather is trying to get custody of him.
“What is this young child’s sin that he is in jail with criminals?” asked Faouzi Trabelsi. “If he grows up there, what kind of attitude will he have toward his homeland?”
The child now lives among two dozen Tunisian women and their children in a Tripoli prison. Tamim is now being raised by a woman who joined ISIS.
European experts believe there are at least 600 children of foreign fighters, but they suspect the numbers are significantly higher.
If the children manage to flee the caliphate, their native countries are reluctant to take them in.
France has detained a number of women detainees and former cubs of the caliphate because it believes they are dangerous. Anyone over 9 is considered a potential terrorist.
In ISIS’s quixotic quest to create a new Muslim society in the caliphate, it encouraged its citizens to go forth and procreate. At its height, more than 31,000 women were pregnant at any given moment, British terror think tank Quilliam reports.
“In the long term, there is the new generation of ISIS, of Daesh. These are the newborns, the children of the marriages,” said Mohammed Iqbel, whose Association of Tunisians Trapped Abroad advocates for the families of those who have left. “And if we don’t save them, they will be a new generation of terrorism.”
And that’s what many countries fear.
French former counter-terrorism chief Louis Caprioli wondered whether the children would eventually embrace their parents’ fanatic values.
He asked: “How are these children going to evolve?”
Canoe
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