Families of Albanian ISIS Fighters Face Long Road Home

BIRN has identified at least 85 children born to ethnic Albanian women from Albania, Kosovo and North Macedonia under the Islamic State, now stuck in a Kurdish-run camp in Syria.

Lavdrim Muhaxheri, a notorious Islamic State fighter from Kosovo who declared himself the commander of Albanians fighting for the militant group in Syria and Iraq, was pronounced dead in mid-2017.

Two years on, the children he fathered in Syria with an Albanian woman from Tirana are living in squalor in a crowded Kurdish-run camp in northeastern Syria, according to the findings of a BIRN investigation.

The two children are among a total of 85 children in the ‘Al Hol’ camp of ethnic Albanian women from Albania, Kosovo and North Macedonia and identified by BIRN.

At least 27 were born in Syria. Many have lost at least one parent. At least three children born to a Kosovar woman are reported to have died along with their mother. Four Kosovar women have died, according to lists obtained by BIRN.

Currently, a group of 108 women and children from Albania, Kosovo and North Macedonia want to return to the Balkans from the Al Hol camp. There are a small number of ethnic Albanian families in two other camps in Syria.

According to a 2017 study by the New York-based Soufan Center, a research body focused on global security, that year around 90 people from Albania were still with the Islamic State, 138 from Kosovo and around 140 from North Macedonia.

The caliphate may have been toppled, but the way home for such women and children looks more complicated than they could probably have imagined, with authorities in the three Balkan states reluctant to see them return and so far without a plan as to how they would be repatriated.

‘These children are victims’

Photo: BIRN

Al Hol is comprised of thousands of tents behind a fence perimeter in the Syrian province of al-Hasakah. According to the United Nations, it currently holds some 73,000 people.

According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, some 65 per cent of people in the camp are children under the age of 18. Roughly 27 per cent of the total are women.

Internally displaced Syrians and Iraqi refugees make up the large majority, but 15 per cent are so-called third-country nationals.

Al Hol camp

Kosovo – Total 48 – 38 children and 10 women (At least 14 children were born in Syria)

Albania – Total 52 – 41 children and 11 women (Thirteen children were born in Syria)

North Macedonia – Total 8 – six children and two women

Total – 108 people from 3 countries

Many of the Albanian women and their children are desperate to return home.

“They have us under surveillance and we are surrounded by wires and soldiers,” a child can be heard telling a relative in Albania on an audio recording listened to by BIRN. “I cannot talk often but please speak to our state so they come and take us.” An infant can be heard crying in the background.

Elodie Schindler, a spokeswoman for Europe & Central Asia at International Committee of the Red Cross, ICRC, said women and children in the camps required special protection.

Schindler said that many children were without official citizenship, had no access to schooling and were vulnerable to abuse and sickness.

“The children in this story deserve our humanity, not our hatred,” Schindler told BIRN. “These children are victims who must not be punished for the sins of their parents… Many don’t have enough food. They must be treated better.”

Little state action

A general view over destroyed parts of al-Hajar al-Aswad neighborhood in south Damascus, Syria, 2018. Photo: PA-EFE/YOUSSEF BADAWI

BIRN asked the interior ministries of Albania, Kosovo and North Macedonia whether they had identified and contacted their citizens in the camps.

The Albanian ministry did not reply. Kosovo’s declined to comment, while the ministry of interior of North Macedonia said it had identified four Macedonian women and their seven children.

“They have established contact with the aim of receiving documents and facilitation of transport from Syria to North Macedonia,” said a spokesperson at the ministry.

The ministry said it had no jurisdiction to facilitate their return from Syria and did not specify whether any other state institution was dealing with the issue.

It said that since the start of the conflict, in 2011, some 80 Macedonian citizens who were part of Islamic State had returned home, including one women and one child.

In Kosovo, Bedri Elezi, director for security studies at the Kosovo Institute of International Studies, said the country had neglected the issue.

Elezi told BIRN that in September 2017 his Institute made contact with six women and 21 children in Syria who wanted to return in Kosovo, but that it was unable to facilitate a deal with the Kosovo authorities to bring them back.

“The group stayed for one month near the Turkish border waiting for the approval of the Kosovo authorities to return,” he said.

“We contacted the foreign minister, the prime minister’s office, the president, the speaker of the parliament, but they didn’t come up with a solution.”

The ICRC, Schindler said, encourages states to balance issues of security and accountability with the need to treat people humanely.

“Countries of origin cannot turn their backs,” she said.