By Ben Wedeman, Muhammad Darwish, Charbel Mallo, Nechirvan Mando, CNN
Al-Roj camp, Syria (CNN) — We stepped out of the bitter cold, through a plastic flap that passed for a door into darkness.
It was warmer inside the tent, but hard to see anything with only a bit of outside light sneaking through the cracks.
“Come in! Come in,” said a female voice in English.
Two children, a girl and a boy, were scampering around. They were speaking in a mixture of English and very proper standard Arabic – the latter immediately striking me as odd since no one in a casual setting speaks that way.
We were in Al-Roj camp, a detention center in northeastern Syria where more than 2,000 women and children (though some are no longer children) have been held – some for more than a decade – by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces. They are the mostly foreign wives (and in many cases, widows) and children of men affiliated with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, ISIS.
In the gloom I hear another, British-accented, female voice.
“Journalists? Please no pictures!”
She asked that we not identify her for fear of complicating her relatives’ legal efforts to repatriate her to the United Kingdom. She told us her British citizenship had been revoked.
“I’m scared because I’m a different person,” she told us. “I’m not a Daeshi,” meaning she’s not a follower of ISIS. “I’m no one. I’m scared for my son.”
Her 9-year-old son was regularly beaten up by the other boys in the camp because his mother was no longer loyal to ISIS, she claimed.
“I was born in England. I was raised in England,” she said. “I don’t have anyone anywhere else. My mum, my dad, my brothers – all are in England. We are utterly and totally stateless.”
If you were wondering, this is not Shamima Begum, the east London native who ran away at the age of 15 to join ISIS in 2015. Britain has also revoked her nationality.
We did go to what our husky AK-47-toting Kurdish escort said was Begum’s tent, but it was shut. I called out saying I would like to speak to her.
“Go away,” a London-accented female voice responded. “I don’t want to speak to you.”
This was not my first encounter with the women of ISIS. In early 2019, I spent two months in Syria covering the final battle against the terror group. We spoke to dozens of ISIS women – from France, the UK, Morocco, Iraq, Turkey, Russia, Indonesia, Finland, etc. Some said they had reluctantly followed their husbands to Syria and Iraq. Others insisted at the time that they still believed in the stark creed of the Islamic State.
But here in Roj, the only women willing to speak with us insisted they had long ago discarded any illusions. They just wanted to go home.
“I want to come back in my country,” Alma Ismailovic, from Serbia, told me in broken English. “I want to live normal life with my children.”
Alma was in the camp’s “market,” a dirt square with a handful of shops selling food and other basic goods.
She was wearing a hijab, a head scarf, rather than the face-covering niqab typical of those with more hardline views.
I asked a group of boys who were hanging around the market if they still believed in the ISIS motto that “the Islamic state is staying and spreading,” and they laughed dismissively as if I had tried out an old, tired joke on them.
“There is no Islamic state,” Hanifa Abdallah, from Russia, told me in rudimentary, heavily accented Arabic. “It’s over. All that’s left is us women.”
She told us two of her children had been repatriated, but three were still with her in the detention center. She, too, said she was desperate to return home, but she claimed Russia wouldn’t take her back. Camp officials said the single biggest na