TUNIS, Tunisia — Almost the only home this toddler has known is a Libyan prison. He already marked one birthday there and in a few days will reach another, turning 3. He is an orphan. His parents, both Daesh (the so-called IS) group members, were killed in an airstrike.
Tamim Jaboudi is among hundreds of children fathered by the Daesh's foreign fighters or brought to the self-proclaimed "caliphate" by their parents who are now imprisoned or in limbo with nowhere to go, collateral victims as the militant group retreats and home countries hesitate to take them back.
Since his parents were killed in February 2016, Tamim has been living among some two dozen Tunisian women and their children in Tripoli's Mitiga prison, raised by a woman who herself willingly joined the Daesh group. The captives are under guard by a militia that tightly controls access to the group, despite repeatedly claiming they have no interest in preventing their return home.
"What is this young child's sin that he is in jail with criminals?" asked Faouzi Trabelsi, the boy's grandfather who has traveled twice to Libya trying to retrieve the boy and twice returned home empty handed. "If he grows up there, what kind of attitude will he have toward his homeland?"
European governments and experts have documented at least 600 children of foreign fighters who live in or have returned from Daesh territory in Syria, Iraq or Libya. But the numbers are likely far higher.
The children and families often find it impossible to escape Daesh-held areas. And even if they do, their native countries are deeply suspicious and fearful of returnees — sometimes even children. Tunisia, France and Belgium have all suffered major attacks from trained Daesh fighters, and Western intelligence officials have said the group is deploying cells of attackers in Europe.
Although the Daesh group says women have no role as fighters, France in particular has detained women returnees and some adolescent boys who it believes pose a danger. Young children often go into foster care or end up with extended family. In the Netherlands, anyone over nine is considered a potential security threat, since that is said to be the age IS extremists begin teaching boys to kill.
In Libya, their fate is particularly uncertain. The North African nation descended into chaos after the 2011 civil war, which ended with the killing of dictator Moammar Gaddafi. The country has been split into competing governments, each backed by a set of militias, tribes and political factions. Militias in December captured the main IS stronghold in Libya, Sirte, effectively breaking the group's efforts to build territory there, at least for now.
Tunisia is working to bring back the women and 44 children held in Tripoli and elsewhere in Libya. But so far the only result has been repeated hold-ups and miscommunications.
"There is no wrong in being born in a conflict zone. Once their Tunisian citizenship is confirmed, they will have an individual treatment," said Chafik Hajji, a Tunisian diplomat who handles the cases of the country's citizens who joined IS.
Meanwhile, the women and children are held in a "big and comfortable" space in the prison, according to Ahmed bin Salem, spokesman of the Libyan militia that runs the facility. The prison was set up several years ago in a building inside Mitiga Air Base, a military facility that is now also used for commercial flights -including daily ones from Tunis — because it is the only functioning airport in Tripoli.
Few if any of the women and children at Mitiga or another group of 120 foreign women and children jailed in the city of Misrata in Libya have valid ID papers, according to Hanan Salah, a Human Rights Watch researcher who specializes in Libya.
While it is unclear how many children were born in IS territory in Iraq, Syria, Libya and elsewhere, a snapshot of the group at its height showed as many as 31,000 women were pregnant at any given moment, many of them wives of jihadis encouraged to have as many babies as possible to populate the nascent caliphate, according to the Quilliam Foundation, a British counter-extremism research group.
Quilliam researcher Nikita Malik said 80 British children were inside Daesh territory. France estimated 450 of its children, including around 60 born there; Dutch and Belgian intelligence each estimated 80 children.
"In the long term, there is the new generation 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."
By many estimates, Tunisia sent more militants to the war zones than any other country, with official figures at 3,000 and some analysts doubling that number.
Trabelsi's daughter and son-in-law were among them. — AP
