In a small apartment outside Minneapolis, I'm watching two brown-haired brothers, ages 7 and 9, on a couch playing chess. They're speaking Arabic sprinkled with English. They stare intently at the board, their little brows furrowed.
After a stretch of silence, the older boy moves one of his pieces. "Check," he announces with confidence.
"Smart move," says their grandfather, sitting nearby.
I'm impressed by their skills and focus. "How did you learn to play?" I ask. The grandfather puts my question to them in Arabic. The older boy responds: al-sijn. I wait for a translation.
"He learned it in the jail, he said," the grandfather tells me. His wife, their grandmother, nods. "In the jail," she says.
Sijn — jail — is a word these boys use with startling frequency. It is not a word you expect to be a regular part of a child's vocabulary, let alone uttered so matter-of-factly. But months before they came to Minnesota, these two boys were living, parent-less, in an enormous desert camp in Syria for relatives of ISIS militants. It is variously called a "displacement" or "detention" facility, but it is effectively a prison. And it was their home for five years — the only home the younger one really remembers. They were 2 and 4 when they arrived there.
Now, they are living with their American grandparents in the United States, a politically charged family reunification brokered by the U.S. government. The State Department calls it a model for addressing an intractable legacy of the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq: what to do with the tens of thousands of people from around the world being held in these Syrian camps, most of them the wives and offspring of men who belonged to the Islamic State, one of the world's deadliest terrorist organizations.
An estimated 22 U.S. citizens are among the roughly 35,000 people in the sprawling, primitive camps, including about 17 American children, according to the State Department. The two Minnesota boys were there until May 2024, when they were flown in a military cargo plane to John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York to start a new life in the American Midwest.
They landed in the camps through no fault of their own: Their father is a naturalized American citizen who left the U.S. to join ISIS a decade ago, and started a family while overseas. Still, many countries are reluctant or unwilling to take in the children of ISIS fighters out of fear they may have been radicalized by extremists and could become future jihadists. ISIS was known for its extreme brutality, including beheadings and mass killings.
But U.S. officials say leaving kids in the camps — which are described as a humanitarian catastrophe, with limited health care and schooling and high levels of violence — is the greater risk. The sooner they can be removed, officials say, the better chance they'll have of a normal existence.
Both the Biden and Trump administrations have backed efforts to reduce the population of the camps. That entails taking back U.S. citizens and pushing other nations, sometimes with American assistance, to repatriate their own people. The State Department under the current Trump presidency describes repatriations as a "high priority," one that involves prosecuting some adults and returning children to their home countries.
"They deserve to be saved, I believe," said the Minnesota boys' grandfather, Ahmed, who asked that NPR not use his last name because he is concerned about the security of his family. "They are innocents and they should not bear the burden of their parents' mistakes."
"We couldn't find him"
The decade-long chain of events that brought the two boys to the United States has created both shame and joy for their family.
The man who would become their father, Abdelhamid, vanished during a family summer vacation to Morocco in 2015. He was an 18-year-old student at the time, still living at home. His parents — Ahmed and his wife, who also asked not to be named for security reasons — discovered him missing one morning. They scoured the house where they were staying, to no avail.
"We went from room to room, from floor to floor," recalled Ahmed. "We couldn't find him."
They contacted hospitals and police precincts, wondering if he had left the house overnight and been injured or gotten in an accident. Eventually, Moroccan authorities checked a flight manifest and found that Abdelhamid had flown to Istanbul, Turkey.
His parents were baffled. Why would he do that? Their confusion quickly turned to shock: Moroccan police told them their son's behavior fit a familiar pattern, and when young Muslim men disappear without saying where they're going, they are often attempting to join a radical group.
The police were correct: Their eldest child, who had grown up in suburban Minneapolis and gone to a U.S. high school and community college, had crossed the Turkish border into Syria and, later, Iraq, and become a member of ISIS.
"He left us," Ahmed said. "It's hard for me to talk about the past. It hurts, to be honest with you. He was a decent guy, a helpful guy to us, an obedient guy, doing chores, going out with his friends, a normal guy … I mean, I couldn't explain it."
Investigators concluded that Abdelhamid, who was born in Morocco and moved with his parents to the U.S. in 1998, when he was 18 months old, had been drawn to a jihadist mindset as an adolescent by ISIS-run Twitter accounts promising a better life, from camaraderie to free housing to the chance to meet a spouse.
According to court records, he was "convinced by an expert ISIS recruiter" on social media to ask himself, "How can you in the West sit in your bedrooms knowing that Muslims are suffering overseas?" and to "test his faith and to become a real Muslim" by joining ISIS. At the time, the group was enslaving women, carrying out mass executions, and staging terrorist attacks around the world. Still, the marketing worked on him, and he chose to enter the ranks of ISIS.
His parents, who became naturalized U.S. citizens in the mid-2000s, and their two other sons — Abdelhamid's younger brothers, who were born in the U.S. — flew back to Minnesota without him. In the months that followed, Abdelhamid occasionally reached out to his family with reassuring messages.
"He said, 'I'm OK. Don't worry about me,'" Ahmed recalled. Abdelhamid told them he was studying to become a doctor to help injured people; his parents were unsure if he was telling the truth. As months passed, Ahmed and his wife kept their family situation a secret from almost everyone, even most of their relatives.
Eventually, Abdelhamid startled them again with news that he had acquired a wife and children while abroad. According to Abdelhamid, he had married the widow of another ISIS fighter, and that woman had a son by her previous husband. She and Abdelhamid then produced a son of their own, raising the two boys together.
That meant Ahmed and his wife were now grandparents to a pair of children they had never met, living a continent away, whose father belonged to an armed extremist group.
"Did you not know that it was a terrorist organization?"
Then, for nearly a year, Abdelhamid went silent. His parents said they had no idea what had happened to him — until they saw a CBS News report in September 2019, filmed in a prison in northeast Syria housing ISIS militants. Their son was there, behind bars, being interviewed on national television.
"Did you not know that it was a terrorist organization when you joined it?" the interviewer, Holly Williams, asked him.
"To be honest, I was kind of a conspiracy theorist a little bit," Abdelhamid replied.
"But it's a terrorist organization, Abdel. It's a terrorist organization that's carried out attacks," Williams said.
"Here's the thing," he responded. "People like me that see this, first of all, don't really believe the news."
On screen, Abdelhamid had a stump for one arm and was limping from two broken legs, wounds he said he sustained in Iraq. The U.S. Department of Justice says he was injured in 2016 "while conducting military activities on behalf of ISIS." His parents barely recognized him. They were stunned and relieved. Stunned by his condition. Relieved to know where he was.
With Abdelhamid's whereabouts now public, the U.S. government arranged to bring him back to the States for criminal prosecution. At that point, he had been in a Syrian prison for 18 months. In September 2020, at age 23, he was transferred into FBI custody, returned to Minnesota, and charged with providing material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization.
But where were his two boys?
According to Abdelhamid, his sons had been taken away from him when he surrendered to Syrian Democratic Forces in March 2019, soon after their mother was killed in Iraq. They were 2 and 4 years old at the time. Abdelhamid didn't know it then, but it would be more than five years before he saw them again. In the meantime, their grandparents — who knew the boys only through photographs texted by their son — were determined to find them.
Ahmed and his wife had already lost one child. They didn't want to lose another two.
"I am writing to see if you can help me"
Their quest to locate the boys led them to a former diplomat named Peter Galbraith, who had been a U.S. ambassador to Croatia, held a variety of roles at the United Nations, and served as a state senator in Vermont.
Galbraith has connections to Kurdish officials who help oversee two camps in northeast Syria, called al-Hol and Roj, that hold mostly the children, widows, wives and other female relatives of dead, captured and surrendered ISIS fighters. The camps are mainly populated by Iraqis and Syrians, but also include people from more than 60 countries, including the United States.
According to the State Department, an estimated 25,000 children live in the camps, which are administered by the Democratic Autonomous Administration for North and East Syria, the civilian counterpart of the Syrian Democratic Forces. Some of the children were born there. Some were brought there by their parents. Some are orphans. Using his Kurdish connections, Galbraith said, he has helped get more than two dozen children of various nationalities out of the camps.
After learning of Galbraith's work, Ahmed wrote to him in August 2021. "Hello, Mr. Galbraith," his email began. "I recently read [about] your involvement in helping … to locate missing children in Northern Syria. I am writing to see if you can help me in finding my two missing grandchildren."
Galbraith agreed to provide assistance, and wondered if the boys might be in the Syrian camps, which he describes as squalid places unfit for long-term habitation: "Endless lines of tents, latrines that are disgusting … tents surrounded by wire so that nobody can leave," he said in an NPR interview.
Galbraith sent photographs of the boys to camp officials, along with their names, dates of birth, and their parents' names. Over the course of a year, he made three trips to Syria to search for them. On his third visit, in November 2022, camp officials brought two young boys to meet him in a small office. Based on their age and appearance, they seemed to be the children he was searching for. Galbraith said the older boy seemed wary, even distrustful.
"You can completely understand why they were fearful, why they thought no good would come from it," Galbraith said. "Basically, any time they encountered somebody they didn't know, something bad had happened. Now this person shows up, a foreigner, an American."
But that encounter began the process of removing them from the camps. After a DNA test proved their identities, the boys were transferred to an orphanage-like facility within the camps, where they were able to have weekly video calls with their grandparents in Minnesota.
Then a network of U.S. government agencies — the State and Defense departments, Citizenship and Immigration Services, Customs and Border Protection, and the Office of Refugee Resettlement, among others — worked together on the legal and logistical steps required to get the boys out of the camps and to the United States.
In May 2024, after a year and a half of complicated negotiations, the boys arrived in New York following a lengthy trip. They were flown from Syria to Kuwait to Germany — where they stopped to drop off the families of some European ISIS fighters — to their final destination in the U.S. Arrival pictures at JFK airport show the boys looking very serious, probably a little dazed, as family members they'd never met in person greeted them with hugs and balloons. One of the boys holds a small American flag.
"They certainly were scared. I think they were also just confused," said attorney Ian Moss, a former State Department official now in private practice who helped coordinate the boys' exit from the camps. "They had been on 20-some hours of flights and are now arriving at 3 o'clock in the morning at JFK to meet with grandparents that they'd only seen via video. It had to be disorienting, to say the least."
Still, added Moss, who was part of the small crowd gathered in New York to welcome them, "To be there for that first moment when the boys were walked back to meet their grandparents …You could just feel that they were greeted with so much love."
"Every day is a new day to them"
Late last September in Minnesota, I stood in front of a suburban apartment building with Ahmed and his wife as they waited for their grandsons to return from their local public elementary school. They were just finishing their first week of classes. A big orange bus pulled into the parking lot, and pressed against one of the windows was a brown-haired little boy with a wide smile, waving happily. He had spotted his grandparents, who lit up at the sight of him.
"Hey! Hey! How you doing?" Ahmed called out as the boy, followed by his older brother, ran to meet them. "How was school?" Ahmed's wife asked, wrapping her arms around them.
By then, the boys had been in the U.S. for about five months, and their grandparents were showing and teaching them everything they could — from swimming to drawing to growing tomatoes to playing tennis — to make up for what they hadn't learned in the camps, Ahmed said.
"They've never been in school," he explained. When they were being held in Syria, "there was just a small classroom you can attend for maybe one hour," he said, but now "every day is a new day to them. Going to school and learning things they never saw or touched — a lot of things: fruits, toys, technology."
The boys arrived in the U.S. speaking mainly Arabic, but that's quickly changing. I peppered them with questions in English, and they often began answering before their grandfather had finished translating what I'd said into Arabic.
They told me their favorite shows are Shaun the Sheep, Tom and Jerry, and Mr. Bean. Their favorite toy is Spider-Man. Their favorite foods are cereal, milk, oranges and bananas — but not apples. Their favorite English words are, "How are you?" and they like to practice asking the question, always responding with a cheerful "good!"
When I first arrived at the family's apartment, I was surprised to find a toddler there. Ahmed, who's 56, and his wife, who's 48, told me they had a surprise pregnancy a few years ago, so they are now parents to a 3-year-old. That makes the two older boys, who are now 8 and 10, the 3-year-old's nephews. They call him their "baby uncle," and their grandparents told me that the boys think it's funny they have an uncle who wears diapers.
It's a crowded house filled with the sound of laughing children who like eating pizza, playing soccer and watching cartoons on YouTube. But the boys also casually tell stories about the deprivations of their previous life, a reminder of how unusual their childhoods have been by American standards.
They have told their grandparents, for instance, that when they lived in the Syrian camps, they would collect erasers and crayons in their pockets, and later chew them like chewing gum. "I said, 'Why?'" Ahmed recalled, "and they said, 'Because there was not enough food.'" They've also described playtimes that involved digging in the ground, mixing dirt with water, and using the mixture to try to build things, like makeshift toys, Ahmed said.
Ahmed and his wife know the boys might need counseling some day to process everything they've gone through, but "whatever bad things happened in the past, we just make them happy, and we are happy," Ahmed told me. His wife nodded, saying that she wants the boys to "forget everything."
I asked if she thinks they are young enough for that to be possible. She told me she believes they have already started to forget.
"They know the difference" between their life in the camps and their life in the U.S., Ahmed said. "And they love us more than anybody else because they know that we take care of them," he added. "We want to erase anything bad in their memories. May God help us to achieve that."
"Life is beautiful now"
In January 2021, Abdelhamid — after several months in custody back in the United States — admitted to being a "soldier of ISIS" and pleaded guilty to providing material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization. Last year he received a 10-year U.S. federal prison sentence. During his June 2024 sentencing hearing in Minneapolis, he said he regretted having joined a "death cult" and told his parents that his two sons are "the only good thing I've given you in a decade."
His boys were in the courtroom during his sentencing, marking the first time Abdelhamid and his sons had seen each other since he surrendered to Syrian Democratic Forces in March 2019 and was separated from his children. He now phones them regularly from behind bars.
In an interview with NPR, Abdelhamid called himself "a traitor to my country" and said he is cooperating with U.S. authorities in other ISIS prosecutions — a claim verified by court records — and hopes to do counterterrorism and deradicalization work after he is released.
Abdelhamid's parents say once his prison sentence ends, they want him to move in with them and their grandchildren, their whole family under one roof.
"I always tell myself I forget whatever he's done to us, as far as put us in this situation and this turmoil," Ahmed said. "I'll always forgive him. He's my son."
Having their grandchildren with them, Ahmed and his wife told me, has been more rejuvenating than tiring, despite the challenges of raising small children during middle age while both holding down other jobs.
"We feel younger. We feel more energized than before," Ahmed said. "We got our kid back and we got our grandkids back. I mean, life is beautiful now."
They say they are grateful for the U.S. government's efforts to reunite their family. "I know America work[ed] hard to bring my grandkids" to the U.S., his wife added. "Thank you so much. I appreciate America for that."
And their family could grow even larger: Abdelhamid says he also had a second wife, a daughter, and a stepdaughter while overseas. As was the case with his first wife, his second wife was the widow of an ISIS fighter, she had a child from her previous relationship, and then she and Abdelhamid bore a child together. Galbraith is also searching for those two girls, but he told NPR it is unclear where they are or whether they are alive.
"A serious humanitarian and a potential future security problem"
In fall 2024, officials from across the Middle East, Europe and Asia convened at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington, D.C., to confront a global challenge: reducing the population of Syria's al-Hol and Roj camps and addressing the risks they pose, particularly to young people.
"More than 25,000 of the displaced persons are children growing up in dire conditions without access to education, opportunity or social support," Richard Verma, a deputy secretary at the State Department until January 2025, told the gathered crowd.
Of the approximately 35,500 people being held in the camps — down from a peak of more than 60,000 after ISIS' self-proclaimed caliphate collapsed in 2019 — more than 90% are women and children, according to the U.S. State Department. Roughly two-thirds are under age 18 and roughly half are under age 12.
In addition, approximately 8,600 former ISIS fighters are in prison facilities across northeast Syria. Since 2021, about 19,000 people have been returned to their home countries from the camps and prisons. The U.S. says it has repatriated 51 of its citizens from Syria and Iraq since 2016, including 30 children. Those U.S. repatriations also include at least a dozen American adults who were prosecuted upon return, some now in prison.
Getting kids out is especially critical, Verma said.
"As long as these children remain in the camps," he warned, "the international community faces a serious humanitarian and a potential future security problem."
The camps are heavily populated by ISIS wives and widows who remain loyal to the Islamic State. Because of that, there's concern they could radicalize the children around them. "The older the children get, the more likely that they're going to buy into the ideology there," said Galbraith. "That's why it is so urgent to get the children out at a young age."
Some countries have resisted bringing home the offspring of ISIS fighters out of fear they could be a safety threat. In Finland, for example, the 2019 repatriation of two young orphaned children of ISIS militants was "politically very, very toxic" and led to a "clear backlash," Finnish Ambassador Jussi Tanner said in a 2021 interview with Foreign Policy. "But then gradually, with the successive repatriations," he added, "the public reaction has become more and more muted."
By the end of 2023, nearly 40 countries had repatriated some of their citizens from the camps, including about 6,000 children, according to a United Nations-affiliated report published in March 2024.
Moss, the former State Department official who helped bring the Minnesota boys back to the United States, views the children of ISIS fighters as innocent victims of poor decisions made by their parents. "Don't punish the children for the sins of their fathers," he said. And he cautions that if the camps aren't dismantled, they could become training grounds for future terrorists, with international consequences.
"You can pretend as if it is a problem somewhere else, but you don't know what the future holds," Moss said. "That problem can be at your doorstep if you don't do anything about it."
U.S. officials say that prospect has become even more worrisome since the fall of the Assad regime in Syria, which has raised fears of a possible ISIS comeback. And while the Trump administration's cuts to foreign aid earlier this year briefly halted U.S. funding that helps support the camps, that funding was later restored.
"This Administration has been clear that as the dynamics in the region change, we cannot allow the security and humanitarian challenges posed by the displaced persons camps and detention facilities in northeast Syria to fester," the State Department wrote in a statement to NPR. "Repatriation is the only durable solution to these challenges."
Moss points to the Minnesota family — Ahmed, his wife and their grandchildren — as a success story so far.
"These two boys are now living with their grandparents and building lives and doing well," he said, "and that we were able to keep a family together meant the United States was able to lead by example."
Galbraith agrees. He visited them in Minnesota in November 2024 — the first time he had seen them since identifying them in the camps two years earlier — and says they were "worlds apart" from the two frightened children he met in Syria.
"They were happy, they were well-adjusted, they were relaxed. They were just healthy, normal boys, and it was wonderful," Galbraith said. "Just completely wonderful."
This story was edited by Barrie Hardymon and Robert Little; the audio was produced by Monika Evstatieva. Research by Barbara Van Woerkom; art direction and photo editing by Emily Bogle; translation by Linah Mohammad and Fatma Tanis and audio engineering by Robert Rodriguez.
Copyright 2025 NPR
