Children of ISIS fighter find new life in Minnesota
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Here's a story about children who were lost and children who were found. It involves a family that went through an almost unimaginable shock. It's not a story this family likes to revisit. It's hard for me to talk about, you know, the past. It hurts, to be honest with you. It hurts a lot. That is Ahmed, who asked that we not use his last name because, due to what you're about to hear, he's concerned about the security of his family.

Ahmed and his wife were born in Morocco. They moved to the United States in the late 1990s. They became U.S. citizens, had kids, and a decade ago, in 2015, they traveled with their family to Morocco to visit relatives. During that trip, their 18-year-old son, Abdelhamid, disappeared. He just woke up in the morning and then...

They searched hospitals and police precincts. Yeah.

Eventually, the police told them there was a way to check if their son was still in Morocco. I guarantee you.

The police were correct. Their teenage son had joined a terrorist organization. Their oldest boy, an American citizen who'd grown up in the suburbs of Minneapolis and gone to a U.S. high school and community college, was now a member of ISIS. His parents would later learn that he had also gotten married and had children.

Consider this. What happened to the families of the Americans who joined ISIS? Coming up, you'll hear about the families they left behind and the ones they formed overseas. From NPR, I'm Ari Shapiro.

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It's Consider This from NPR. When ISIS was at its height, its ranks included several hundred Americans. They were often young men radicalized online by savvy marketing that promised free housing and the chance to meet a wife. When the Islamic State collapsed, some of those young men ended up in huge detention camps in Syria, and the U.S. has been trying to bring them home.

Today, we're bringing you the story of one American family coping with the aftermath of the child they lost and the children they found. NPR's Sasha Pfeiffer takes it from here. It may be hard to understand why a kid from the U.S. would join ISIS. It's one of the most violent jihadist groups in the world. But its marketing campaign was savvy. ISIS recruiters on Twitter and YouTube promised a better life, from free housing to the chance to meet a spouse.

That message worked on teenagers like Abdelhamid. After going missing in Morocco, he flew to Turkey and from there made his way to Iraq and Syria. But he occasionally reached out to his parents with reassuring messages. When we came back to the States, he gave us a call actually. And then he said, I'm okay, don't worry about me, everything is okay.

What did he say he was doing? Oh, he was telling us that he's going to go for college. He wants to become a doctor because he left there to help injured people. His parents hoped that was true. Eventually, Abdelhamid gave them more shocking news. He'd started a family. That meant Ahmed and his wife were grandparents to a pair of little boys they'd never met. It

When he was in Syria, most of the time he called us from there, sent us pictures of his kids. Then they stopped hearing from Abdelhamid. For nearly a year, they had no idea where he was.

until a CBS News report in September 2019. We are hopping around now. I want to go to northeastern Syria. That is where prisons are filled to the point of bursting with foreign ISIS fighters. And a CBS News exclusive, Holly Williams, was given rare access to one of these prisons and spoke with an ISIS fighter from Minnesota. That ISIS fighter was their son being interviewed behind bars on national television. Did you not know that it was a terrorist organization when you joined it?

To be honest, I was kind of a conspiracy theorist a little bit. But it's a terrorist organization, Abdel. It's a terrorist organization that's carried out attacks. Here's the thing. People like me that see this, that, first of all, don't really believe the news. Abdelhamid's parents learned from that news broadcast that he was in a Syrian prison. What did you think when you saw that TV interview? I couldn't recognize him. You said, that's not my son. I said, this is not my son. My son...

used to be this, this, this, and this is completely different. Physically? Physically, yeah. How had he changed?

I mean, it was too skinny and malnutrition, you can tell. The CBS footage showed Abdelhamid limping from two broken legs. He had a stump for one arm. Was there any sense of relief that finally you knew where he was? Yeah, in that sense, yes. It was a relief because we know that he's alive first and we can work with the government to bring him back.

The U.S. government eventually did bring him back. Abdelhamid was returned to Minnesota in 2020 to face prosecution. He admitted to being a soldier for ISIS and pleaded guilty to supporting a foreign terrorist group. He also called himself a traitor and said he was consumed with regret. As for his little boys, they'd vanished.

I got in touch with Abdelhamid at a noisy county jail in Minnesota. He's now 28 years old. He told me while he was in Syria, he married the widow of another ISIS fighter. She had a son by her previous husband. Then she and Abdelhamid had another son. They raised the boys together. Until...

When Abdelhamid surrendered and his boys were taken away, his younger son was two years old and his older one was four. And when Abdelhamid's parents learned the kids were missing, they were determined to find them.

But they kept their family situation a secret from almost everyone, even most of their relatives. We don't want nobody to know about what's going on. And we just try to survive day by day, knowing that we had a hope, knowing that one day we'll get together again.

They became consumed with tracking down their grandchildren, the ones they'd seen only in photos. But how? They heard about a former U.S. ambassador, Peter Galbraith, who might be able to help them. So they wrote to him.

When I visited Galbraith at his home in Boston, he read from their email. Hello, Mr. Galbraith. I'm writing to see if you can help me in finding my two missing grandchildren. Galbraith has connections to Kurdish officials who oversee Syrian detention and displacement camps, holding tens of thousands of ISIS fighters and their families.

And Galbraith wondered if that's where the boys may be. There are two main camps now. There's Al-Hol, which has endless lines of tents, latrines that are disgusting, Raj Camp,

The same idea, tents surrounded by wire so that nobody can leave. Galbraith has helped get about 30 children of various nationalities out of those camps, including some American children. So using his connections, he reached out to the Kurdish officials who run the camps to try to find Ahmed's grandkids. I sent them photographs electronically prior to going there, along with

the names, the dates of birth, the parents. Then, over the course of a year, Galbraith made three trips to Syria to look for the boys. On his third trip, camp officials brought two young children to meet him in a small office. They seemed to be the kids he was searching for. Galbraith said the older boy in particular seemed wary of him, distrustful. I mean, basically, any time they encountered somebody they didn't know, something bad had happened.

Now this person shows up, a foreigner, an American. You can completely understand why they were fearful, why they thought no good would come from it. A DNA test later proved their identities, and a network of U.S. government agencies worked together 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 two boys flew to New York on a military cargo plane.

It was a long ride. Arrival pictures from the New York airport show Abdelhamid's sons looking very serious, probably a little dazed.

A former State Department official named Ian Moss was one of the people who welcomed them at JFK Airport. They certainly were scared. I think they were also just confused. They'd been on 20-some hours of flights and are now, you know, 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. But that middle-of-the-night airport arrival marked the beginning of their new lives.

And to be there for that first moment when the boys were walked back to meet their grandparents, who, like, you could just feel that they were greeted with so much love, balloons and everything. I met the boys late last summer as they were finishing their first week of school in Minnesota. Every day, their grandparents greet them at the bus stop when they come home. Hey, how you doing? Good.

Their grandfather, Ahmed, has been showing and teaching them everything he can, from swimming to drawing to growing tomatoes. He says he's trying to make up for what they didn't get in the camps. Because they've never been to school, it was just a small classroom. They can attend school for one hour back there in Syria.

But now they really appreciate it because every day is a new day to them, going to school and learning things that they never saw actually or touch. So they love it. What kind of things would they not have touched? A lot of things. Fruits, toys, technology around them too. They live near the boys' school. We took a one-floor elevator ride up to their apartment. This is the apartment.

Go ahead. You want to have a seat? I'm confused to find a toddler also in the house. Ahmed, who's 56, tells me he and his wife, who's 48, had a surprise pregnancy a few years ago. So they're now parents to a three-year-old. And Ahmed tells me that little boy has a cute nickname in the house. That's your baby uncle? Baby brother.

The two older boys think it's funny they have an uncle who wears diapers. The grandkids arrived in the U.S. speaking mainly Arabic, but that's quickly changing. I asked them what classes they like in school. And what toys. And what shows they're watching. I'm Jerry, Mr. Bean.

They tell me their favorite English words so far are, how are you? So we test that out. How are you? So I say, how are you? You say, good. Good. How are you? How are you? Do you want to ask me? Oh, good. You want to have him ask me? How are you? I'm good. Thank you. They like outdoor sports and indoor games. You can play chess? Yeah. He's good at it. I ask them where they learn to play.

They respond with an Arabic word. It means jail. They use that word a lot. It's what they call the place where they lived in Syria after their dad was taken away. They mention it casually. After all, it was their home for five years. The only home the younger one really remembers. When they describe what it was like, these little boys start matter-of-factly telling startling stories.

He said he used to grab some erasers or crayons, put them in his pocket, and later start chewing them, like chewing gum. I said, why? And he said, because there was not enough food. Chewing crayons and erasers because there wasn't enough food.

They also described playtimes in Syria that were the opposite of American abundance. Because over there we don't have toys, we don't have nothing to play with. Sometimes we just dig on the ground, you know, the earth, mix it with water and try to build something, just like a toy or something like that.

The phone rings while I'm visiting. It's their father, Abdelhamid. He was sentenced last year to 10 years in U.S. federal prison. He often calls them from there. You're dead on the phone. Hello. Hello. Assalamu alaikum.

They say he calls every day, making them laugh with jokes about the baby uncle and diapers. When these two boys arrived in Minnesota last year, it turned their grandparents' lives upside down. Both work. Their house is relatively small. They know the kids might need counseling someday to process everything they've gone through.

But Ahmed and his wife say bringing these children into their home has brought them tremendous joy. I feel like I'm more powerful, I'm more young. I don't feel like I'm tired. We feel younger. Yeah, we feel younger for these kids. I start playing with him. Maybe this time I'm not with my kids, I'm now with my grandkids. I did not expect that answer at all. I thought it was going to be that you were more tired. No, no, we...

After what happened, we got the good news. I mean, it's like a, what's the term? Regenerating? Rejuvenating. That's the word. Yeah. Yeah, so we feel that more energized than before. But kids are tiring. Believe me not. Like if you see kids coming from different country, what happened with him before...

And you want to give him everything. You want to see him happy. I'm never shopping for my kids like I shop for my grandkids. I'm serious, you know. Because you want to spoil them more? This is how you express your joy. You know what I mean? Oh, finally we got them. It's like compensating ourselves and them. Whatever happened in the past, bad things that happened in the past, we will just...

make them happy and we are happy. We are really, really happy now. To forget everything before. Are they young enough that you think that's possible? Yeah, they know. They know now. They know the difference and they love us more than anybody else because they know that we take care of them and we spoil them. We want to erase anything bad in their memories.

May God help us, you know, to achieve that. Might I invite you to take your seats. In Washington, D.C. last fall, officials from across the Middle East, Europe and Asia gathered to talk about the dangers posed by the roughly 35,000 people being held in Syrian camps. Good morning. Good morning, everybody.

Richard Verma was a deputy secretary at the U.S. State Department until January. More than 25,000 of the displaced persons are children growing up in dire conditions without access to education, opportunity, or social support. Some of those children are American. Some were born there. Others were brought to Syria and Iraq by their parents.

So far, the United States has brought about 30 American kids home from the camps, usually to live with family members. More than a dozen are still there.

The U.S. has also brought back American adults, some now in prison. But Verma says getting kids out is even more critical. As long as these children remain in the camps, the international community faces a serious humanitarian and a potential future security problem. The camps are heavily populated by the wives and widows of ISIS fighters, and many of those women remain loyal to ISIS —

Because of that, there's concern they'll radicalize the children around them. Here's Peter Galbraith again. And the older the children get, the more likely that they're going to buy into the ideology there. And that's why it is so urgent to get the children out.

get them out at a young age. Some countries have resisted bringing home the children of ISIS fighters out of fear they could be a security threat. But Moss views those kids as innocent victims of poor decisions made by their parents. He says, don't punish the children for the sins of their fathers.

And he says if the camps aren't dismantled, they could produce future terrorists. People will continue to exist. You can pretend as if this is a problem somewhere else, but you don't know what the future holds. Like, that problem could be on your doorstep if you don't do anything about it. The U.S. is pushing other nations to reduce the number of people in the camps by taking back their citizens —

The Trump administration's State Department calls that a high priority. And it says that's especially important due to the fall of the Assad regime in Syria, which has raised fears of a possible ISIS comeback. Ian Moss says the Minnesota family, Ahmed, his wife, and their grandchildren, are a model success story so far. These two boys are now living with their grandparents together.

and building lives and doing well. That we were able to keep a family together meant the United States was able to lead by example. Galbraith, who helped get those boys home, agrees. He said this about the contrast between the two frightened children he met in Syria in 2022 and the ones he next saw again when he visited them in Minnesota last fall.

Worlds apart, I mean, they were happy, they were well-adjusted, you know, they were relaxed. I mean, you know, they were just healthy, normal boys, and it was wonderful, just completely wonderful. Go ahead, go ahead, numbers. Uh-huh. Two, three. Back on the outskirts of Minneapolis, the two grandkids are now eight and ten and are speaking more English every day. They proudly count the number of times they can kick a soccer ball to their grandparents.

Seven. Seven? Oh, good. The grandparents told me that once their son, Abdelhamid, is released from federal prison, they want him and their grandchildren to live with them under the same roof.

And they say they are grateful for the United States government's efforts to reunite their family. I know America worked hard to bring my grandkids. It's working hard for this. Thank you so much. That reunification means their years of worry about their missing son and missing grandchildren are finally over. We feel relieved now. We got our kids back and we got our grandkids back. I mean, life is beautiful now, to be honest.

This episode was produced by Monica Vstatieva and Catherine Fink. It was edited by Barry Hardiman and Robert Little, with audio engineering support from Robert Rodriguez. Our executive producer is Sammy Yenigan. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Ari Shapiro.

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