They sleep on mattresses crawling with bugs in tents without air-conditioning. There is no escape and they live in fear of revenge attacks.
Such is the lot of the foreign wives of ISIS fighters, and their children, who are being held in a desert camp in Iraq at a secret location.
Now, footage has emerged in which they vent their frustration, and their longing to go home.
‘Most here came with their husbands. We didn’t come here to fight or to kill. We came here to live,’ one woman says in the video, taken by a reporter from RT.
Around 1,400 foreign wives and children of suspected Islamic State fighters are being held at a secret location in the Iraq desert
However, not all new arrivals at the camp feel the same way, as one of those being held explains: ‘When we came here, one of the women with us blew herself up. The soldiers started shooting…’
Another whose jidahi husband had been killed says: ‘I want to go home. I’m here by accident. I really want to go home. Please get me out of here.’
The Iraqi authorities are holding 1,400 foreign wives and children of suspected Islamic State fighters after government forces expelled the jihadist group from one of its last remaining strongholds in Iraq, security and aid officials said.
Most came from Turkey. Many others were from former Soviet states, such as Tajikistan, Azerbaijan and Russia, according to Iraqi army and intelligence officers.
‘Most here came with their husbands. We didn’t come here to fight or to kill. We came here to live,’ one woman says in the video
The camp’s location is being kept secret because aid workers and the authorities are worried about tensions between Iraqis, who lost their homes and are also living in the camp, and the new arrivals
Other Asians and a ‘very few’ French and Germans were also among them.
Most had arrived at the camp, which is run by the United Nations, since August 30, when Iraqi troops drove Islamic State out of Mosul.
The camp’s location is being kept secret because aid workers and the authorities are worried about tensions between Iraqis, who lost their homes and are also living in the camp, and the new arrivals.
Many Iraqis want revenge for the harsh treatment they received under the extremists’ interpretation of Sunni Islam they imposed in Mosul and the other areas they seized in 2014.
‘The families are being kept to one side (of the camp) for their own safety,’ an Iraqi military intelligence officer said.
Western officials are worried about radicalised fighters and their relatives coming home after the collapse of Islamic State’s ‘caliphate’.
Iraqi army soldiers hold an ISIS flag near an Iraqi army base in the outskirts of Mosul