Kyrgyz families press Bishkek to bring home women held in Iraq over IS ties

Dozens of Kyrgyz citizens gathered outside President Sadyr Japarov's office in Bishkek on Sept. 14 to ask the government to bring home relatives imprisoned in Iraq for links to the Islamic State group, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported on Sept. 19. According to Kyrgyz authorities cited in the report, 41 citizens of the Central Asian republic are currently held in Iraqi prisons, most of them wives or relatives of IS fighters.

The appeal follows an announcement by Iraq's Justice Ministry in August that it is considering transferring nearly 6,000 foreign nationals detained over IS links back to their countries of origin. Kyrgyz authorities had not responded to the families' request by the time RFE/RL published its report.

A family emptied by the Syrian war

Among the protesters was Kamaldin Teshebaev, a man in his 70s from Kyzyl-Kiya in southwestern Kyrgyzstan. He and his wife once had three sons, three daughters-in-law and 16 grandchildren. In 2014, one son, then working as a migrant laborer in Russia, left for Syria with his family to join IS as the group expanded there. His two brothers followed.

Three sons and three grandchildren were killed in Syria, Teshebaev said. His three daughters-in-law ended up in Iraqi prisons. His wife traveled to Syria in an attempt to bring the family back and was herself imprisoned on terrorism-related charges. Thirteen surviving grandchildren returned to Kyrgyzstan in 2021 as part of a group of 79 children the government repatriated from Iraq.

"I am alone now, but I am grateful to our president and government that brought back my grandchildren," Teshebaev said. "They are grown up now, two of them recently got married."

Rahima Niyzamova is seeking the release of her 41-year-old daughter, Zebo Alieva, who has been held at Iraq's Rusafa prison for more than eight years. According to her mother, Alieva was working in Türkiye in 2015 when her husband, an IS fighter, persuaded her to move to Iraq and join him. Niyzamova has cared for Alieva's four children since the Kyrgyz government brought them home in 2021. The youngest was eight months old when the mother was jailed and is now nine. "I am in great pain. Just imagine, a mother's child is sitting in prison," Niyzamova said. "I've developed diabetes, and a heart condition."

A regional pattern

Once IS was driven from the land it held in Iraq and Syria, foreign fighters and their relatives were detained or confined to camps in the tens of thousands, RFE/RL noted. Many foreign women who joined the group, particularly the spouses of militants, were convicted under Iraq's counterterrorism laws. Kyrgyzstan and other Central Asian states have since organized repatriation missions in coordination with local authorities and international organizations, focused mainly on women and children. The 2021 operation that returned 79 children to Kyrgyzstan was one of those missions; the adult women, by contrast, have largely remained behind bars.

What it means: Baghdad's August signal that it may hand back thousands of foreign detainees changes the calculus for governments that have so far limited repatriation to minors. For Bishkek, the 41 citizens in Iraqi custody are a small number in absolute terms, but the families' decision to take their plea to the president's doorstep shows the issue has moved from quiet consular work into domestic politics. The government's silence as of Sept. 19 suggests it has not yet decided how to weigh humanitarian pressure from families such as the Teshebaevs against the security and reintegration questions that returning adult IS convicts would raise. How Kyrgyzstan answers will be watched by its Central Asian neighbors, which have run repatriation missions of their own and face the same choice if Baghdad follows through.