Recently, Iraqi journalist Sara al-Mansour's sister, who lives in the southern Iraqi city of Basra, got a new neighbor.

"A woman who has come back from Daesh," al-Mansour explained, using the local acronym for the extremist "Islamic State," or IS, group.

The new neighbor said she was kidnapped by the IS group and forced to have children with their fighters, said al-Mansour, who is based in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad. The woman had been living in a camp, but the Iraqi government had since vetted her, allowed her to leave and was paying her social welfare.

"But then my sister heard what the children of this woman were saying," says al-Mansour, who asked DW to use her maiden name because of the sensitivity of the subject.

"They said they liked living in Mosul [IS' former capital in northern Iraq] much better than Basra because there, they could just go into a house and claim it, and they got lots of American dollars."

When the extremist IS group was at its most powerful between 2014 and 2017, it controlled large parts of Iraq and Syria. In Mosul, IS fighters regularly requisitioned locals' homes and paid members a salary, often in dollars.

"What can you do about the mentality of people like this?" al-Mansour asks. "I don't think they should be living here," she said.

The Iraqi journalist isn't alone in her opinion. 

Trapped in al-Hol

By 2019, the IS group had been almost completely defeated in both Iraq and Syria. If not killed during final battles, IS fighters were arrested and imprisoned.

Left behind were their wives, children and other civilian supporters.

Many of these ended up imprisoned in what's known as al-Hol, a "closed camp," in north-eastern Syria near the Iraqi border. In 2019, the camp, which previously held around 10,000 displaced people, saw its population swell to over 73,000. The United Nations estimates around half of the inhabitants are Iraqis.

There are likely several different categories of people in al-Hol, explains Raed Aldulaimi, a professor of political studies at Al-Imam Al-Adham University College in Baghdad.

"Those families who believe in IS, those families who had a member join IS — and it doesn't mean the rest of the family agrees with it — who were then worried about being punished for that; and then also people who had no affiliation with IS but were looking for safety and ended up there."

Civilians who worked for the IS group or who simply stayed in IS-controlled areas may also be seen as collaborators.  

Since May 2021, the Iraqi government has been trying to repatriate its citizens from al-Hol. But the process has been slow and unpredictable.

However, this year it's become more urgent. Since 2019, the camp has been overseen by Syrian Kurdish forces, who are backed by the United States.

But since the ouster of the authoritarian Syrian regime in December 2024 and Donald Trump's election, the fate of al-Hol is less clear. Over the past four months, the Iraqi government has been speeding up repatriation

Two convoys out a month

An exact number is hard to come by but somewhere between 8,000 and 12,500 Iraqis have been helped to leave al-Hol since 2021. This year so far, over 1,200 more have left, and the Iraqi government says it plans two convoys a month from now on, with a view to getting all Iraqis out by 2027.

It's hard to know how many Iraqis are still there because people also leave the camp informally or are smuggled out. But potentially between 15,000 and 20,000 Iraqis continue to live there.

The newly increased pace of repatriation from al-Hol could be manageable under certain conditions, says Siobhan O'Neil, project lead at the Managing Exits from Armed Conflict initiative that operates within the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research, or UNIDIR. 

"While there may be increased returns, that doesn't mean they are all going back to one place. If 15,000 people went to a small town, that'd be huge. But that's not what we expect based on return patterns we have observed so far," says O'Neil, whose team has found many Iraqi returnees eventually moved several times before settling.

A potential area of concern may be the overwhelming of Iraqi government facilities for rehabilitation, O'Neil suggests.

Iraqi officials say that up to 10,000 returnees have gone through another camp near Mosul called Jadaa. There returnees undergo more security checks, receive counselling and are able communicate with their families or communities, something that can pave the way to a better return, O'Neil says. But some media reports say Jadaa is often understaffed or undersupplied.

"If the center has many more residents with no additional resources, or there are delays in clearing residents to leave — which we have seen in our research contributes to poor outcomes — this could lead to problems," she explains. 

But as the story told by Iraqi journalist al-Mansour illustrates, there are also some less tangible challenges to repatriation.

As they came to power in Iraq, the IS group divided Iraqi communities along sectarian lines. They were initially welcomed by many Sunni Muslim locals, who saw them as resisting Iraq's former government.

Due to the group's brutality and extremism, that welcome didn't last long. However anybody who was even vaguely associated with IS remains under suspicion. That is around 250,000 Iraqis, an official from Iraq's Ministry of Interior previously told the UN Development Program.

There are many reports of neighbors destroying "IS family" homes, beating family members or reporting them to the authorities for spurious reasons. Men fear arrest, women worry about harassment and UN monitors have reported schoolteachers refusing to enroll their children.

There are also other peripheral issues, UNIDIR's O'Neil says.

"Some of our interviews have shown that communities that receive returnees are worried about economic competition for scarce jobs, or very specifically, concerns are raised that some women will turn to sex work," she notes.

What could help?

Besides going through Jadaa camp, other methods for community reconciliation have seen returnees "sponsored" by community leaders, who serve as a monitor of good behavior. Some returnees are asked to make a public disavowal of IS.

Unfortunately, there is no one-size-fits-all solution, says political studies professor Aldulaimi, who is conducting further research on why some Iraqi communities are more willing to integrate "IS families" than others.

It very much depends on context, he tells DW. Returnees to big cities where nobody knows them tend to have it easier.

"But it really depends on what happened during IS' time in the area. The most complex situation [for integration] occurs in more diverse communities where there might have been violence and enslavement or sexual assault," he says. It can also depend on factors like which groups fought IS in the area, he adds, and whether they're still there now.

From her team's research, O'Neil suggests "better, more strategic communications" might help.

UNIDIR researchers found Iraqis were more open to returnees if they knew they'd gone through government rehabilitation and identity checks.

But many didn't know much about what those processes entail, she notes.

Edited by: K. Hairsine