Should ISIS fighters/wives/children be repatriated?

[epronovost]

You made a good point, Yonadav, and this would work for someone who served in the armed forces of ISIS (in my opinion, I am not a lawyer), but Hoda Muthana was not an ISIS soldier, she was an ISIS wife. It especially irks me that she isn't even cognizant that what she did was wrong, but she's a legal conundrum.

She was an ISIS soldier. She ran propaganda for ISIS. She fought in the way that ISIS uses its female soldiers. Listen, very few military personnel serve in actual combat positions in modern warfare. But they are all regarded as combatants.

There is no way that we are going to re-integrate this person into our society.  That's too much to ask of people.

ISIS did have a brigade of female soldiers armed and designed for combat and law enforcement within their territory (they were disbanded in the early days of the counter offensive to take Raqa). They were abot 300 strong at their peek in 2015. Hoda Muthana wasn't part of this group. Running propaganda doesn't by definition make you a soldier, you could be qualified a civil servant of ISIS proto-government (they did have ministers and a bureacracy to administer their territory). Soldiers, by definition, are only those who are part of the armed militia branch of ISIS. There were some women in there, but not much. The idea she should be considered a soldier or enemy combattant is murky. Plus, considering ISIS was never recognised as a State, she was part of a criminal organisation not really of an enemy nation. Either she's a mundane criminal who took part in an insurrection and spported terrorists and ths must be judged and condamned by her homecountry or she is a prisoner of war belonging to another State (ISIS) and can be judged according to the laws surrounding enemny combattant. Let's not repeat the ridiculous scenario of Afghanistan where the US decided to have its cake and eat and invented from whole cloth a third group of combattant which could basically get fucked over, tortured, emprisonned for decades and judged before a fake court. This entire thing was a human right fiasco and a huge stain on the US reputation and moral authority.