ISIS brides are attempting to create jihadi units within refugee camps - despite also pleading to be allowed back to their home countries.
Scores of women have reportedly re-formed units of the militants' feared religious police, the 'Hisba,' and enforce rules and punishments on other residents of the camps since the fall of the caliphate last month.
Despite their apparent reluctance to stop supporting ISIS, however, many of the women are appealing to their former nations to allow them to come home.
Four ISIS brides who spoke to AP at the al-Hol and Roj camps in
Syria said it was out of 'misguided religious faith' or naivety or youthful rebellion that they travelled to Syria.
Now after the militants' defeat, they say they made a mistake and are pleading to come home. They are among tens of thousands of Syrian, Iraqi and foreign women and children who belonged to the caliphate now held in camps in northern Syria overseen by the U.S.-backed, Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces.
The four women insisted they had not been active ISIS members, and they all said their husbands were not fighters. Those denials and much in their accounts could not be independently confirmed.
'How could I have been so stupid, and so blind?' Kimberly Polman, a 46-year-old Canadian woman, said of her decision to join the caliphate.
To many, their expressions of regret likely ring hollow or self-serving. Travelling to the caliphate, the women joined a group whose atrocities were well known, including sex enslavement of Yazidi women, mass killings and grotesque punishments of rule-breakers, ranging from public shootings to beheadings and hurling from rooftops.
Governments around the world are reluctant to take back their nationals. Some are focusing on repatriating children and not the parents.
Current Belgian policy, for example, is to bring back children under 10. 'Up to today our priority remains to return these kids because they are the victims, so to speak, of the radical choices made by their parents,' said Karl Lagatie, deputy spokesman of the Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
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