Women married to Isis fighters due to land in Germany from Turkey

Two women married to Isis fighters were expected to land in Germany, as Turkey continued to deport individuals with alleged affiliations to the terrorist group to their European countries of origin.

The women are the eighth and ninth individuals to be repatriated to Germany this week, after the Turkish government unexpectedly announced on Monday it would no longer act as “a hotel” for foreign nationals who fought alongside terrorists.

A German-Iraqi family landed in Berlin on Thursday evening. The family of seven, which is believed to have links to the Salafist scene in Hildesheim in Lower Saxony, was questioned by authorities, and the 55-year-old was detained over a series of minor, non-terrorist offences.

German authorities have reluctantly conceded they are obliged by international law to allow all German nationals into the country and will only be able to detain or bring to justice the returnees if Turkey or Syria cooperated in supplying evidence against them.

The German foreign minister, Heiko Maas, earlier in the week appealed for Ankara to quickly pass on information “that would stand in a court of law to detain someone and bring them to justice”.

While Germany’s public prosecutor general is investigating the two women due to arrive on Friday, they are not to be arrested upon touching German soil.

One of the women is believed to be a 27-year-old Hanover-born woman of South Asian origin who first travelled to Syria in 2014.

According to Hayat, a German de-radicalisation scheme that has been in touch with the woman since December 2017, she spent at least the last two years in a secure annexe at the Ain Issa camp, in Kurdish-controlled north-east Syria, following the death of her husband in combat.

The woman escaped after Kurdish troops opened the camp’s gates in anticipation of the arrival of Turkish forces last month, and was then captured by the Turkish-backed Free Syrian Army, leading to her detention in Gaziantep.

Interviewed by Fox News in 2018, the woman said she was writing a book in the hope of protecting other women from making the same “mistake” she did.

“We believe that the woman mainly travelled to Syria out of love for her partner, and not because she is deeply immersed in Islamist ideology”, said Claudia Dantschke, a project director for Hayat, a programme that seeks to de-radicalise young jihadis by counselling their next of kin.

The second woman is believed to have been born in 1998 and recently escaped from the Kurdish-run al-Hol camp in northern Syria.

Two more women who travelled to Syria after their husbands joined Isis are expected to be deported to Germany in the next three weeks, after German authorities have verified the identity of the children who are expected to accompany them.

A tenth individual whose deportation was originally expected this week is believed still to be a prison in Turkey: the 29-year-old German-Chinese jihadi Benjamin Xu, from Berlin, is serving a life sentence over the death of two Turkish policemen in March 2014.

In total, 95 German nationals with affiliations to Isis are believed to be in prison in Turkey, Syria and Iraq. Twenty-six have already been issued with an arrest warrant in Germany, while there are a further 33 investigations that are designed to result in an arrest.