Alex Trelinski
TWO Spanish women who married ISIS extremists have been repatriated to Spain and arrested.
They lived in squalid Syrian camps with 13 children- four of whom were orphans.
The group flew into the Torrejon de Ardoz military airbase outside Madrid on Monday night.
One of the women is married to an ISIS fighter who is in a Syrian prison, while the other is widowed.
A third female who came from Ceuta and who Spain agreed to take could not be found.
All of them were were visited by a Spanish Foreign Affairs department official last year.
The two women were arrested on arrival at Torrejon de Ardoz on a warrant issued by the National Court and will be brought before a judge.
They are expected to face charges of cooperating with a terrorist organisation and could face five years in jail if convicted.
They had been held in various detention camps in Syria since 2019.
The women say they were tricked by their husbands into going to Syria and played no part in any extremist action.
The status of the children will be worked out on a case-by-case basis depending on their age.
Over the past decade, thousands of extremists in Europe travelled to Syria to become fighters with ISIS, often taking their wives and children to live in the ‘caliphate’ it set up in territory seized in Iraq and Syria.
The ‘caliphate’ fell in 2019 with families having to fend for themselves in poor conditions in camps.
