[Rudaw] Twenty-seven Russian children from Iraq are returning to Moscow on Sunday. Their mothers are in jail in Iraq, serving time for membership in ISIS. "Tonight a plane of the Emergency Situations Ministry will land at the Ramenskoye airport bringing back 27 children aged between four and 13," said a spokesperson for the office of Russia’s children’s rights commissioner Anna Kuznetsova, Russia’s TASS news reported.
The children will be given health checks and then handed over to relatives and guardians.
Nearly 40 Russian children are expected to be repatriated from Iraq in February.
Kuznetsova’s office has documented 699 minor Russians whose parents took them to combat zones in the Middle East.
On December 30, some 30 children of Russians who had joined ISIS were brought back to Russia.
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The Kremlin announced in early January that 115 Russian children aged below ten -- along with eight aged between 11 and 17 -- were still in Iraq.
Iraqi law allows detainees to be held with their offspring until the age of three, but older children have to live with relatives.
In November, Kheda Saratova -- an adviser to Chechnya's authoritarian leader Ramzan Kadyrov -- estimated "around 2,000" widows and children of Russian IS fighters were still in Iraq and neighboring Syria.
Around one hundred women and kiddies -- mostly from Caucasus republics -- have returned to Russia so far.
Nearly 4,500 Russian citizens had gone abroad to fight "on the side of terrorists", Russia's FSB domestic intelligence agency said last year.
More than 300 people, including around 100 foreign women, have been sentenced to death in Iraq for belonging to the Islamic State
...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling
Allaharound with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not
reallyMoslems....
, while others have been sentenced to life in prison.
Most of those convicted are Turks or originate from former republics of the Soviet Union.
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Anna Kuznetsova, Russia's envoy for the rights of children, confirmed the comments, according to the TASS state news agency.
She said the 27 children were aged from four to 13 and were from 10 different regions in Russia.