A child at Al Hol camp in Syria, March 2019  
Issam Abdallah / Reuters

Three years ago, a global coalition of countries led by the United States retook most of the territory in Iraq and Syria controlled by the Islamic State. Once ISIS was defeated on the battlefield, the world moved on. Left unanswered was the question of what to do about the people, including thousands of children, who had come from abroad, either voluntarily or through coercion, to live under ISIS rule and were now abandoned by their governments.

Many of the women and children, and a small number of men, ended up in two detention camps in the middle of the desert

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