ISTANBUL — Sitting on a chair swinging her legs, 9-year-old Nisa flashes a rare smile at the memory of her mother kissing her the last time they saw each other. Barely a month back from a prison camp in Iraq, where her mother remains incarcerated on a life sentence for aiding terrorism, her short life has been one of untold trauma and upheaval.

She lived for five years in the Islamic State’s caliphate after her father took the family from Turkey to join the terrorist group. And she lost her baby brother and father to the war. She then spent more than a year in an Iraqi jail with dozens of other Turkish families affiliated with the Islamic State.



Now, she is one of more than 200 Turkish children the government has repatriated from Iraq. She was handed over to her maternal grandparents in Istanbul, who know only snippets of what she has been through.

“She was really skinny. Her eyes were full of fear,” said her grandmother Bedia, who, like the relatives of other children, asked that the family’s last name not be used to protect its privacy. “In the last month, she got herself together because we took care of her.”