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Photo by U.K. Metropolitan Police Service

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Scores of Moroccan women have successfully returned – including some, like Zarah, who slipped in and out of the country unnoticed – and dozens more are waiting in detention centers in Turkey while their cases are reviewed. Moroccan officials acknowledge that the women pose a dilemma for policymakers and law enforcement: the country is obliged to accept custody of its citizens, but there is no set policy on how to deal with them. Returnees who committed crimes will go to jail, but the law is less clear on how to treat wives and mothers with no record of violence or history of direct participation in extremist causes.

“All the women tell us the same story: their husbands went because of the financial benefits and they followed them because they had no choice,” a senior Moroccan official said in an interview, insisting on anonymity in discussing the country’s security challenges.

Most of the women who have returned so far appear intent on resuming their old lives and putting the Islamic State behind them, officials say. But the fear among security experts is that some of the returnees continue to hold radical views and will seek to indoctrinate family members.

“There are, first and foremost, their children, who they are supposed to bring up the way ISIS would want them to,” the senior official said.

We thought that even if they would try to destroy the caliphate, it will live on as long as we spread the idea of the Islamic State. Zarah

Several recent Moroccan returnees interviewed by The Washington Post all seemed relieved to be home, describing an increasingly harrowing existence inside a caliphate strained by shortages and daily airstrikes and bombardments. Each agreed to talk about their experiences on the condition that their family names or locations not be revealed, citing fears of reprisal by Islamic State sympathizers in Morocco or arrest by the authorities.