Recently, Iraqi journalist Sara al-Mansour's sister, who lives in the southern Iraqi city of Basra, got a new neighbor.

"A woman who has come back from Daesh," al-Mansour explained, using the local acronym for the extremist "Islamic State," or IS, group.

The new neighbor said she was kidnapped by the IS group and forced to have children with their fighters, said al-Mansour, who is based in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad. The woman had been living in a camp, but the Iraqi government had since vetted her, allowed her to leave and was paying her social welfare.

"But then my sister heard what the children of this woman were saying," says al-Mansour, who asked DW to use her maiden name because of the sensitivity of the subject.

"They said they liked living in Mosul [IS' former capital in northern Iraq] much better than Basra because there, they could just go into a house and claim it, and they got lots of American dollars."

When the extremist IS group was at its most powerful between 2014 and 2017, it controlled large parts of Iraq and Syria. In Mosul, IS fighters regularly requisitioned locals' homes and paid members a salary, often in dollars.

"What can you do about the mentality of people like this?" al-Mansour asks. "I don't think they should be living here," she said.

The Iraqi journalist isn't alone in her opinion.

By 2019, the IS group had been almost completely defeated in both Iraq and Syria. If not killed during final battles, IS fighters were arrested and imprisoned.

Left behind were their wives, children and other civilian supporters.

Many of these ended up imprisoned in what's known as al-Hol, a "closed camp," in north-eastern Syria near the Iraqi border. In 2019, the camp, which previously held around 10,000 displaced people, saw its population swell to over 73,000. The United Nations estimates around half of........

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