Marwa Ahmad rarely leaves her run-down house in the Syrian city of Raqqa. The single mother of four says people look at her with suspicion and refuse to offer her a job, while her children get bullied and beaten up at school.

She and her children are paying the price, she says, because she once belonged to the Islamic State group, which overran a swath of Syria and Iraq in 2014 and imposed a radical, brutal rule for years.

Ahmad is among tens of thousands of widows and wives of IS militants who were detained in the wretched and lawless al-Hol camp in northeastern Syria after U.S.-led coalition and Syrian Kurdish forces cleared IS from the region in 2019.

She and a growing number of families have since been allowed to leave, after Kurdish authorities that oversee the camp determined they were no longer affiliated with the militant group and do not pose a threat to society. But the difficulties they face in trying to reintegrate back in Syria and Iraq show the deep, bitter resentments remaining after the atrocities committed by IS and the destructiveness of the long war that brought down the militants.

There also remains fear of IS sleeper cells that continue to carry out attacks. IS militants in Raqqa on Monday attacked and killed six members of the Kurdish-led security forces, known as the Syrian Democratic Forces. The attack came following a surge of SDF and U.S. raids targeting IS militants in eastern Syria.