 I'm Chris Bosley. I'm the acting director for the program on violence and extremism here at USIP. I'm Heidi Ellis. I'm the director of the Trauma and Community Resilience Center at Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Brandon Court, director for the Center for Global Mental Health Equity at George Washington University. My name is Sarang Hamasayid. I work as director of Middle East programs at USIP. It's been nearly four years since Baguz, which is the last ISIS stronghold in Syria fell, and tens of thousands of people streamed into places like Al-Hol in Northeast Syria. Just under 50,000 people from over 60 different countries remain consigned to displacement camps and detention centers in the region where living conditions are dire, and ISIS views the population, over half of whom are children under the age of 11, as sources to reconstitute its ranks. Here, and in too many other contexts worldwide, where we need to prevent more people from engaging in extremist violence, we simultaneously need to support those who have been affected, children who have been trafficked into the conflict, and find viable exit ramps for those who have already engaged in it. When I think about the children who are in Al-Hol, I think about two different types of problems that are going on. The first set is around the kinds of experiences that they're having. And by that, I'm thinking about exposure to violence, traumatic loss, grief, the sorts of trauma experiences that are impacting their lives. But the second set of problems that I think about is what they're not experiencing. So here are kids who are moving through their childhood without what I think of as some of the basic scaffolding that supports child development. So we think of kids as going to school and coming home to families where there's a sense of safety and stability, having access to health care, food, water, a sense of security when they walk outside their door. Without those kinds of experiences, plus the traumatic experiences these kids are having, they're really carrying a double burden. In child development, we have a concept called developmental cascades. And the idea here is that all these different parts of development build on each other. So that if something early on gets off kilter, a child lacks a sense of safety, a child doesn't learn when they need to be learning, those impact all the later stages of development. So the longer these kids remain in Al-Hol, the more we're placing them at risk for these developmental cascades. If we're able to shift things, create a sense of safety, move them to a place where they can begin to have those experiences that childhood needs, we can begin to see the positive impact roll forward. Everyone throughout their lifetime is vulnerable to psychological distress and mental health conditions. When you're someone who's been involved in extreme violence, either as a perpetrator or a survivor, or in a community that's been affected, you're even more vulnerable to psychological distress and a host of mental health conditions. When we think about these issues, it's a whole of society approach that we need. Everyone in a society needs greater awareness and understanding about trauma, the impacts on the body and on the mind. In addition, there's increasing interventions that can be done by people who don't have a mental health background. Even someone with a high school education can be trained in a period of about two to three weeks to provide some basic types of psychological support, and those can be very impactful. And in some ways, when an intervention is delivered by a community member, it works even better because it's somebody who knows your life, knows your community, knows your family. There's a shared lived experience. When we do that, though, we also need to realize that some individuals may have higher levels of need that a community member may be unable to independently support. So we can also support the integration of mental health into primary care services for children and adolescents and also to adults as well. In Iraq, the USIP is working with government and civil society leaders to support return rehabilitation and reintegration of Iraqis to areas liberated from ISIS. We have been using our problem solving dialogue to remove communal and institutional barriers to return, specifically reducing stigma. This year, we have really focused our emphasis to introduce the Rise Action Guide, Rise Standing for Rehabilitation, Reintegration through Individual, Societal and Structural Engagement, so that we help our government and civil society partners to have a general framework that looks at the whole of government, whole of society, a response to this problem set. And in that context, we are particularly helping raise attention to the behavioral mental health and psychosocial aspect of return and reintegration. We are making preparations to provide more detailed training on the mental health and psychosocial support to those specialized teams and resources permitting we hope to provide that training and capability to actors in the communities of return in the next year.