This is the fourth in a year, and possibly the last. France on Tuesday repatriated ten women and 25 children who were detained in jihadist prison camps in northeastern Syria, the French Foreign Ministry announced. “Minors are handed over to the services responsible for child welfare” and will be subject to medical and social monitoring while “adults are handed over to the competent judicial authorities”, specifies the Quai d’Orsay in a press release.
A total of 16 women and 35 children had been brought back to France as part of a case-by-case policy during a first collective operation, followed in October by 15 women and 40 children. In January, the Foreign Ministry announced the repatriation of 15 women and 32 children, days after being condemned by the UN Committee against Torture. On Tuesday, “France thanked the local administration in northeastern Syria for its cooperation, which made this operation possible”.
Another hundred French children in the camps
“There remain in these camps a hundred children who know only the mire, barbed wire and violence,” said Tuesday Marie Dosé, lawyer for families of women and children detained in the camps in northeastern Syria.
She believes that France “has the means to impose the return of these children, who can very well be taken with their mothers to Iraqi Kurdistan with a view to their expulsion to France, whether or not this return is accepted by these women. “. She deplores the double penalty for children “victims (…) of the choice of their parents first, then of that of France, which refused to repatriate them for five years”.
According to the collective of United Families, representatives of the French government visited Camp Roj in May where they spoke with “all French women”. They “asked them whether or not they agreed to be repatriated with their children during a repatriation (…) presented as being ‘the last'”. The collective, which denounces living conditions “incompatible with respect for human dignity”, urges the government to take “immediately all the necessary measures to repatriate all the French children detained in Syria, as well as their mothers”. .