INTERNATIONAL
France has announced the repatriation of dozens of women and children linked to suspected Islamic State members from Syrian refugee camps.
“France has today undertaken the return to the country of 35 French minors who were in camps in northeast Syria,” the French Ministry for Foreign Affairs said in a statement.
“This operation also includes the return of 16 mothers from these same camps,” it added, without specifying which camps they had come from.
The statement said the minors had been handed over to child protection services and would be subject to “medical monitoring.”
It said the mothers would face judicial proceedings.
Thousands of foreign citizens are currently held in camps in northern Syrian, administered by the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).
The SDF have increasingly called for countries to repatriate their citizens as unrest has continued to build in the camps, spurred on by suspected IS activity.
Last month the UN said that more than 100 people, including many women, had been murdered in Syria’s Al-Hol camp in just 18 months.
The Al-Hol camp is increasingly unsafe and the child detainees are being condemned to a life with no future, said Imran Riza, the UN resident coordinator in Syria.
Al-Hol, in the Kurdish-controlled northeast, was meant as a temporary detention facility.
However, it still holds about 56,000 people, mostly Syrians and Iraqis, some of whom maintain links with the IS, which seized swathes of Iraq and Syria in 2014.
The rest are citizens of other countries, including children and other relatives of IS fighters.
Source: Middle East Eye
