The child support services have taken care of the minors and the women have been handed over to the judicial authorities to be detained or interrogated.
France has repatriated this Tuesday 35 minors of French nationality and 16 mothers who were interned in jihadist prison camps in northeastern Syria, as announced by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This is the first time that the Paris authorities have allowed the return of children with their parents, who are considered suspected radical Islamists.
The minors have been handed over to child support services and will undergo a medical check-up. The 16 mothers have been, for their part, “brought before the competent judicial authorities,” the Quai d’Orsay, the name given to the French Foreign Ministry, explained in a statement. At the same time, the French government thanked the local authorities in northeast Syria for their cooperation in making this operation possible.
The National Antiterrorist Prosecutor’s Office specified that, of the 35 repatriated minors, seven are unaccompanied. Of the 16 women, 12 have arrived in France with their children and four had already consented to the return of their children in previous operations.
The women, between 22 and 39 years old, are all nationals, except for two, whose children are holders of French nationality. The National Antiterrorist Prosecutor’s Office specified that, after their arrival in the country, eight have been detained for questioning, since there was a search warrant against them, and an arrest warrant was pending against the other eight.
Only one of the minors has been arrested. He is about a young man who will be of age in a few days and about whom there are suspicions of his participation in a terrorist group. The rest will receive educational assistance, added the National Anti-Terrorist Prosecutor’s Office, which will centrally monitor all of them after their arrival in French territory.
End to “case by case”
This Tuesday’s is the largest repatriation operation of jihadist minors and mothers carried out by the French authorities since the fall in March 2019 of the last stronghold of the Islamic State terrorist organization in Baguz (Syria). With this collective return, France breaks with the policy it had followed until now, consisting of only allowing the return “case by case” of orphaned children or minors whose mothers had agreed to separate from them. As of January last year, Paris had repatriated 35 children in total.
The United Families Collective, which brings together French families who went to areas between Iraq and Syria to carry out jihad, applauded this collective repatriation operation. And he hoped that it would mark the end of “this abject policy of ‘case by case’ that separates brothers and snatches children from their abandoned mothers” in the Syrian prison camps. He also hopes that this will end “this inhumane policy that has lasted for years.”
This group has also urged the French government to return to the country as soon as possible all the French children and their mothers who are detained in the jihadist prison camps in Syria, as other European states have done, such as, for example, Belgium. and Germany. According to the French press, before this latest operation, there were some 80 Islamist women and 200 national minors in these types of centers.
The United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child had accused France last February of violating the rights of French children in Syria by leaving them for years in potentially deadly and inhumane conditions in camps for relatives of jihadists.
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