SOHR: To bring them or leave them: women and children in Syrian camps caught in a dilemma
Germany and Denmark, announced Thursday repatriating 11 women and 37 children from the Roj camp, in northeastern Syria, where suspected Islamic State members have been held by Kurdish forces, with the support of the US.
Take in ISIS families or leave them in Syria, is a dilemma that dominated the international political scene in the recent years amid the UN and NGO pleas to save women and children from the treacherous conditions in the Syrian camps, and the harsh opposition from certain political parties, fearing the extremist ideology of ISIS would have infiltrated the minds of the children..
At its height, ISIS controlled 88,000 sq km (34,000 sq miles) of land stretching across Syria and Iraq. After ISIS’ territorial defeat in March 2019, ISIS’ families were moved to camps along with thousands of others who were displaced.
Figures and conditions of foreign children and women in Syria
For more than two years, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) kept roughly 13,500 detained foreign women and children in three makeshift camps in the north eastern of Syria’s. A smaller number of male foreign fighters, estimably 2000, are held in a separate prison network.
Field research focusing on the largest of the camps for foreign women and children, al-Hol camp, reveals a picture of squalor, sexual abuse and endemic violence, reported international crisis group.
Of the 13,500 foreign women and children present in Al Hol, Ein Issa and Roj camps before Save the Children estimates that around 85% of all children are under the age of 12, while 4,400 of them, or around 45%, are under the age of five, according to the last report published by Save the children organization.
Around 9,500 children from more than 40 nationalities were living in Al Hol, Ein Issa and Roj camps before the start of the Turkish military operations in Northeast Syria on October 9, 2019, added the same source.
Turkey has launched a military operation in northeastern Syria, in 2019, after US forces pulled back from the area, with a series of airstrikes strikes hitting Kurdish-controlled border towns.
“In the week since the operations began, at least 11 children in Northeast Syria and Turkey have reportedly been killed with reports of serious injury such as head wounds and injuries resulting in amputations. The true figure of children harmed is likely much higher, as journalists and NGOs struggle to maintain a presence and access information amidst the growing violence,” announced Save The Children NGO in the same report.
Between January and early October 2019, Kazakhstan took back 156 children, slightly more than 50% of all children known to have been repatriated. In Europe, Kosovo repatriated 74 children, France 17, and Sweden 7 among others as a handful of orphans have also been repatriated by Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, the U.K., Finland and Denmark, according to Lawfare and Save the children.
Bringing ISIS families home, numbers and controversy
U.S is one of the few countries who had made a serious effort to bring back its nationals. Washington has repatriated eighteen Americans – six men, three women and nine children – and has urged other coalition allies to follow suit. Other countries that have shown significant commitment to repatriation include Russia, Uzbekistan, Kosovo, Malaysia and Indonesia; Moscow has chartered flights and brought back over 200 women and children from Syria and Iraq, meting out light sentences, though many hundreds remain.
North African countries such as Morocco and Tunisia have done little. Also lagging are Western governments, particularly EU member states, Canada and Australia, which as of October 2019 had brought home only roughly 180.
Germany
Germany repatriated 23 children and their eight mothers on a charter flight which landed shortly before midnight on October 6, 2021, at Frankfurt airport. They had been living in the Roj prison camp in northeastern Syria, which is under Kurdish control.
German federal prosecutors said three women were arrested on arrival at Frankfurt airport, as they are accused of membership in a foreign “terror organization”, taking the children with them against their fathers’ will and violations of their duties of care and education.
Germany’s last joint repatriation alongside Finland in December 2020 brought back five women and 18 children.
Belgium
After the outbreak of war in Syria in 2011, more than 400 Belgians went there to join ISIS among the largest number of any European country.
The Belgian government announced in July, this year, the evacuation of ten children and six mothers from the Syrian prison camp to Belgium, while three Belgian mothers and seven children have rejected the offer to return to their homeland, BBC says.
Many European countries have balked at allowing the return of people linked to ISIS, yet some, like Belgium and Finland, are now heeding the advice of security experts and rights groups who say that repatriations are the safest option.
France
According to the last report issued by the Belgian Royal institute of international relations (EGMONT), in 2019, France came first as the European country with the largest population in the Syrian camps, which reached 130 adults and 270-320 children.
France has turned down numerous calls for repatriation, even as some of the women staged a monthlong hunger strike, protesting the inhuman conditions in the prison camps, reported The New York Times.
As France reels from years of terrorist attacks, the government has opposed calls to repatriate people who left to wage jihad, fearing worsening the security state in the republic.
Although France has taken in 35 children from the camps on a case-by-case basis, 100 women with French citizenship and their 200 children remain mostly in the Roj camp, according to Jean-Charles Brisard, the director of the Paris-based Center for the Analysis of Terrorism, statement to the New York Times.
France was due to repatriate at least 160 of them in early 2019, according to intelligence documents brought to light by the newspaper Libération, but the situation in the camps became too volatile, the French intelligence official said, and the plan was abandoned, reported the New York Times.
United Kingdom
The British government has long grappled with how to handle the estimated 900 Britons who travelled to Syria and Iraq to join the conflict there.
Although hundreds have returned to the UK, with dozens then prosecuted, the government has revoked more than 150 people’s citizenship and an unconfirmed number remain in the hands of pro-Western Kurdish militias in northeast Syria.
Shamima Begum, who was just fifteen when she and two other schoolgirls from London travelled to Syria to join the jihadists, is the most high-profile case.
Begun was stripped of her citizenship in 2019, and recently lost a long-running legal bid to return to appeal the decision.
The British NGO Reprieve estimates around 25 British adults and 34 UK children are still being held, urged London to reverse its policies.
A British government spokesperson argued that depriving someone of their British citizenship is never a decision that is taken lightly, “but our priority is always to ensure the safety and security of the UK,” reported the Guardian.
Morocco
There are 89 Moroccan women detained in the Syrian camps, accompanied by 251 children, in addition to 21 Moroccan orphans, while the number of combatants detained in Syria is about 113, according to the National Coordination of the Families of Moroccan Trapped and Detained in Syria and Iraq in Iraq report issued in early January 2021.
The two children Fatima and Othman were the first children to return legally to Morocco,
Among hundreds of children in Syrian camps or those who are hiding in Turkey; Fatima and Othman came to the kingdom without a passport, thanks to their grandfather’s long juridical battle, after which his desire was fulfilled.
The two children returned without their parents, as their father is still imprisoned inside the Syrian territory, and their Syrian mother stayed in Turkey.
The Northern Observatory for Human Rights reported in June, this year, that the Moroccan authorities are making arrangements to return Moroccan women and children in the “Al-Rouj” and “Al-Hol” camps in northern Syria, but no further news were issued after this announcement.
UN calls the government to end the humanitarian crisis in the Syrian camps
UN human rights experts expressed, this year, serious concerns at the deteriorating security and humanitarian situation at the Al Hol and Roj prison camps in northeast Syria, home to over 64,000 people, mostly women and children. The organzation has issued official letters to 57 governments, whose nationals are held there, urging them to repatriate them without delay.
The decision about what to do with the women and children in Syria is a complicated decision with several consequences. The women in the camps have different backgrounds, motivations and affiliations, and some of them were children when they joined the radical forces. So, the extent of their responsibility and the threat they may pose to their home countries varies greatly.
Even if it seems obvious that the children should be repatriated, since they are the only group who has no responsibility in the current situation, the decision of separating children from their mothers is still a controversial solution that raised condemnations among the NGO’s communities. Moreover, many children received extremist education and radical influence during their lives within ISIS’ members, which may causes security threats to their homelands.
It’s a complicated and morally fraught situation, however the humanitarian crisis in the camps won’t be resolved, indeed, by abandoning women and children in the “mini-caliphate,” where malnutrition, sexual assault and death worsen the crisis, as the internal European Union and several NGOs reported.
Source: Hespress