Child support services have taken care of the minors and the women have been handed over to the judicial authorities for detention or questioning.
France on Tuesday repatriated 35 French minors and 16 mothers interned in jihadist detention camps in northeastern Syria, the French foreign ministry said. This is the first time Paris authorities have allowed the return of children with their parents, who are considered suspected radical Islamists.
The minors have been transferred to child benefit and will undergo a medical examination. The 16 mothers, for their part, have been “referred to the competent judicial authorities,” the Quai d’Orsay, the name given to the French foreign ministry, said in a statement. At the same time, the French government thanked the local authorities in northeastern Syria for their cooperation in making this operation possible.
The National Anti-Terrorist Prosecutor has indicated that of the 35 repatriated minors, seven were unaccompanied. Of the 16 women, 12 arrived in France with their children and four had already agreed to the return of their children in previous operations.
The women, aged between 22 and 39, are all nationals, except for two of whom the children are French. The National Anti-Terrorist Prosecutor has indicated that eight were detained for questioning after their arrival in the country, as a search warrant had been issued against them, and the other eight were under arrest warrant.
Only one of the minors has been arrested. This is a young man who will be of age in a few days and who is suspected of participating in a terrorist group. The rest will receive educational assistance, added the National Counter-Terrorism Prosecutor’s Office, which will monitor them all centrally after they arrive on French territory.
This Tuesday marks 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 is breaking with the policy it had hitherto followed that orphans or minors whose mothers had agreed to divorce them would only return “case by case”. By January last year, Paris had repatriated a total of 35 children.
The United Families Collective, which brings together French families who moved to areas between Iraq and Syria to carry out the jihad, applauded this collective repatriation operation. And he hoped it would end “this despicable case-by-case policy of dividing brothers and snatching children from their abandoned mothers” in Syrian detention camps. He also hopes that this will put an end to “this inhumane policy that has been going on for years”.
This group has also urged the French government to return to the country as soon as possible all French children and their mothers held in the jihadist prison camps in Syria, as other European states, such as Belgium for example, have done. and Germany. According to the French press, there were about 80 Muslim women and 200 national minors in these centers before this latest operation.
Last February, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child accused France of violating the rights of French children in Syria by leaving them in potentially deadly and inhumane conditions for years in camps for relatives of jihadists.
Source: La Verdad
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