France repatriates 40 children from Syrian camps

Campaigners have been pressuring the government to speed up transfers and bring French citizens home

It was the largest such repatriation in three months. AFP

France repatriated 40 children and 15 women on Thursday from camps in north-eastern Syria holding family members of suspected ISIS fighters.

It was the largest such repatriation in three months and came a week after a European rights court condemned France over its refusal to return two women detained in Syria.

The children were handed over to childcare services and will have medical and social follow-ups, the foreign ministry said in a statement, while the women will be transferred to the judicial authorities.

"France expresses its thanks to local authorities ... for their co-operation, which has made this operation possible," the ministry said.

Western countries have faced a dilemma over how to handle their citizens detained in Syria since the end of military operations against ISIS there in 2019.

Thousands of extremists in Europe joined the group as fighters, often taking their wives and children to live in the caliphate declared in territory conquered in Iraq and Syria.

Before July, France had prioritised its security over welfare concerns for the detained, pointing to a series of attacks, including the November 2015 assaults on Paris that left 130 people dead.

In September, the widow of an ISIS attacker who stormed the Bataclan concert venue in Paris was repatriated to France and charged with associating with terrorists.

The woman, identified as Kahina El H, was among a group of 51 women and children brought back from detention camps in north-east Syria, where they have been held since the fall of ISIS.

At the same time, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that France must re-examine repatriation requests from two other French women who travelled to Syria with their partners to join ISIS. The requests were also for the children they gave birth to there.

The French citizens were among more than 40,000 foreign nationals, most of them Iraqis, in detention, according to Human Rights Watch.

According to earlier estimates by rights groups, some women and children are probably still in the camp after Thursday's repatriation operation, which followed a similar mission in July.

The latest operation to return its citizens marked the largest such transfer since July when France, after pressure from campaigners, returned 35 children and 16 mothers from the Syrian camps.

The French government had long refused mass repatriations of the hundreds of French children detained in Kurdish-controlled camps, dealing with them on a case-by-case basis that rights groups criticised as deliberately slow.