Rights defender Claire Hédon on Thursday (April 28) asked the government to repatriate the children of French jihadists detained in Kurdish camps in Syria for nearly five years. Dramas for the families who remained in France, who despair of seeing their loved ones again.
According to the newspaper La Croix, Claire Hédon would have sent a letter to the newly re-elected president. “Each day spent in these camps endangers the lives of these children exposed to inhuman and degrading treatment,” she wrote in a statement.
During the televised debate between the two rounds, President-candidate Emmanuel Macron said that child protection would be at the heart of the next five years. “It is high time to change direction, and to give these children, who are also victims of Daesh, their chance”, indicates in a press release the collective families United, an association bringing together a large part of the approximately 80 wives of jihadists and 200 French children held in camps in northeastern Syria.
Since 2016, 126 French children have returned from Syria or Iraq, most of them very young. Unlike its European neighbours, including Germany which has repatriated “a large part” of the children, Paris maintains a policy of returns in dribs and drabs which attracts its wrath when the living conditions there are “appalling”, according to the UN.