QAMICHLI, Syria (Reuters) – The repatriation of foreign nationals close to jihadists detained in camps in northeastern Syria reached a record in 2022, with 517 women and children repatriated at this stage against 324 last year, announce Tuesday the Kurdish authorities.
Of this total, around 100 women and children were repatriated to France and around 50 to Germany, while more than 150 people were repatriated by Tajikistan, which had not carried out any repatriation before this year.
After the fall of Daesh in 2019, many governments have long been reluctant to repatriate women who had joined the ranks of the Islamic State group in Syria or Iraq, fearing security threats and negative reactions from public opinion on the return of radicalized people. .
But recurrent criticism from the UN, Unicef, various humanitarian NGOs and even the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) encouraged an acceleration of repatriations, the total of which was 281 in 2020 and 342 in 2019.
France is one of the countries whose doctrine has evolved. While the government has so far refused the repatriation of French women who have joined Daesh – believing that they should be judged on the spot – and decided on a case-by-case basis for the return of children, several operations have been organized since a first group repatriation of 35 French minors and 16 mothers at the beginning of July.
In total, more than 10,000 foreign women and children are still being held in detention camps for the families of jihadists in Al-Hol and Roj, in Syrian Kurdistan, according to a figure communicated to Reuters by Badran Jia Kurd, senior official of self-governing regional administration.
Many NGOs have denounced the sanitary conditions prevailing in these dilapidated and overcrowded camps.
For Letta Tayler, head of terrorism and counter-terrorism work at the NGO Human Human Rights Watch (HRW), “this humanitarian and security crisis will only get worse as long as the countries of origin continue to -treat the management of their detained nationals to a non-governmental force in one of the most complicated war zones in the world”.
In his eyes, the some 500 repatriations organized this year therefore represent only “a drop in the ocean”.
(Report Orhan Qereman and Maya Gebeily; French version Myriam Rivet, edited by)