France will stop the collective repatriation of jihadist wives and their children detained in camps in northeastern Syria, for lack of volunteers and after having carried out the fourth operation of this type in a year on Tuesday. “All the mothers having expressed their wish to leave Syria having been repatriated, there will be no more operations of this type,” a diplomatic source told AFP on Friday. On Tuesday, 10 women and 25 children were repatriated from Syria, an operation which had then been presented to families as the last of its type, causing their concern.
France cannot “forcibly repatriate people residing abroad, nor of course their children”, the diplomatic source explained on Friday, specifying that 169 children and 57 adult women have been brought back to French territory since 2019. ” Some very radicalized mothers have explicitly stated that they want to stay in Syria,” explained the same source, without being able to communicate the number of people concerned. In May, a source familiar with the matter told AFP that around 80 French women did not want to “return”. Another diplomatic source, however, did not rule out the possibility of repatriating some women on an individual and targeted basis.
“Barbed wire” and “violence”
These French women had voluntarily gone to the territories controlled by jihadist groups in the Iraqi-Syrian zone and had been captured at the time of the fall of the Islamic State (IS) organization in 2019. Any adult who joined the Iraqi-Syrian zone Syrian country and who remained there is the subject of legal proceedings. The question of their repatriation is sensitive in many countries, particularly in France which was hit by jihadist attacks, especially in 2015, fomented by IS.
France had opted until the summer of 2022 for the targeted repatriation of orphaned children or minors whose mothers had agreed to renounce their parental rights. Then in July 2022, it carried out the first large-scale collective repatriation operation, before that of October, then January.
Hundreds of children involved
“There remain in these camps a hundred children who know only the mire, barbed wire and violence,” said Tuesday Marie Dosé, lawyer for families of women and children detained in the camps in northeastern Syria. She affirms that France “has the means to impose the return of these children, who can very well be taken with their mothers to Iraqi Kurdistan with a view to their expulsion to France, whether or not this return is accepted by these women. “.
The United Family collective, which brings together relatives of French women detained in Syria, regularly denounces living conditions in the camps “incompatible with respect for human dignity”. This association also urges the government to take “immediately all the necessary measures to repatriate all the French children detained in Syria, as well as their mothers”.