France will halt the collective repatriation of jihadist wives and their children detained in camps in north-eastern Syria due to a shortage of volunteers and after carrying out its fourth such operation in a year on Tuesday.
• Also read: Paris has repatriated ten women and 25 children from jihadist prison camps in Syria
“All the mothers who expressed their desire to leave Syria have 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 presented to families at the time as the last of its kind, which worried them.
France “cannot forcibly repatriate people residing abroad and, of course, their children,” the diplomatic source said on Friday, indicating that 169 children and 57 adult women have been returned to French territory since 2019.
“Some very radicalized mothers have explicitly stated that they want to stay in Syria,” the same source said, without being able to give the number of people affected. In May, a source familiar with the matter told AFP that around 80 French women did not want to “return”.
However, another diplomatic source did not rule out the possibility of individual and targeted repatriation of some women.
“Barbed Wire and Violence”
These French women had voluntarily entered areas controlled by jihadist groups in the Iraqi-Syrian zone and were captured at the time of the 2019 fall of the Islamic State (IS) organization.
A court case will be instituted against any adult who has joined and remains in the Iraqi-Syrian zone.
The issue of their repatriation is a sensitive one in many countries, particularly France, which was hit by jihadist attacks fueled by ISIS, notably in 2015.
By the summer of 2022, France had opted for the targeted repatriation of orphans or minors whose mothers had agreed to waive their parental rights.
Then, in July 2022, it carried out the first large-scale collective repatriation operation, before being carried out in October and then January.
“Hundreds of children are still living in these camps, who only know the swamp, the barbed wire and the violence,” said Marie Dosé, advocate for families of women and children detained in the camps in north-eastern Syria.
She reiterates that France “has the means to enforce the return of these children, who may very well be taken to Iraqi Kurdistan with their mothers for their expulsion to France, whether or not these women accept their return .”
The United Family collective, which brings together relatives of French women detained in Syria, regularly denounces that the living conditions in the camps are “incompatible with respect for human dignity”.
This association also calls on the government “to take all necessary measures without delay to repatriate all French children detained in Syria, as well as their mothers”.