Marie Dosé sighs deeply, pushing back her brown locks. Tortoiseshell spectacles frame her serious gaze. Various legal briefs sit tidily on her oversize desk. Dosé is the lead lawyer representing Le Collectif des Familles Unies, a group that brings together the families of more than a hundred French citizens stranded in detention camps in Syria since the collapse of ISIL, the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. Her law offices, in a converted classic Parisian apartment in the Ninth Arrondissement, are spacious, but far from luxurious. Children’s books are tidily laid out in the waiting area, together with a Smurf toy figurine dressed in a lawyer’s robe, holding a yellow scroll.
It was also seven years ago that the first family contacted Dosé to seek her help to bring back their daughter, together with two young grandchildren, from Syria. Dosé laughs bitterly as she recounts how at the time she simply took it for granted that the French government—Emmanuel Macron’s government—would want to repatriate French citizens, especially minors. Her hopes would be repeatedly dashed. Perhaps it was the scars of the series of ISIL terror attacks on French soil, or the right-wing political threat of Marine Le Pen, Macron’s two-time rival for the presidency. Regardless, though its policy evolved, France, unlike Germany, Finland, and other European countries, has not brought back many of its women and children.
What’s more, after this summer’s snap elections, Macron is a lame-duck president, initially forced into cohabitation with a minority right-wing coalition government, having rejected the progressive parties’ candidate for prime minister. That government collapsed in early December. The next parliamentary elections are widely expected next summer. As unforgiving as Macron’s France has been with the stranded women and children, an even more severe policy would be expected under a Le Pen government. The question of the children’s return grows ever more urgent. Matters are further complicated by the fall of Bashar Al Assad’s regime, which for the moment has deepened the uncertainty surrounding the detainees’ future.
One ISIL Frenchman was Patrick Pascal (all names of the family members have been changed). Patrick was born and raised in a middle-class, mixed-faith Parisian household. Both parents were educators. Pierre, the father, was born in French Algeria to a Pieds-Noirs family of Protestant and Roman Catholic stock. Patricia, the mother, is partly of Jewish heritage and lost an aunt to the Nazis during the wartime occupation of France. The family would spend the school year in Paris and summers in a holiday cottage in the countryside, a short drive away from the beach. Today, both are retired and in their sixties, with the gentle manner common to many grandparents, except that their four grandsons are detained in a Syrian camp. When I first visited them this past summer, they were busy packing bags for a third trip to Syria, where they would visit their daughter-in-law and grandchildren. “This was not what we imagined when we said we would travel once we retire,” Pierre quipped, “yet here we are.”
Back home, he would meet and marry Leïla, a Parisian of Arab heritage. By 2015, the couple had two young boys. Patrick would also fall in with a fundamentalist crowd. During a picnic that summer, he shared with his parents that he planned to take his young family “on holiday.” Patrick managed to leave France, despite being technically under “judicial supervision.” One month later, in August, he told his parents that he would “extend his vacation.” The following month, he would share with them that the young family had arrived in ISIL territories.
Thousands of foreign women and children were stranded in SDF camps in northeastern Syria. As of 2021, the two main camps of Al Hol and Al Roj held more than 60,000 people, of whom around 12,000 were third-country nationals.
Syrian Kurdish officials have repeatedly called on third countries and the international community to “urgently” repatriate their citizens. These calls were echoed by the United Nations and humanitarian NGOs. Vladimir Voronkov, undersecretary-general of the United Nations Office of Counter-Terrorism, publicly warned that countries’ failure to repatriate would “bring about the very outcomes we intend to prevent,” including “the radicalization and recruitment of a new generation of terrorists, and the strengthening of terrorist groups in the region and around the world.”
What is striking is that the vast majority of the detained were, and remain, minors. The latest counts estimate children make up two-thirds of those detained in camps. Moreover, according to United Nations estimates, 77 percent of the children in camps were under the age of 12 at the time of internment, with 33 percent younger than five. The sanitary conditions within the camps are dire. An average of five children per week were reported to have died in Al Hol during 2019 and 2020. Save the Children reported that two children were dying every week in Al Hol in 2021. The United Nations Commission of Inquiry on Syria described conditions in Al Hol as “inhumane.” Children have drowned in sewage pits, died in tent fires, and been run over and killed by trucks.
The security situation is equally challenging. Children are at constant risk of being trafficked, injured, or even murdered. The U.N. reported more than 90 murders in Al Hol in 2021. Forty-two murders, including 22 women victims, were documented in Al Hol in the first 11 months of 2022 alone. In November 2022, two Egyptian girls, both younger than 15, were found dead with stab wounds in a sewage ditch in Al Hol, days after being raped, according to the U.N. report.
A precise number is not known, but at least hundreds of the detained children were citizens of Western democracies. In 2019, France’s Minister of Justice Nicole Belloubet confirmed that 75 percent of the French children detained in the camps were younger than seven. These children ...
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