The attack carried out by the Islamic State (IS) organization against the Ghwayran prison in Hassaké, which killed nearly 500 people at the end of January, was a painful reminder of the risks posed by keeping foreign jihadists and their families in the prisons and camps in northeast Syria, three years after the fall of the self-proclaimed IS caliphate.
The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF, predominantly Kurdish) have reiterated their inability to ensure the detention, not to mention the trial, of the 12,000 foreign fighters of the IS for whom they are responsible.
In an appeal relayed by Washington and the United Nations (UN), the FDS have urged their international partners to repatriate their nationals detained in camps where 60,000 people are crammed, half of them children, and which have become a real ” time bomb “with deteriorating living conditions and growing radicalization, more murders and escapes.
What does France intend to do with its jihadists and their families still detained in northeast Syria? The question has, until now, been absent from the debates between the declared candidates for the presidential election. Political leaders remain deaf to repeated calls from families, lawyers, parliamentarians, NGOs and even the National Consultative Commission on Human Rights to repatriate them. While a growing number of European countries are choosing to repatriate children and their mothers, citing the humanitarian imperative and the deterioration of security in this region, Paris is sticking to its position.
Judgment on the spot
On February 14, the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, Jean-Yves Le Drian, contented himself with reaffirming the French doctrine of “case by case”: France will continue to repatriate children – “unaccompanied minors, orphans, (…) those whose mother accepts the departure” –, but not adults who must, according to Paris, be judged on the spot. Since the collapse of ISIS in March 2019 in Syria, France has brought back thirty-five children, the last in January 2021. In December 2021, a 28-year-old French woman, mother of a 6-year-old daughter, is died of diabetes in the Roj camp, despite repeated requests from lawyers for her repatriation for medical reasons.
France, which still has the largest “contingent” of the European Union (EU) in north-eastern Syria – i.e. 80 women and 200 children out of approximately 300 women and 600 children, according to estimates – is illustrated by one of the hardest positions at European level. She was pinned on February 24 by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, which considered that she had violated the rights of French children detained in Syria by failing to repatriate them, in particular “their right to life, as well as their right not to be subjected to inhuman and degrading treatment”.
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