A French lawyer is seeking the repatriation of an ISIS follower’s two orphaned children, who are still detained in Al Roj camp in north-east Syria.
Their French mother, Malika, died recently of illness in the camp, leaving behind two girls aged nine and 11, and is the third French woman to die in a camp since the collapse of ISIS in 2019.
The family has been detained in Al Roj since 2019, which remains under control of the Syrian Democratic Forces, a Kurdish armed group.
Marie Dose, the lawyer representing the family, told Le Parisien she had met the two girls in the camp and has been petitioning the French government to repatriate Malika since 2019.
Though initially intended as a refugee camp for families displaced during the battle with ISIS, residents are unable to leave the camp and remain under close supervision by the SDF due to their suspected affiliation with ISIS.
Rights groups have described this as arbitrary detention and pointed to the camp’s poor sanitary and living conditions.
France is believed to have repatriated at least 179 children from camps in Syria and Iraq, but dozens remain and some have become adults. Some women have reportedly refused repatriation because they feared being separated from their children.
Forty-seven French men suspected of belonging to ISIS in Syria were transferred by US forces to Iraq earlier this year, during a confrontation between the SDF and the new Syrian government which led to some of the prisons being abandoned.
The US has urged countries to repatriate their nationals so that they face trial in their home countries.
Three men who were brought to Syria by their parents when they were children aged 12 and under have also lodged a complaint to French courts seeking repatriation this month, as they languish in an Iraqi prison.
If tried and convicted of terror-related offences by Iraqi courts, the men face the death penalty.
The Syrian government closed a larger camp for women and children, Al Hol, earlier this year, acknowledging that the majority of those detained were Syrian nationals who were displaced during the US-led battle against ISIS.
