ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — French protesters gathered outside the Secretary of State office in Paris on Saturday, urging president Emmanuel Macron and his government to repatriate children of Islamic State-linked parents from hazardous camps in northeast Syria.
Around 50 people gathered outside the government office for the back-to-school themed protest, organised by the United Families Collective (Collectif des Familles Unies), a group of relatives of ISIS-linked women and children campaigning for the repatriation of their loved ones. Children's backpacks were laid out onto the ground, with photos of children stuck at the camps and placards reading "repatriate me" placed on top of them.
"All French children are at school, except French children imprisoned in camps in Syria," a press release issued before the protest read.
Some 250 children born to French nationals who joined the Islamic State are held at the Roj and al-Hol camps in northeast Syria, run by the Kurdish-led authorities that control the area. Over 13,000 foreign, non-Iraqi nationals live at the two camps; more than 9,000 of them are children.
Related: ‘I’ll never abandon you’: the French fight to bring ISIS-linked women and kids home from Syria
Conditions at al-Hol, home to the vast majority of ISIS-linked women and children, have been almost universally recognised as unlivable, with poor sanitary conditions and overcrowding. Human Rights Watch (HRW) detailed the "filthy and often inhuman and life-threatening conditions" at the camp in a report published in June.
Al-Hol recorded its first coronavirus cases last month, and it is feared that the camp's conditions could exacerbate the spread of the disease.
Like other European countries, France has only repatriated children on a case-by-case basis, taking back 28 of those that authorities have deemed to be the most vulnerable. Surveys of French public opinion show that repatriation even of children is unpopular.
Kurdish authorities, the United States, and humanitarian organisations have urged countries to repatriate their nationals and trial the adults at home, but to little avail.
The day before Saturday's protest, an open letter was published by the United Families Collective calling on Macron to repatriate children from the camps, and an appeal for repatriation was signed by 76 French lawmakers from both ruling and opposition parties.
Among those speaking at the protest were relatives of detainees, lawyers, and other campaigners.
"What's 200 children out of 65 million inhabitants?" United Families Collective member Veronique Roy asked. "It's nothing, what are we afraid of? These children are children, they have done nothing, they are victims. And if we are afraid of repatriating them because we think they are the children of adults who are responsible for having gone to Syria or perhaps for having committed acts that perhaps fall under the jurisdiction of justice, and although we judge them, France is capable of judging them."
Authorities in northeast Syria said last week that they were in the process of moving hundreds of "less radicalised" residents of al-Hol to the smaller, better organised Roj camp. However, reports emerged in Australian press of women and children being taken from al-Hol to Roj, with some handcuffed, strip-searched and their possessions destroyed.
Speaking to Rudaw English on Wednesday, the Kurdish official in charge of the camps in northeast Syria denied that people had been taken from al-Hol with force; instead, they had been taken "securely", amid what he described as tense conditions at the camp between ISIS-loyal residents and others.
ISIS-affiliated women “see al-Hol Camp as their small state and they have courts and security forces," official Sheikhmous Ahmed said. "They create obstacles [for others to leave the camp]. They beat those families who want to leave the camp, because they believe that if someone leaves the camp they have left their caliphate. So we don't take people out by force, but securely."
French families were among those who have been moved from al-Hol to Roj, the United Families Collective told Rudaw English last week.
"We can’t forget that this situation came to be in the first place because of the scandalous attitude of our countries - France and Europe in particular - which must repatriate their nationals, and who leave innocent children to survive in camps, in prisons, and in exile," the collective said.
Video footage by AFP; video editing by Sarkawt Mohammed
