‘I’ll never abandon you’: the French fight to bring ISIS-linked women and kids home from Syria
ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — Anne* delighted in the cross-country visits of her eldest granddaughter to her home in small-town France. “She was very sweet, very wise, intelligent, joyful. She liked drawing, manual tasks, going to the park, seeing the animals, bedtime stories,” Anne recounted to Rudaw English. “We'd have fits of laughter. She loved food, and she’d say, "’Grandma, you're going to make this for me’...I'd make pastries with her beside me."
Anne is somewhat hesitant to open up about her story of loss, asking to be kept as anonymous as possible for her safety. She has not seen her granddaughter, now aged ten, in four years. Like thousands of other people all over the world drawn in by the establishment of a new caliphate, Anne’s daughter and son-in-law took their three children to Syria in 2016 to join the Islamic State (ISIS).
As ISIS barrelled towards defeat in 2018 and 2019, thousands of men were arrested and imprisoned, and women and children interned at camps under the control of Kurdish-led authorities in the country’s northeast. Some 70,000 women and children, including 13,000 or so foreign, non-Iraqi nationals, now live in the indefinite squalor of Hasaka’s al-Hol and Roj camps, their futures undetermined. Nine thousand of them are children; around half of them are under 5 years of age.
Around 150 ISIS-linked French adults and some 250 of their children are in detention at al-Hol and Roj. France has the largest number of ISIS-linked children in detention at the two camps of any European country. Just 28 French children have been repatriated, granted return home only on a ‘case by case’ by their government - despite calls by Kurdish authorities, human rights organisations and the United States for countries to repatriate their citizens. While French president Emmanuel Macron and foreign minister Jean-Yves Le Drian have recognised the dire conditions the country’s citizens are living in, they have shown steadfast refusal to speed up repatriation.
Pushing back against the obstinance to return French citizens are relatives of detainees, lawyers, and outspoken survivors of ISIS terror attacks in France. Their pleas are particularly impassioned when it comes to the return of blameless French children, and their mothers, who they say ought to be trialled in the country they came from.
Upon her arrival in Syria four years ago, Anne’s daughter lived near the ISIS stronghold of Raqqa; she did not tell Anne exactly where, fearing it could compromise her safety. Anne maintained contact with her daughter through WhatsApp messages and phone calls – that was how she learned of the birth of a fourth grandchild, a boy, in 2017. Her granddaughter would send her voice notes telling her she missed her, and wanted to see her. When Anne’s daughter was widowed in 2018 and moved to al-Hol, she continued to send her mother updates, now about the difficulties of camp life; frequent bouts of illness, treks to source water when deliveries did not come around, and torrential rainfall that caused their tent to collapse two winters ago, soaking all of their possessions.
Anne considered her daughter and grandchildren as some of the lucky ones. She was able to send them money to pay for more new clothing, more blankets, food. And unlike some, she at least knew where her family were.
“There was a point when Anne was in daily contact with her daughter – “she’d send me photos...she’d tell me when it was too hot, too cold, when she was taking medication,” she said.
But Anne has not heard from her daughter in over a year. She has no idea of her whereabouts, and whether or not she has been separated from her children. She has only heard whispers through the families of other detainees of raids on the camp by burly, balaclava-clad guards, of women having been whisked away without explanation. She assumes her daughter was among those caught in a raid’s net, to be sent to a detention facility elsewhere in northeast Syria. Other French relatives of detainees have recounted, that regular contact with family came to an abrupt end after raids on camps seeking to root out women suspected of continued affiliation to the terror group.
The uncertainty over her family’s condition has left Anne wracked with worry.
“It's really hot in Syria right now. Are they in prison? Are they eating, drinking, are they sick? It's horrible. I used to tell myself they're ok, they're being detained by Kurds – even if they don't like them, they haven't been killed, they're there. But I don't know what's happened to them now. I'm scared, especially for the children.”
Strength in numbers
Searching for answers to the whereabouts of her daughter and grandchildren has left Anne feeling isolated and ignored. She has tried contacting the French foreign ministry, the French justice ministry, the United Nations, non-governmental organisations, and has sent correspondence translated into both Arabic and Kurdish to the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, but to no avail. The French foreign ministry has simply told her that they know of her children and grandchildren’s presence in northeast Syria, that they’ve registered it, but nothing more.
But a group of families of ISIS-linked detainees has provided her with support, and the strength in numbers to push forward in the search for her daughter and grandchildren. Founded in 2018, the United Families Collective (Collectif des Familles Unies) is made up of over a hundred families of which a member left to join Iraq or Syria during the rise of the Islamic State from 2014 onwards. Working on a “secular and democratic” foundation, the collective campaigns for the repatriation of all French children and their mothers, and against the religious extremism that motivated their departure.
Posts on the collective’s Twitter account run with clockwork regularity, including daily camp temperature checks, calls from relatives of ISIS detainees around the world for help in locating their loved ones, and drawings by French children held at the camps. Its tenacious campaigning on Twitter and beyond has proven effective, securing high-level meetings with the French government – but those meetings have largely proven fruitless.
“Our collective has been received some months ago by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and by the prime minister’s team,” collective member Marc Lopez told Rudaw English. “This didn’t give us any results, and our current contact is made only by the intermediary of lawyers of the families.”
While there is no corresponding legal collective as such, a number of lawyers are conducting a coordinated push for the repatriation of all French children and their mothers. The lawyers – Nabil Boudi, William Bourdon, Emmanuel Daoud, Marie Dose, Henri Leclerc, Martin Pradel, Ludovic Riviere, and Gerard Tcholakian – have assembled to court French government attention.
Toulouse-based Riviere worked on the repatriation of three siblings from al-Hol camp on June 22 - part of a group of ten “unaccompanied children and orphans” taken in by France. The three siblings were two brothers and a sister, whose twin, seven-year-old Taymia, was repatriated in April for treatment for a cardiac condition. The four children were repatriated without their mother, with her permission.
The motive behind working these cases is simple; “because French families want us to. It is inhumane to leave these French children in these conditions. They are victims above all, victims of the decisions made by their parents,” Riviere told Rudaw English.
Repatriation of French children is a “legal obligation” under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the failure of France, a signatory of the treaty, to uphold the basic rights of these children is "abominable," Riviere said.
Of those currently held at al-Hol, 90 percent are women and children. Most foreign detainees are put up in the camp’s annex, further away from basic camp services like water. The camp, particularly the annex, is known to be dangerously overcrowded, thanks to the massive influx of residents after the capture of Baghouz. Al-Hol’s population rose from around 10,000 at the start of 2019, to more than 73,000 people by May of that year, according to Save the Children.
Humanitarian organisations have documented desperate camp conditions, including outbreaks of hepatitis, diarrhoea, and other illnesses. The annex’s only clinic has reportedly been shut for months. Health fears have been confounded by the potential threat of an outbreak of coronavirus that would thrive in its poor sanitary conditions.
According to data provided by local monitor the Rojava Information Center (RIC), 406 deaths were registered at al-Hol between December 4 2018 and August 31 of last year. The overwhelming majority – 313, or 77 percent – were of children under the age of 5 years old. At least nine children born to European parents have died of preventable causes in northeast Syrian camps in recent years, the New York Times reported Yasmine Ahmed, executive director of the Rights and Security International group as saying.
Alongside its repeated calls for countries to repatriate their citizens, officials from the Kurdish-led Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (NES) have said that they and the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) are unable to cope with managing al-Hol, and fear they cannot stop a potential resurgence of radicalisation at the camp, where bloody riots and demonstrations have taken place. Propaganda videos have surfaced in recent years of children at the camp pledging allegiance to ISIS. Some 2,000 “less radicalised” women and children are being transferred to Roj, currently home to 4,000 women and children and widely recognised to be the camp with better conditions, “to reduce pressure on Hol and to reduce risk of radicalisation”, RIC told Rudaw English.
The number of French children at the two camps is unclear, with estimates ranging from between 200 and 300 before repatriations began. RIC said that there are no official numbers for the number of French children at the camps. The United Families Collective says the number is likely between 200 and 250, and that two thirds of these children are under the age of 6. An April 2019 report by French news outlet Liberation claiming to have seen classified government documents put the number of registered ISIS-linked French men, women and children at 250.
New justice minister, new chapter?
Eric Dupond-Moretti, appointed as French justice minister on July 6, was a well-known criminal defence lawyer before taking on his current role. A year and a half ago, he called for the repatriation of all French nationals – men, women, and children.
Asked on French television in February 2019 if he supported the repatriation of French adults and children from Syria and Iraq, he responded with certainty. Trial there has led to the death penalty sentencing – illegal in France since 1981 – and French nationals must face justice at home.
"Of course...we have to repatriate them, especially if they incur the death penalty, and judge them in France. They must have their right to a fair trial."
Anne, Lopez, and Riviere all expressed hope that Dupond-Moretti’s appointment would breathe new urgency into repatriations. Optimism is tempered, though, as former justice minister Nicole Belloubet had also issued strong statements backing the repatriation of French nationals, saying that there was “no other choice” but to do so.
Refusal to repatriate all detainees appears to originate from the foreign ministry. Though foreign minister Le Drian recognised conditions at al-Hol as a “pressure cooker that risks exploding”, he has since stubbornly, and so far, successfully, insisted on case-by-case repatriations. He actively sought the trial of French ISIS suspects held in Syria by Iraqi authorities, where some were sentenced to death and executed – though a long-term plan for this appears not to have materialised.
Liberation’s report detailed that the French government had a general repatriation plan in place at the beginning of 2019 for both suspected jihadists and their families, including 149 children – but one eye was always glued towards opinion surveys that indicated widespread French public hostility to repatriation of anyone linked to ISIS.
“On these topics, public opinion is very, very sensitive. The presidency knows too well the unpopularity of this decision,” a judicial source told Liberation.
France fears radicalisation
A 2019 survey for Franceinfo and Le Figaro found that two-thirds of the French public were against the repatriation of ISIS-linked children from camps in Syria, amid fears of the import of radicalised young people feeding into and replenishing networks of homegrown Islamic extremism.
Anne’s daughter converted to Islam over a decade ago, introduced to the religion by her first love. She continued practising after they broke up, and later married another Muslim man. She moved across the country with her new husband, Anne said, and become increasingly withdrawn, unwilling to socialise with anyone except a select group of other Muslim women.
Though she suspected her daughter was becoming increasingly radical in her beliefs, Anne never expected that she would up sticks and head to Syria.
“The first time I spoke to her [in Syria], she told me, "I am obligated to be here". There was some mental manipulation there,” Anne said of her daughter. "They practice a religion, living in France, everything's going fine, and then a few years later my daughter is in a war in Syria? There's a problem. Something has gone on.”
The public’s fear of radicalisation and potential attacks by ISIS recruits on French soil are understandable, Anne says, but guilt cannot be applied uniformly to all detainees.
“It's normal for people to be scared when there are terrorist attacks,” Anne said. “The problem is that the authorities judge everyone in the same way. They can say that my daughter is guilty of joining this organisation...but the children are innocent.”
“Yes, people left, but they haven't necessarily done anything. They have to be judged fairly and individually. The authorities have to recognise that, repatriate them, and accept that some of these people can be cured of this...they have to be given a chance to rehabilitate.”
For some of those at the receiving end of the violence exacted by the Islamic State across Europe, there is no ambiguity about what the French government should do.
Aurelia Gilbert was at a rock concert at Paris’ celebrated Bataclan venue on November 13, 2015, when gunmen stormed the building. The revelling crowd mistook the sounds of the first gunshots for firecrackers, or for some other special effect, until the people around them began to drop dead. Gilbert survived by bolting towards a stairwell, where she and other concert-goers hid for over two hours until the gunshots subsided.
"You can't do anything, you just pray that the bullets don't come to you," she told LBC in an interview upon her first return to the scene since the attack.
She escaped via the stage, descending into a pit "crowded with dead bodies and blood".
"All those people I'd previously seen dancing and singing and happy and so full of life, young...they were dead," she told LBC.
Ninety people died at the venue, and over 200 were wounded in a coordinated, six-part series of attacks striking Paris that night. The bloodbath was claimed by ISIS, and further inflamed fears surrounding homegrown terrorism in a year that had begun with the Charlie Hebdo shootings.
In an interview with Radio-Canada one year after the attack, Gilbert had already predicted the problem French jihadists and their families in Iraq and Syria would later pose to a country battling religious extremism. "What do we suggest, society wise?” she asked. “They are French, we can't forget that."
In response to a recent call by a group of Belgian terrorist attack victims for the urgent repatriation of their nationals published, she took a public stance to say that France must do the same.
“Since November 13 [2015], I have refused to pass on a message of hate, which would be to play the same game as the terrorists who want to cut our society apart. Vengeance is not justice,” Gilbert told Rudaw English.
“I want to see the organisers and actors of the attacks judged in a just way and punished. I trust in the justice of my country.” Gilbert said. “To believe in a fair and humane judicial system is what differentiates us from Daesh.”
Where arguments for the humanity of children so young appear to be failing, the need to repatriate may have to be reframed in darker terms, she said.
“Since the humanitarian slant doesn’t appear to be enough (which is terrible to say), the security stance has to be explained: these children are not “brainwashed”. And even if that was the case, their destiny is not sealed. We have to give them a chance to be remedied of their traumas. They should know that their country awaits them, and will welcome them. If not, they’ll seek revenge in 10 years, 15 years. And no border will be able to hold them back.”
‘I’ll never abandon you’
Where legal methods are failing, families of detainees feel compelled to explore other options to bring their loved ones home. One possibility is to be smuggled to the nearby border with Turkey, from where they could be extradited to France thanks to a still-standing cooperation agreement made in 2014 by then French foreign minister Bernard Cazeneuve, allowing for “jihadists returning from Syria via Turkey to be immediately taken into custody upon their return.”
“I've told my daughter, "don't worry, I'll never abandon you. If there's a point where it has to happen, we'll make sure you get to Turkey, then France,” Anne told Rudaw English.
Footage coming out of al-Hol has shown women willing to go to desperate measures to make their way out of the camp, hiding in boxes under outbound water tankers in the baking summer heat. Anne has heard smuggling fee estimates of between 1, 3, and 10,000 euros, depending on the route taken; the higher the cost, the closer to guarantee that you make it to the border.
But it is a route riddled with dangerous obstacles. She has heard stories of women who tried to escape and were sold, brought back to the camp, or have simply vanished. Women who have arrived in Turkey, but have been left to languish in prison. Women who thought they were crossing the border, but were abandoned somewhere in Syria, left to fend for themselves.
To facilitate the smuggling of her loved ones poses Anne a moral dilemma. “Even with parents who respect the values of the Republic, of the law, who want to do things the right way, things aren't moving. So how else can we bring them to France?”
“Anyway, that's not an option for me,” Anne said, “because I don't know where my daughter is.”
*Name has been changed by request of the interviewee
Editing by Holly Johnston and Hannah Lynch