France’s jihadi wives return home
Government long resisted calls to end detention abroad
PARIS — France brought home 16 wives of jihadis from sprawling detention camps in northeastern Syria on Tuesday, breaking with a policy that for years had ruled out repatriating and trying adult women who had left to join the Islamic State group.
The women were accompanied by 35 children — some traveling with their mothers, others who are orphans — in what was the largest such group repatriated in one go by France as the government responded to mounting pressure to shift its approach.
France had long resisted calls by rights groups and security experts to repatriate adult women, saying that it considered them “fighters” who should be tried where they were accused of committing crimes: in Syria and Iraq.
Even as such local trials proved impossible, France stuck to its position and refused to bring home not only adults but also most children, repatriating only a few dozen over the course of three years, following a piecemeal approach that came to contrast with most of its European neighbors.
The French Foreign Ministry said in a statement Tuesday that welfare services had taken care of the children and that the mothers had been turned over to the judicial authorities. The women — all are French, except for two who have French children, authorities said — are expected to be charged in connection with joining the Islamic State.
International organizations, including the United Nations, along with lawyers and politicians, had urged France to rethink its approach, pointing out the deteriorating living and
security conditions in the camps.
The effort was also given a lift by the reelection in April of President Emmanuel Macron, who no longer has to take into account a potential electoral backlash. The issue of the repatriations is highly sensitive in France, which remains traumatized by years of Islamist terrorist attacks.
On Tuesday, Julien Odoul, a lawmaker and spokesperson for the National Rally, the far-right party of Marine Le Pen, posted on social media about the repatriations. “Bringing them back to France is a crime against the security of our people,” he wrote.
About 165 children and 65 women of French nationality are still stranded in the fetid, disease-ridden detainment camps run by Kurdish forces in northeastern Syria, where they are in a state of legal limbo.
Letta Tayler, a senior counterterrorism researcher at Human Rights Watch, said that more than 1,000 European citizens had been brought home since 2019, when the Islamic State lost its last foothold in Syria.
Repatriations in other European countries have accelerated since the beginning of the year, recognizing the dismal security and living situation in the camps, with countries including
Belgium and Germany bringing home more than 90 children and their mothers.
By contrast, France had not taken back any of its citizens since January 2021, following a case-by-case approach that limited repatriation to orphans and children whose mothers agreed to let them go.
Adult women, the French authorities have long said, should be tried in Syria or Iraq. But trying them locally has proved impossible; the Iraqi government has ruled out doing so, and the Kurdish administration that is detaining them in Syria is not internationally recognized.
The repatriation Tuesday of the 16 women, ages 22-39,
suggested that France was now willing to take a different approach.
Tayler, of Human Rights Watch, urged the country to repatriate all its citizens and to prosecute them as appropriate. “Surely it can provide due process to women who have already said they are willing to serve prison time if they are brought home,” she said.
Ludovic Riviere, the lawyer of a woman who was brought home Tuesday, said, “The French position had become ridiculous, dangerous and indefensible.”
Living conditions in the Kurdish-run camps have deteriorated sharply over the months, giving greater urgency to repatriations and prompting the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child to criticize France.
“France has violated the rights of French children detained for years,” the committee said in a statement in February. “The children are living in inhuman sanitary conditions, lacking basic necessities including water, food and health care, and facing an imminent risk of death.”
Most security experts and rights groups have argued that leaving European citizens in the camps incurs greater risks than bringing them home, because they could join a resurgent Islamic State in the region.