Britain repatriates some Islamic State orphans left in Syria
Britain’s Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab is seen outside Downing Street in London, Britain, October 24, 2019. Photo: Reuters
LONDON,— Britain said on Thursday it had arranged for some orphans to be brought home from Syria, joining Germany, Belgium and Australia in repatriating children whose parents were suspected members of Islamic State.
Britain has generally been reluctant to allow adults who traveled to Syria to return home but Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said it was right to bring children home.
“These innocent, orphaned, children should never have been subjected to the horrors of war,” Raab said.
“We have facilitated their return home, because it was the right thing to do. Now they must be allowed the privacy and given the support to return to a normal life.”
Raab did not say how many children were returning. The charity Save The Children said in October that more than 60 British children were trapped in north-eastern Syria.
Many Western countries have struggled with how to deal with citizens who went to the Middle East to join groups such as Islamic State, which was driven out of its last territorial enclave in March by U.S.-backed forces.
Earlier this month Turkey started to deport captives from Islamic State.
The Kurdish Democratic Union Party PYD and its powerful military wing YPG/YPJ, considered the most effective fighting force against IS in Syria and U.S. has provided them with arms. The YPG, which is the backbone of the Syrian Democratic Forces SDF forces, has seized swathes of Syria from Islamic State.
The Kurdish forces expelled the Islamic State from its last patch of territory in the eastern Syrian village of Baghouz in March 2019.
11,000 Kurdish male and female fighters had been killed in five years of war to eliminate the Islamic State “caliphate” that once covered an area the size of Great Britain in Syria and Iraq.
Syria’s Kurds have detained thousands of foreigners suspected of fighting for Islamic State, as well as thousands of related women and children, during the battle against IS in Syria and are being held in by Kurdish forces in Syrian Kurdistan.
The Kurds are pushing foreign nations to take responsibility for the crisis and have warned that they could not guarantee how long they could keep such large numbers of dangerous jihadists locked up.
Copyright © 2019, respective author or news agency, Ekurd.net | Reuters
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