France says won't take back Syria jihadist fighters and their families
France and other European nations have been wrestling with
how to handle the hundreds of foreign fighters, many of whom are being held by
the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces which led the final push against ISIS.
French daily Liberation reported Friday that in early March
the government had been ready to bring home around 250 men, women and children
before abandoning the plan given public hostility to the repatriations.
The issue is extremely sensitive in France, where a deadly
2015 attack on the capital claimed by ISIS killed 130 people and set off a wave
of other deadly assaults since then.
"It's logical that our services considered all
hypotheses. This was one of the hypothesis they prepared," Castaner said
at a press conference following a meeting of G7 interior ministers in Paris.
"No communal repatriation was under consideration to be
carried out," he said, reiterating that France would nonetheless study
bringing back children of jihadist fighters on a "case-by-case
basis".
He denied Liberation's claim that France's policy with
regards to fighters in Syria was being dictated by public opinion.
Last month, French authorities for the first time brought
home five orphaned children of French jihadists' from camps in northeast Syria.
According to the UN children's agency UNICEF, around 3,000
foreign children from 43 countries are housed at the Al-Hol camp in Syria
alone, which has taken in most of the people fleeing ISIS's self-proclaimed
"caliphate" in recent weeks.
Up to 1,700 French nationals are thought to have travelled
to Iraq and Syria to fight with the jihadists between 2014 and 2018, according
to government figures. Around 300 are believed to have died in combat.
Kurdish officials have warned they do not have the resources
to hold all the captured fighters indefinitely, and Washington is also urging
its allies in the anti-ISIS coalition to take home their citizens.
But repatriation is a politically fraught issue, and
governments fear they may not have enough evidence to convict ISIS members who
claim they did not fight.