For the first time, Paris performs a massive repatriation of French people held in Syria. It is a break with the policy of the “case by case” hitherto privileged.
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Two special aircraft, one of which was chartered by the French government, landed on Tuesday July 5 at dawn, at Le Bourget airport with 16 jihadist women and 35 children, all repatriated detention camps in northeast Syria. This is the most important repatriation operation carried out by the French authorities since the fall of the last bastion of the Islamic State organization (IS), in March 2019, in Baghouz.
This collective repatriation marks a break with the policy of the “case by case” adopted so far by Paris, which consists de facto in bringing children to the national soil without their mothers, that is to say either Orphans, children whose mothers had agreed to sign a document for renouncing their parental rights. Fearing to be abandoned on the spot – or simply refusing to assume the judicial consequences of their acts – the vast majority of mothers had so far refused to separate from their children.
Only 35 alleged orphaned children had been repatriated by Paris, including the last in January 2021. About 80 jihadist women and 200 French children were still detained in the northeast camps of Syria, before the repatriation of Tuesday.
Long interrogations
Just after landing, mothers and children were separated. The women were immediately arrested and placed in police custody, under the arrest warrants issued in their absence. They will be questioned at length by officers of the Directorate General of Internal Security (DGSI) and the anti-terrorist sub-directorate (SDAT), before a very likely indicted by the anti-terrorist judges, accompanied by a placement in pre-trial detention.
Children were taken care of by Social Aid for Childhood (ASE) in Seine-Saint-Denis, competent territorially. While their legal fate is entrusted to the tribunal of the minors of Bobigny, they will have to go through a long process of health and psychological evaluation, carried out, among others, by the Avicenne hospital, which has a unit specialized in psychotrauma, under the direction Professor Thierry Baubet. The children will then be placed in host families and followed by the ASE services and the judicial protection of youth (PJJ).
What could have motivated such a turnaround on the part of Paris? Among the European countries, of which some 5,000 nationals joined IS between 2013 and 2017, France was increasingly isolated in its choice of a repatriation policy “on a case -by -case basis”. Belgium, Finland, Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands and Germany have decided to repatriate all of their children, in the company of their mothers when possible. Thus, Brussels brought about almost all of its nationals on the spot.
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