Mon 26 February 2024:
Dozens of families who once lived in the IS ‘caliphate’ in Syria urging their governments to rescue them from barricaded camps manned by armed guards, Sky News reported.
This report comes from our special correspondent Alex Crawford…
Tens of thousands of women, many of them Western and once married to Islamic State men, are still being held in two closed tented camps in northeast Syria nearly five years after the fall of the extremist group.
Shamima Begum – who ran away to join IS while a teenager at school in east London – is not the only woman to be effectively disowned and abandoned by her home country.
Alex Crawford spoke to British, Australian, Belgian, German, Dutch and Caribbean women who all insist they and their children are being punished for the sins of their partners and fathers.
Most of the Western women and their children are in Al Roj where they’ve been without electricity for the past month and where conditions are brutally tough.
In one section of the camp called Australia Street because of the domination of Australians living there, there are rainbows and painted maps of Australia.
One mother from Melbourne called Kirsty Rosse-Emile told us she had two small children, aged seven and four who she desperately wants to take back home.
“My kids have done absolutely nothing wrong. My daughter was two years old when we came here and they know nothing and I’m trying to protect them from everything.”
‘Let us come back’
One British woman from Leeds told us how she was persuaded to go to Syria by her husband who was from Birmingham. She doesn’t know where her husband is now but so many of IS’s foreign fighters were killed in combat. Her seven-year-old son Adam was born in Raqqa, the capital of the IS caliphate in Syria.
“It was a bad mistake,” she said of her decision, “but I want to go back home”.
“There are no schools here,” she said. “No reading or writing – nothing, and there are no doctors. No, don’t do this to Adam, he’s innocent.”
SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES
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