ROJAVA HANDS OVER 30 CHILDREN OF ISIS-LINKED PARENTS TO RUSSIA

Fri 13 November 2020:

The Kurdish-led administration of northeast Syria, also known as Rojava, has handed over 30 children of ISIS-linked parents to Russian authorities, on Thursday – marking the fourth repatriation of its kind by Moscow in as many months.

News of the handover of the children aged between 2 and 14 to Russian authorities was made at a press conference by Abdulkarim Omar, co-chair of foreign relations for the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (NES).

“The children are innocent… we believe the place of these children is not in the camps. They should live somewhere peaceful,” Omar said.

If children are left in northeast Syrian detention camps, “a radical and new generation of terrorists will rise, they will be worse than the current ISIS and they will be brainwashed,” he added.

Approximately 70,000 people live in the northeast Syrian camps of al-Hol and Roj, most of whom are women and children who either fled or were rounded up as the Islamic State (ISIS) began to lose ground in the country from 2017 onwards. Around 13,000 of those held at the camps are non-Iraqi foreigners.

There are no exact figures on the number of Russian children currently in Iraq and Syria, but Kheda Saratova, a repatriation activist and advisor to Chechen leader Ramazan Kadyrov estimated in February 2019 that there could be as many as 1,400.

Human rights groups have deplored the “filthy and often inhuman and life-threatening conditions” found in the camps. Rojava’s authorities have implored governments worldwide to repatriate their nationals, especially children, from al-Hol and Roj, but few countries have heeded the call.

Thursday’s handover of Russian children followed a meeting between Syrian First Lady Asma al-Assad and Anna Kuznetsova, head of the Russian-presidency affiliated Commissioner for the Rights of the Child in Damascus earlier on Thursday.

Russia’s repatriation of children from Syria ground to a halt when the coronavirus outbreak began to take international hold. They resumed in August, when 26 children were repatriated, according to Russian state media outlet TASS. Fifteen children were repatriated from Syria in September, and 27 more were taken back to Russia in October.

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