23 women and children from Syria who had been captured and kept hostage in the ISIS camps have been repatriated to Germany and Finland. Notably, some of them had had a criminal record to their name, and had allegedly had ties with the Islamic State.
According to German media reports, the three repatriated German women are aged between 21 and 38 and the children are aged between 2 and 12. The group resided in a refugee camp under Kurdish control.
“I am very relieved that we were able to repatriate another 12 children and three mothers from camps in northeastern Syria yesterday,” German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said in a statement. Maas added that the return was organised in cooperation with Finland, which repatriated six children and two women. He did not further identify the women or children. However, the German weekly Bild am Sonntag reported that all three women had left Germany in recent years to join the so-called Islamic State group Syria. The paper identified the women as Merve A., Yasmin A. and Leonora M.
Finland’s foreign ministry said it had brought home six children and two adult mothers because it was the only way to protect the children held at the al-Hol camp in northeastern Syria, where Kurdish-led forces have detained suspected former IS members. “Under the constitution, Finnish public authorities are obligated to safeguard the basic rights of the Finnish children interned in the camps insofar as this is possible,” it said.