“I simply no longer know what to do. The situation is an absolute catastrophe.”
Marie Dosé sighs deeply, pushing back her brown locks. Tortoiseshell spectacles frame her serious gaze. Various legal briefs sit tidily on her oversize desk. Dosé is the lead lawyer representing Le Collectif des Familles Unies, a group that brings together the families of more than a hundred French citizens stranded in detention camps in Syria since the collapse of ISIL, the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. Her law offices, in a converted classic Parisian apartment in the Ninth Arrondissement, are spacious, but far from luxurious. Children’s books are tidily laid out in the waiting area, together with a Smurf toy figurine dressed in a lawyer’s robe, holding a yellow scroll.
This year marks the seventh anniversary of the loss of most of ISIL territories in the Levant, most notably the two large urban centers of Mosul and Raqqa, which ISIL had seized in 2014. It is also the seventh anniversary of the start of the detention in northeastern Syria of hundreds of European women and children: the families of European men who heeded ISIL’s siren call back when the terrorist group seemed unstoppable. The detainees have spent those years in camps run by the Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF—an anti-ISIL, U.S.-backed Kurdish-Arab militia—alongside tens of thousands of non-European women and children.
It was also seven years ago that the first family contacted Dosé to seek her help to bring back their daughter, together with two young grandchildren, from Syria. Dosé laughs bitterly as she recounts how at the time she simply took it for granted that the French government—Emmanuel Macron’s government—would want to repatriate French citizens, especially minors. Her hopes would be repeatedly dashed. Perhaps it was the scars of the series of ISIL terror attacks on French soil, or the right-wing political threat of Marine Le Pen, Macron’s two-time rival for the presidency. Regardless, though its policy evolved, France, unlike Germany, Finland, and other European countries, has not brought back many of its women and children.
Today, at least 50 French women and 120 French children are still detained in the camps. Many have perished in the harsh conditions of the desert, with only basic medical care available. Back home, a code of omertà has set in among France’s political class as regards the return of these French families. In a country where marches and strikes are frequent, there is little visible political and social agitation for repatriation. There are no MISSING or KIDNAPPED posters of these children plastered on lampposts. To Dosé, “childhood is the last sacred thing there is … yet neither policymakers nor the public give a damn.”
What’s more, after this summer’s snap elections, Macron is a lame-duck president, initially forced into cohabitation with a minority right-wing coalition government, having rejected the progressive parties’ candidate for prime minister. That government collapsed in early December. The next parliamentary elections are widely expected next summer. As unforgiving as Macron’s France has been with the stranded women and children, an even more severe policy would be expected under a Le Pen government. The question of the children’s return grows ever more urgent. Matters are further complicated by the fall of Bashar Al Assad’s regime, which for the moment has deepened the uncertainty surrounding the detainees’ future.
One of the most striking phenomena of the rise of ISIL in 2014 was its transnational appeal: An estimated 53,000 men, women, and minors, including 40,000 fighters, were said to have joined ISIL forces. Up to 4,761 of the foreign volunteers were women; another 4,640 were minors. These volunteers and their families hailed from 80 to 110 countries, spanning the borders of the Islamic world and beyond. Around 6,000 came from Western Europe, 7,000 from Eastern Europe and Russia, and 750 from the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand. Of the Western contingent, around 40 percent were women and minors. The largest group by far were the French: Approximately 1,900 joined ISIL. A Collectif representative confirmed to me that the relatives of those members represented in his association span “all of France’s class, ethnic, geographic, and religious backgrounds.”
One ISIL Frenchman was Patrick Pascal (all names of the family members have been changed). Patrick was born and raised in a middle-class, mixed-faith Parisian household. Both parents were educators. Pierre, the father, was born in French Algeria to a Pieds-Noirs family of Protestant and Roman Catholic stock. Patricia, the mother, is partly of Jewish heritage and lost an aunt to the Nazis during the wartime occupation of France. The family would spend the school year in Paris and summers in a holiday cottage in the countryside, a short drive away from the beach. Today, both are retired and in their sixties, with the gentle manner common to many grandparents, except that their four grandsons are detained in a Syrian camp. When I first visited them this past summer, they were busy packing bags for a third trip to Syria, where they would visit their daughter-in-law and grandchildren. “This was not what we imagined when we said we would travel once we retire,” Pierre quipped, “yet here we are.”
As in many neighborhoods across France, Patrick grew up with many Muslim friends. In the park nearest the Pascals’ Parisian home, one does not have to listen hard to hear the staccato Arabic of the Maghreb. Patrick’s familiarity with Arab culture evolved into interest in the Muslim faith, and eventually led to him converting during his teenage years. He moved to Egypt when he turned 18 to try to learn Arabic and deepen his knowledge of the faith. Yet he returned to France shortly thereafter.
Back home, he would meet and marry Leïla, a Parisian of Arab heritage. By 2015, the couple had two young boys. Patrick would also fall in with a fundamentalist crowd. During a picnic that summer, he shared with his parents that he planned to take his young family “on holiday.” Patrick managed to leave France, despite being technically under “judicial supervision.” One month later, in August, he told his parents that he would “extend his vacation.” The following month, he would share with them that the young family had arrived in ISIL territories.
The Pascal family may have arrived during ISIL’s zenith; yet, as sudden as ISIL’s rise was its downfall. By the winter of 2017, after intense attacks from an international coalition and SDF forces, ISIL lost control over all its major urban areas. Many ISIL fighters, civilian members, and their families were killed in combat. Those who survived, like the Pascal family, fled for their lives. In April 2018, the family was captured unharmed by SDF forces. Patrick was separated from his family. He would later be sent for trial in Iraq, with France’s permission. Leïla and her three boys—the third son was born in Syria—would be interned in Al Roj camp, in northeast Syria. (A fourth son was born later.)
Thousands of foreign women and children were stranded in SDF camps in northeastern Syria. As of 2021, the two main camps of Al Hol and Al Roj held more than 60,000 people, of whom around 12,000 were third-country nationals.
The SDF itself has a mixed reputation, despite its success in overcoming ISIL. The group is closely linked to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, which has been designated as a terrorist group by the United States, the European Union, NATO, and the United Kingdom, among others. The SDF has been repeatedly accused of ethnic cleansing, torture, and other war crimes.
Syrian Kurdish officials have repeatedly called on third countries and the international community to “urgently” repatriate their citizens. These calls were echoed by the United Nations and humanitarian NGOs. Vladimir Voronkov, undersecretary-general of the United Nations Office of Counter-Terrorism, publicly warned that countries’ failure to repatriate would “bring about the very outcomes we intend to prevent,” including “the radicalization and recruitment of a new generation of terrorists, and the strengthening of terrorist groups in the region and around the world.”
What is striking is that the vast majority of the detained were, and remain, minors. The latest counts estimate children make up two-thirds of those detained in camps. Moreover, according to United Nations estimates, 77 percent of the children in camps were under the age of 12 at the time of internment, with 33 percent younger than five. The sanitary conditions within the camps are dire. An average of five children per week were reported to have died in Al Hol during 2019 and 2020. Save the Children reported that two children were dying every week in Al Hol in 2021. The United Nations Commission of Inquiry on Syria described conditions in Al Hol as “inhumane.” Children have drowned in sewage pits, died in tent fires, and been run over and killed by trucks.
The security situation is equally challenging. Children are at constant risk of being trafficked, injured, or even murdered. The U.N. reported more than 90 murders in Al Hol in 2021. Forty-two murders, including 22 women victims, were documented in Al Hol in the first 11 months of 2022 alone. In November 2022, two Egyptian girls, both younger than 15, were found dead with stab wounds in a sewage ditch in Al Hol, days after being raped, according to the U.N. report.
A precise number is not known, but at least hundreds of the detained children were citizens of Western democracies. In 2019, France’s Minister of Justice Nicole Belloubet confirmed that 75 percent of the French children detained in the camps were younger than seven. These children were either brought to the conflict zone by their parents, or were conceived and born in erstwhile ISIL territories, as with the Pascals’ third child. The Pascals’ fourth child would be born in a detention camp in October 2018.
The “right of return” is a core principle in international law that, according to Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, guarantees everyone’s “right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.” This right was partially born of the restrictions placed on Jewish citizens of Germany, whose entry and exit from their homeland were blocked by Nazi authorities.
While the right of citizens to return to their countries is a fundamental legal right, it is understandable, given the severity of the actions of adults who voluntarily joined ISIL, that their potential return home would be a source of controversy. Most legal advocates, however, took for granted that children would be quickly repatriated. After all, they were entirely blameless.
Yet, unlike other cases involving stranded citizens abroad, such as those of Americans kidnapped by Hamas in Gaza, there would be limited public clamor in France to bring “our kids home” and, consequently, a striking lack of political will, too. Louise (a pseudonym) is a UNICEF official involved in the repatriation negotiations with the governments in question. When we spoke near the United Nations New York headquarters, she admitted that, back in 2019, “We thought the world, especially democracies, would take people home. Instead we were surprised by the level of inaction, particularly with regards to children.” Today she fears the camps are turning into a “Guantánamo Bay situation, with numbers slowly going down, but at the same time children’s lives are wasting away.”
In fact, individual Western government policies regarding repatriating female and minor citizens vary markedly. Finland, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Germany, and eventually Belgium moved to return all of their underage nationals detained in Syria, as well as the mothers, where feasible. To Jussi Tanner, Finland’s special envoy for repatriations, bringing the women and children home together reflected both the state’s obligation to protect children’s fundamental rights and the state’s security interests, because the “longer children remain in the camps, the harder it will be to counter violent extremism and radicalization.”
America’s policy has also been to repatriate detained American citizens, including volunteer combatants, in order to prosecute them in U.S. courts. According to Rights and Security International, as of July 2023, 38 Americans—both adults and minors—have been repatriated. At least 11 additional individuals have returned of their own accord.
The United States has also lobbied other countries to repatriate, not least to minimize potential ISIL radicalization of the thousands of children in camps. Gen. Michael Kurilla, the U.S. military commander in the Middle East, described detained children as “prime targets for [ISIL] radicalization.” In January 2022, ISIL attacked one SDF prison, aiming to free its fighters. The prison held more than 3,000 ISIL suspects and about 700 adolescent boys. The attack resulted in the deaths of more than 500 individuals. Many of the dead were children or juveniles. The risk of similar actions is increasing. In 2023, ISIL claimed responsibility for 121 assaults in Syria and Iraq. The pace of ISIL attacks has since more than doubled, with 153 taking place in the first half of 2024 alone.
The U.S. approach is exceptional among anglophone Western nations. The United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia have shared an extreme reluctance to repatriate their citizens. The United Kingdom in fact stripped some of its nationals of their citizenship, even those who went to Syria while still minors. Very few have been brought back, and there has been no marked change in policy under Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour government.
Jo Becker, Advocacy Director of the Children’s Rights Division at Human Rights Watch, explained to me that the lethargic and hostile policy is down to a number of reasons. The children are from “the other”: Most are of immigrant stock, from lower down the socioeconomic ladder, and all are of the Muslim faith. The questions of the role of immigrants in Europe, and the place of Muslims in the continent, are already domestic political hot buttons. Becker notes that beyond “poor community activism … racism is surely a factor,” together with the rhetoric of fear of returnees being “ticking time bombs,” as one prominent French prosecutor described them. Many of the countries with the largest contingents in Syrian camps have been the victims of repeated ISIL terrorist attacks.
All these elements certainly apply to France. It has suffered the bloodiest ISIL terrorist attacks on the continent, including the November 2015 Paris attacks that killed 131 and injured 416. At the same time, France has supplied the largest contingent of Western ISIL fighters. The broader question of integrating France’s Arab and Muslim population—the country’s largest ethnic and religious minority—has bedeviled French politics and boosted the popularity of French extremist politicians.
Partly as a result, Marine Le Pen’s far-right Rassemblement National, or National Rally, the new name for her father Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National, has established itself as the largest opposition party. Le Pen advanced to the second-round runoff with Macron in France’s last two presidential elections, where she has noticeably narrowed her losing margin. In 2022, Le Pen garnered more than 41 percent of the presidential vote, compared to 34 percent in 2017. Her father managed less than 18 percent in his 2002 presidential runoff against Jacques Chirac.
France’s initial policy during ISIL’s collapse was for French citizens to be detained and tried by local authorities. The government began to make plans to change this toward the end of 2018, following the defeat of ISIL, when the Trump administration announced the planned withdrawal of the bulk of U.S. forces from northeastern Syria. Some French Cabinet ministers began to publicly speak in favor of repatriation. In January 2019, Belloubet, the minister of justice, spoke of France’s interest in “ensuring that we know what the French detainees are up to.” Christophe Castaner, France’s minister of the interior at the time, publicly stated that detainees were “French before being jihadists”—suggesting that France was thus responsible for bringing men home, too. This prompted Le Pen to retort that “they are jihadists so they shouldn’t be French.” A few days later, Édouard Philippe, France’s then prime minister, also spoke in favor of repatriation, asking, “Do we prefer that they be dispersed, that they join the ranks of [ISIL], or that they leave for another country to continue to foment” jihad?
It seemed that the French government was set to repatriate. At the end of January 2019, it was leaked to France’s conservative BFM TV, presumably by hard-liners opposed to repatriation, that the government was preparing to fly home more than a hundred detainees, including men, to France. The adults would all be immediately imprisoned, while children would initially be taken into foster care.
Far-right politicians and media outlets quickly began to stir up opposition, with Le Pen declaring that those individuals “should not return to France.” An internet poll published at the end of February by France Info and Le Figaro—France’s leading conservative broadsheet—showed wide support for this view. A hefty 82 percent of the online responses supported Iraq—rather than France—trying French jihadists. In addition, 89 percent were “worried about the return of jihadists [from Syria] to France,” while 67 percent preferred to “leave the [French] children of the jihadists in Iraq and Syria.” The survey also broke down the results by political party preferences and found that 63 percent of the supporters of Macron’s own party were opposed to the return of the children.
Macron addressed the controversy on February 26, denying that there ever was any plan to bring back jihadists and affirming that France would continue to apply the same policy of detaining and trying the French citizens on the ground in Syria and Iraq. Yet it was not true that there was no plan to bring back the French detainees. I obtained copies of leaked French intelligence documents that confirm the advanced preparations made for the return of all French detainees, including adult males. In one document, an Excel table lists detainees’ names, nationalities, birth dates, gender, date of arrest, whether they were minors, where they were detained, whether their physical location was confirmed, whether they would be repatriated in the first or second proposed flight, and whether there was an agreement with another country to take custody of the detainee instead. Also listed were family membership (so as to identify members of the same family who had different surnames), the date the individual left for ISIL territories, and how long they had spent there. Leïla Pascal and her three children at the time appear on the list. All the names—including adult men—that I reviewed on the partial list were classified as “to be repatriated,” except for one Mauritanian who was not a French citizen. The return of French citizens was to be coordinated with the U.S. Army, reflecting U.S. policy that the safest place to try and monitor the detainees was in their home countries.
A second secret PowerPoint lays out how such monitoring would proceed. The document lists the number of French citizens and groups them by categories. Last updated at 4 p.m. on March 6, 2019, it lists 106 “confirmed” adults to be returned to France: 37 men and 69 women, of whom six were foreigners. Four more adult women are listed as “unconfirmed.” The number of men and women assigned to France’s different anti-terrorism and intelligence services, notably the General Directorate for Internal Security, or DGSI, and the Judicial Police’s Anti-Terrorist Bureau, or SDAT, is listed and broken down by gender. The document notes three adult noncitizens, two Belgian women and one Mauritanian man, on the “to not repatriate” list.
The document also lists 149 “confirmed” children, with another six “unconfirmed,” broken down by age: Thirty are younger than two years old, 99 to 103 between two and 13 years old, seven older than 13, and 13 to 15 with unconfirmed ages. Of those older than 13, two are listed by name to be assigned to SDAT and DGSI, presumably for post-repatriation interrogation.
The repatriation would never take place. Another ISIL-inspired attack on French soil in early March 2019 further empowered the hard-liners around Macron, in particular Jean-Yves Le Drian, a former defense minister who at the time was foreign minister. In 2016, Le Drian wrote a short book, Who Is the Enemy?, laying out how to “fight and defeat” the enemy “while remaining within the political, legal, and ethical” culture of France. In office, Le Drian and the French government instead negotiated a deal—reportedly in exchange for a secret $2 billion payment to Iraq—to transfer 13 French nationals arrested by the SDF in Syria to Baghdad for trial and imprisonment. France was and is the only Western country to allow this, despite the fact that France has banned the death penalty.
Three months later, between May 26 and 29, 11 of those same French citizens were sentenced to death. Patrick Pascal was one of those sentenced to hang. In Iraq, ISIL membership carries the death penalty. However, the Frenchmen were arrested in Syria, not Iraq. The Pascals deny Patrick was an ISIL combatant at all. Agnès Callamard, at the time the U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions, described the transfer of the accused to Iraq as “illegal” and the trial as “unfair,” clouded by allegations of torture and ill treatment. Le Drian stated in Parliament on May 29 that the defendants had enjoyed fair trials.
Under Le Drian’s stewardship, French policy was also tough on the French relatives. A representative of the Collectif confirmed to me that Le Drian’s Foreign Ministry “never shared news of deaths with relatives back home,” even if the families would have no other way of finding out. When the Pascals first traveled to Syria in 2019, as part of a pan-European group, they were the only ones refused entry to camp. SDF officials apologetically turned them back, saying “the orders allowed all nationalities to enter, except for the French, as their government did not want them to enter.” The Pascals’ request to visit Iraq, where Patrick was being held, was also refused by French diplomats. After Le Drian left his position as foreign minister, the Pascals would return to the Syrian camp for two more visits. Both times they were admitted. Similarly, the Pascals’ subsequent requests for authorization to travel to Iraq have been granted.
Still, France’s policy would become more generous in one way: France would now bring back orphans, on a case-by-case basis. Other children would be repatriated only if their mothers renounced their legal parental and custodial rights. Between early 2019 and early 2021, 35 vulnerable children were thus brought home. Adults would still not be repatriated, even for medical reasons. One 28-year-old Frenchwoman died in camp for lack of treatment, despite repeated requests for a medical evacuation to France. In 2021, a group of French female detainees started a hunger strike to demand repatriation. Yet, under Le Drian, France’s policy would not budge. Le Drian did not reply to multiple emails requesting comment.
Even worse, the policy was applied inconsistently. At the time, five French juvenile males were being held in a center at Orkesh, where the SDF detains adolescent boys in conditions notably tougher than in the Al Roj and Al Hol camps. All five are sons of French jihadists; all were brought to Syria as children. One arrived when he was 11, another when he was nine. Four of the five never fought for ISIL. The fifth admits fighting for ISIL while still a minor.
At the time the new policy was announced, all five were minors and separated from their parents. Yet they were still not repatriated, despite their repeated requests. One boy’s mother and siblings were flown home in January 2023, but the boy was overlooked by French officials and left behind. Several boys require urgent medical attention. One was injured by a mortar, another by an allied airstrike in 2019, leaving him with one paralyzed arm and serious head injuries. A third, the former fighter, was shot in the head by ISIL as he tried to escape and was later further injured by an exploding mine. One French teenager attempted to commit suicide, before being saved at the last minute by another detainee. Another male French juvenile, Asadullah, is separately held in Al Houri camp. His jihadist father, since killed fighting for ISIL, kidnapped him and his two elder brothers from his ex-wife and smuggled them from France to Syria. Asadullah arrived in Syria at the age of nine, surrendered to the Kurds when he was 12, yet remains in camp despite repeated requests for repatriation.
Dosé fears that “those forgotten boys will soon die, unless France rescues them.” France is well aware of the boys’ plight: The youths shared that they were interrogated by French intelligence agents at Orkesh. Dosé met with Luis Vassy, then the chief of staff of Stephane Séjourné, France’s foreign minister until September. Dosé recalled that Vassy promised that he would bring the boys’ situation to the immediate attention of the foreign minister, and that “they will study this very seriously.” Despite Vassy’s promises, the French Foreign Ministry has yet to change tack. Vassy did not reply to my emails requesting comment.
I spoke to François Hollande, president of France from 2012 to 2017 and Macron’s former boss, to try to better understand the refusal to bring back these minors. Hollande explained that the fact that they were innocent was precisely why Macron’s government had not brought them back, as the “children cannot be taken into custody [on their return to France] because they have not committed any [violent] act.” While making clear that he disagreed with the policy, and that “France must take care of its citizens,” he said the refusal to repatriate is simply “un choix politique.”
Lawyers for the Collectif, the group fighting for the displaced families, have repeatedly challenged this policy choice, but French domestic courts declined to provide any relief. The administrative courts repeatedly affirmed the French state’s executive privilege on all matters concerning international relations. This was in striking contrast to neighboring Belgium. Like France, Belgium was the repeated victim of ISIL-inspired terrorism, had a large contingent of citizens interned in Syrian camps, and initially put in place a minimal repatriation policy. Nicolas Cohen, a Brussels advocate for Belgian families of those detained in Syria, shared with me his experience of the “total resistance of Belgian authorities…. No one wanted to hear anything about [the children].”
But Belgian policy would change. Judges ordered the government to allow the return of all the children in Syria, together with their mothers. In Germany, too, the state at first would return only children, before domestic courts ruled that bringing back children without their mothers violated laws on protecting the family.
The deference of French courts forced families to seek judicial relief internationally, where France’s policy has been repeatedly censured. In February 2022, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child condemned France for its failure to repatriate minors, underlining that doing so violated the children’s fundamental right to life. The committee concluded that France had failed to show “due consideration to the best interests of the child victims when assessing their relatives’ requests for repatriation.” Further, the committee ruled that “prolonged detention of the child victims in life-threatening conditions … amounts to inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment.” France then repatriated women for the first time, bringing home 16 women in July 2022, along with 35 children.
A second legal victory by the families was won in September 2022, when the European Court of Human Rights ruled that France must consider all requests for repatriation. The case involved French grandparents, who sued the French state on behalf of their daughters and grandchildren, who were detained in the Syrian camps. The court ruled that the absence of a formal decision by the French government in response to repeated requests for repatriation was arbitrary and violated France’s legal obligations. That October, France repatriated 16 women and 42 children. In January 2023, France was reprimanded in yet another international forum, this time the United Nations Committee Against Torture. A few days later, France repatriated 15 women and 32 children from the Syrian camps.
Étienne Mangeot, a French advocate involved in the repatriation cases, told me that it was “clearly only condemnation, or the prospect of being condemned, in international legal fora that prompted France to change policy.” Immediately before the September 2022 judgment, one lawyer acting on behalf of the families was briefed off the record by Macron’s new justice adviser, Xavier Ronsin, who said that France’s policy would change, as it soon did.
Another important factor for the change in policy was that Catherine Colonna replaced Le Drian as foreign minister in May 2022. It is notable that no repatriation of any women took place during Le Drian’s tenure; this changed under Colonna. Hollande underlined to me that it is “the minister of foreign affairs who has the authority to decide” on repatriation, while the “ministers of justice and interior are responsible for the detainees only once they have returned to France.”
All informed sources I spoke to stated that the decision-making on this question is ultimately the preserve of Emmanuel Macron, with policy discussions tightly controlled within a small circle. To Dosé, “It is obvious that it is Macron who personally decides all of this. He cannot acknowledge the error of the policy he put in place, so he is being stubborn and dragging things out.” In a way, Macron’s policy was the worst of both worlds: He did not act decisively to protect the French children out of fear of blowback from the political right, yet he still lost ground to the far right in every election held during his tenure.
Today, the question of the children’s return is rarely raised in French media, other than an article in Le Monde after every repatriation flight. Few officials will speak on the record. Hollande underlined to me the fear among French policymakers of both Marine Le Pen and of public opinion more broadly. Mangeot described thedecision-makers as “very, very scared,” indeed “almost paralyzed” by the fear of future terrorist attacks in France and of being “blamed if they bring back the children.” Simon Foreman, a French expert in international law involved in the cases, told me that “the French position is incomprehensible, and is dictated by political calculations and analysis of public opinion.”
France’s policy is even more unfathomable because the children already brought back from Syria “do not present any particular difficulty,” said Olivier Christen, the prosecutor of France’s National Anti-Terrorist Office. To him, these children “do not fit in any way” the description of “ticking time bombs.”
Even though France’s final relaxation of policy allows for the repatriation of all women and children at the mother’s request, neither the families nor their advocates are satisfied. They are pushing for France to bring back all the women and children, whether the women are willing or not. A French diplomat quoted in Le Monde argued that France cannot repatriate citizens by force, but that is precisely what France planned to do in 2019, before Macron’s U-turn.
Matthieu Bagard, co-president of Avocats Sans Frontières, or Lawyers Without Borders, talked me through the mindset of the remaining Frenchwomen in the camps, which he, too, has visited multiple times. One group of “radicalized” women remain pro-ISIL and prefer their children to grow up in camps rather than return to what they consider an impious, heathen, French society. These women “impose their choice on the children.” In one case, it is a grandmother who is forcing her preference on an orphaned grandchild, who remains with her in the camp.
A second group is ready to return but is worried about their preference being known, as it would expose them to punishment and retaliation by ISIL sympathizers in the camps. A third group occupies the middle ground. They are willing to return in theory, but afraid of the punishment that awaits them and, indirectly, their children. More than anything, they do not want their children to be removed from them and their extended families. Repatriated French children are taken on arrival by child welfare authorities and placed in foster families or homes, where they sometimes spend years before being returned to their actual families. Abuse of children is not uncommon in French foster care.
As for the women themselves, many feel they’ve “paid sufficiently,” as Leïla Pascal once said, for their mistake in going to Syria. All will be charged with association de malfaiteurs terroriste—association with terrorists—as soon as they set foot on French soil. The charge carries a sentence of up to 30 years in prison, considerably longer than in neighboring countries. Three women repatriated to France from the camps have been sentenced to 12, 14, and 17 years, respectively.
What’s more, France doesn’t count the years in the SDF detention camps as time served. In Germany, by contrast, the Supreme Court has established that an individual’s mere presence in ISIL territories is insufficient to lead to a presumption of membership in the terrorist organization. Furthermore, for those who are ultimately convicted in German courts for acts committed in Syria, years of detention abroad are used as a factor to determine the final German sentence. Every year that Germans are held in Iraqi prisons counts as three years of a German sentence, while years of detention at Al Hol are assessed on an individual basis. Still, most German women who are convicted of membership in a terrorist group—in this case ISIL—rarely serve their full prison sentences, since they’ve often earned “credit” through their various incarcerations abroad.
France’s punitive policy means that many women, such as Leïla—the Pascals’ daughter-in-law and mother of their four grandsons—hope for repatriation to a third country. Some Frenchwomen married and had children with foreigners, leading them to hope for repatriation to their husbands’ countries. Other women are dual nationals because of foreign heritage. Leïla herself is a dual national, despite being born and raised in France. She sometimes dreams of taking her boys to live in her third country. There they could live together, in safety, free of the threat of criminal prosecution.
Leïla’s parents-in-law share that she suffers bouts of “panicked fear” and simply does not know how to proceed after many years of detention in precarious conditions. During my last visit to the family, Leïla was messaging the Pascals that she could hear the explosions of Turkish airstrikes around the SDF camp, retaliation for a Kurdish terrorist attack in Ankara a few days earlier. The United States, too, conducted airstrikes in the region in late October.
What Leïla fears most is being separated from her boys. Leïla’s eldest, Hassan, is now a tall 14-year-old. He risks being summarily removed from her care by the SDF, and placed in the male juvenile detention center in Orkesh. Leïla’s other sons are 10, eight, and six years old; all will eventually be separated from her. Like other female detainees with sons, Leïla faces the real question of whether the boys will be taken to Orkesh or to France, where they would initially enter the foster system, before eventually being reunited with their grandparents.
The Pascal grandparents strongly prefer that Leïla choose to return home with the boys. When I last visited them, they had just come back from their third visit to Syria, and they would soon travel to Iraq to see their son, whose health continues to deteriorate. Patrick’s death sentence has since been commuted; he has also requested to be repatriated to serve his sentence in France.
For the Pascals, the whole situation has been an unimaginable “emotional, financial, and legal burden to bear, yet the hope is still alive,” according to Pierre Pascal. Their mood was more positive and optimistic than it was before their summer trip to Syria. The spare bedrooms in their apartment are ready for the grandchildren, with the beds made.
François Hollande, too, regrets that there have not been more returns to date, and he told me, “France’s current policy clashes with the principle of protecting [French] children … as well as that of liberty. The priority [of the French state] must be protecting children. We take more risks in not bringing them back. We must bring them back as quickly as possible.”
In my final conversation with Marie Dosé, she spoke with passion about how “France owes these children a duty of care. We must save these children from their mothers, and these mothers’ ideology.” She is worried about France returning to a more hard-line policy. Before the fall of the Assad regime, Dosé received an official refusal to repatriate the French teenagers at Orkesh and Al Houri, with the French government claiming the area “is too dangerous for French soldiers,” despite Dosé and French grandparents repeatedly visiting the same facilities. More than anything, she is fearful for the very lives of the children: “We are in a race against the clock, and time is running out for these most innocent of victims.”
