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ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Russia is repatriating a number of Russian children from families affiliated with the Islamic State (ISIS) group, an official from northeast Syria (Rojava) said on Thursday, raising the toll of repatriated orphans to the soviet state from the region’s camps to over two hundred.
Rojava will handover eight Russian children to the Presidential Commissioner for Children’s Rights in Russia Maria Lvova-Belova and her accompanying delegation, the co-chair of Rojava’s foreign relations commission Abdulkarim Omar said in a press conference on Thursday.
“We have previously handed over 225 orphaned children to Russia,” Omar added.
Omar did not disclose from which camps the children were taken from.
The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) arrested thousands of ISIS fighters along with their wives and children when they took control of the group’s last stronghold in Syria in March 2019. Most of these people have since been held at al-Hol and Roj camps.
Lvova discussed the efforts to get the children at the camps with the Syrian President Bashar al-Asaad on Wednesday, according to the Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA).
Assad described the camps as “an incubator for terrorism and extremist ideology,” noting that western countries were content with keeping the camps as they are, and commenting that work should be done to close the camps permanently.
Kurdish and US officials have made repeated calls on the international community to repatriate their nationals from the camps, where children are exposed to ISIS ideology. Moscow repatriated 20 orphans from Rojava in July.
Amnesty International also renewed its repatriation calls in a recent report.
“Governments must stop flouting their international human rights obligations to uphold these children’s right to life, survival and development and promptly repatriate them as a matter of urgency,” the report quoted Diana Semaan, Amnesty International’s Syria researcher, as saying.
Human rights groups have previously warned of squalid conditions in al-Hol, describing it as “filthy and often inhuman.”
Al-Hol camp has been branded a breeding ground for terrorism, with this year being “the deadliest” at the camp, Hawar News Agency (ANHA) reported on Thursday morning.
At least 126 crimes have been committed in al-Hol since the start of the year and 13 tents were deliberately set on fire, ANHA said. A Syrian refugee was found shot dead on Wednesday morning.
The head of a humanitarian organization described the camp as “the place where hope is going to die” during a visit to al-Hol in late March.
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