The mother of an Islamic State extremist being held in northern Syria has demanded the French government send money to the defector or allow her family to send aid.
The jihadist, a woman in her thirties, is currently being held in the al-Hol prison camp in northern Syria along with her three children. The mother of the woman has taken the French state to court, claiming that the government must financially help her daughter.
“While the state is currently choosing not to organise the repatriation of its nationals, it is responsible for providing material and financial assistance to the latter or at the very least to allow their families to do so,” the lawyers for the mother of the ISIS member argued.
According to a report from La Provence, the lawyers went on to state that there was also a severe risk that the human rights of the woman’s children, aged two to eight, could also be violated, and that it justified “urgent action by the French state.”
Lawyer Vincent Brengarth went on to add that the conditions in the camp were deteriorating due to sanitary conditions and the possible spread of the Wuhan virus.
Franc is not the only country to have nationals in Syria’s al-Hol prison camp for Islamic State extremists. A number of Swedish nationals of Somali background are also present in the camp.
In January, Somalian president Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed went as far as to offer to allow the estimated 30 to 40 women to be transferred to Somalia as the Swedish government showed little interest in having them returned to Sweden.
In August, Marine General Kenneth McKenzie, head of the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), warned that prisons like al-Hol could lead to a resurgence of the Islamic State terror group if prisoners were not returned to their countries of origin.
“If we stay where we are, we’re going to have huge problems, huge problems in the near term with lots of people potentially dying, and then huge problems in the long-term because I have yet to see a scheme that can talk about de-radicalization at scale,” he said.
“I don’t have an answer besides repatriation,” he added.
“We either deal with this problem now, or deal with it exponentially worse a few years down the road.”
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