QAMISHLI: Repatriations of foreign woman and children affiliated to Daesh from detention camps in northeast Syria hit a record high in 2022, Kurdish authorities said on Tuesday.
Thousands of foreigners including women and children had gone to Syria to live in Daesh’s so-called “caliphate” until 2019, when US-backed Kurdish forces snatched the last pocket of Syrian territory from the jihadists.
Fleeing women and children were housed in overcrowded detention camps run by Kurdish authorities and international NGOs, who had pushed for repatriatiations due to rising violence and dire conditions in the camps.
Governments responded slowly, fearing security threats and a public backlash over the return of individuals radicalized by Daesh.
But the pace picked up his year, with 517 women and children repatriated so far, according to Kurdish authorities’ statistics.
They included more than 100 from France and over 50 from Germany. More than 150 were returned to Tajikistan, the first for that country.
Returns numbered 324 in 2021, 281 in 2020 and 342 in 2019.
More than 10,000 foreign women and children remain in the Al-Hol and Roj camps, Badran Jia Kurd, a senior official in the autonomous administration, told Reuters.
Letta Tayler, Human Rights Watch’s counter-terrorism lead, said the rise could be due in part to criticism by the United Nations and the European Court of Human Rights of European countries’ failure to repatriate their nationals.
Also, states had found they had the legal farmework to prosecute and jail those who had traveled to Daesh-held territory, making those governments more willing to bring them home, Tayler added.
But she said 2022’s figures “are still drops in the bucket.”
“This humanitarian and security crisis will only get worse if countries keep outsourcing management of their detained nationals to a non-state force inside one of the world’s most complex war zones,” Tayler said.
Record number of foreigners repatriated from Daesh camps in Syria this year
https://arab.news/j4twx
Record number of foreigners repatriated from Daesh camps in Syria this year
US lawmakers press Israel to probe strike on reporters in Lebanon
- “The IDF has made no effort, none, to seriously investigate this incident,” Welch said
- Collins called for Washington to publicly acknowledge the attack in which an American citizen was injured
WASHINGTON: Several Democratic lawmakers called Thursday for the Israeli and US governments to fully investigate a deadly 2023 attack by the Israeli military on journalists in southern Lebanon.
The October 13, 2023 airstrike killed Reuters videographer Issam Abdallah and wounded six other reporters, including two from AFP — video journalist Dylan Collins and photographer Christina Assi, who lost her leg.
“We expect the Israeli government to conduct an investigation that meets the international standards and to hold accountable those people who did this,” Senator Peter Welch told a news conference, with Collins by his side.
The lawmaker from Collins’s home state of Vermont said he had been pushing for answers for two years, first from the administration of Democratic president Joe Biden and now from the Republican White House of Donald Trump.
The Israeli government has “stonewalled at every single turn,” Welch added.
“With the Israeli government, we have been extremely patient, and we have done everything we reasonably can to obtain answers and accountability,” he said.
“The IDF has made no effort, none, to seriously investigate this incident,” Welch said, referring to the Israeli military, adding that it has told his office its investigation into the incident is closed.
Collins called for Washington to publicly acknowledge the attack in which an American citizen was injured.
“But I’d also like them to put pressure on their greatest ally in the Middle East, the Israeli government, to bring the perpetrators to account,” he said, echoing the lawmakers who called the attack a “war crime.”
“We’re not letting it go,” Vermont congresswoman Becca Balint said. “It doesn’t matter how long they stonewall us.”
AFP conducted an independent investigation which concluded that two Israeli 120mm tank shells were fired from the Jordeikh area in Israel.
The findings were corroborated by other international probes, including investigations conducted by Reuters, the Committee to Protect Journalists, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and Reporters Without Borders.
Unlike Welch’s assertion Thursday that the Israeli probe was over, the IDF told AFP in October that “findings regarding the event have not yet been concluded.”
