PARIS: An anti-terrorism prosecutor in France on Wednesday said that 364 repatriated children of French parents suspected of joining the militant group Daesh in Iraq and Syria a decade ago were doing well.
“There are 364 children in 59 departments (areas in France), who are followed by judges for children, and who benefit from coordination from my office to make sure they have optimal care,” Olivier Christen told the French media.
Another anti-terror prosecutor in 2018 feared that the children of French citizens who joined Daesh after it set up a so-called caliphate in 2014 could be ticking time bombs. Christen, who leads the National Anti-Terror Prosecutor’s Office (PNAT) opened in 2019 brushed aside that worry.
He said these 364 children are being closely monitored and they pose no particular difficulty. He said overall 170 women had returned from Syria and Iraq to France, including 57 from detention camps in northeast Syria since the Daesh collapse in 2019.
Christen said out of the 364 children who had been brought to France, 169 have been repatriated in the last two years.
Until 2022, France brought back children on a case-by-case basis, giving priority to orphans and some children of women who had agreed to give up their parental rights. However, Paris changed that policy two years ago.
Daesh seized control of large swathes of Syria and neighboring Iraq in 2014 before Syrian forces backed by a US-led coalition ousted them from their last patch of land in eastern Syria in 2019.
