PARIS – In a desperate appeal to the French government, about 10 French women who joined ISIS and are now being held in detention camps in Syria started a hunger strike on Saturday, protesting the government’s refusal to bring them home for trial.
The women are among dozens of French mothers and their nearly 200 children who have been detained by Kurdish forces for at least two years in miserable camps and are in a state of legal limbo.
“We decided to stop eating, regardless of the risks, until we found the right people to get answers about our future,” said one of the women in a voice message obtained by The New York Times.
Two French lawyers representing women confirmed the hunger strike in one demonstration released on Sunday night.
Since at least 2019, when the Islamic State lost its final position in Syria, some 60,000 relatives of Islamic fighters, mostly women and children, have been held in fetid and disease-infested detention camps run by Kurdish forces in northeastern Syria, without future authorization in sight.
France, along with other Western nations that also have citizens detained there, resisted calls from families and rights groups to repatriate their people and brought back only a handful of children.
The repatriation of citizens who left for jihad long ago is a sensitive issue in France, a country that still suffers from years of Islamic terrorist attacks. But the hunger strike, along with recent initiatives by French lawmakers and citizens, could increase pressure on the government to act in the face of a situation that is getting worse by the day.
United Nations human rights experts have called on 57 states, including France, to repatriate women and children whose “continued detention for unclear reasons” in the camps “is of great concern and undermines the progression of responsibility, truth and justice”.
France has long argued that adults who entered the Islamic State, including women, should be tried where they committed their crimes: in Syria and Iraq. Several men have already been tried and convicted in Iraqi courts.
But so far, judging women has proved impossible, since their potential crimes are unclear and because the Kurdish government that is detaining them is not internationally recognized. Kurdish forces commanding the camps call for the repatriation of all foreigners, saying they cannot keep them indefinitely in an unstable region.
Women on hunger strike say they want to be tried in France.
“We are there, waiting, in tents, in the cold, in the winter,” said a striker in a voice message.
She said: “We want to pay our debt to society for the choice we made to come here. But it is time for this nightmare to end and for us to return home. “
The New York Times has obtained several voicemails from women, but is not publishing their names because they have received death threats from supporters of Islamic State who oppose their desire to return to France.
Countries like Russia, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan each repatriated more than 100 of their citizens, far more than Western nations, where public opinion is firmly against bringing home those who have left to fight with the Islamic State.
Human rights groups have pressured governments to at least bring home the children of their citizens, arguing that minors did not choose to go to Syria and that raising them in camps that became cauldrons of Islamic radicalization would only aggravate the situation.
But France has agreed to repatriate children only on a case-by-case basis, giving priority to orphans and fragile children whose mothers agree to let them go. To date, 35 children have been brought back, including a 7-year-old girl with a heart condition who was flown to France for urgent medical attention in April.
In the current French political climate, repatriations can be even more difficult. In the fall, the country was hit by several Islamic terrorist attacks that reopened old wounds. A bill that aims to combat Islam is expected to get final approval in the French Senate next month.
Families of relatives imprisoned in Syrian camps and human rights groups have long denounced this fragmented repatriation process. In the north of France, the mother of a French woman detained in Syria has been on a hunger strike since February 1 to protest French policy.
In a public letter, a The French legislator recently condemned the conditions in the camps and the government’s reluctance to act, which he called “deeply inhuman and irresponsible political cowardice”.
“If, because of our inertia, we continue to tolerate the guilty silence of the government,” said the letter, “then it would have been the lawmakers who let innocent children die.”
A spokeswoman for the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which oversees the repatriation process, could not be reached for comment.
Marie Dosé and Ludovic Rivière, lawyers for women on hunger strike, said in a statement that women should only be tried in France and that “for more than two years”, they “are waiting to pay for what they have done.”
In one of the voice messages, a woman said that they needed “help from our country now”.
A trial in France, she said, would be “a second chance”.