“I am scared I’ll die anytime,” the teenager said in his 11-second voice message. “Please help me.” He was a human shield for ISIS, one of about 150 foreign minors taken hostage in a prison in northeastern Syria last month. Even if he survived the siege, his prospects were bleak.
While the West has largely moved on three years after the fall of the so-called Caliphate, more than 7,000 foreign children remain trapped in de facto prison camps in Northeast Syria run reluctantly by the Kurdish-led Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria. (These children are from nearly 60 countries, including France, Tunisia and Britain — but the figure does not include the thousands of Iraqi and Syrian children also in the camps and prisons for ISIS fighters and their families.)
The siege — which ended with heavy casualties when Kurdish-led forces recaptured control of the prison last week — served as a desperate reminder that most of these children have committed no crimes: Their parents chose to go to Syria to join the Islamic State, not them. Most were likely too young to have participated in ISIS brutality.
Yet because many countries have refused to repatriate adult citizens who joined ISIS, with some even claiming they have no legal obligations to help them, most of these children face the same open-ended detentions as their parents.
The prison-camp conditions are horrific and dangerous. They’re also breeding grounds for radicalization and the next generation of ISIS adherents.
In an ideal world, the recent siege — where ISIS militants sought to free its fighters and release a wave of extremists — would have prompted governments to reconsider bringing their nationals home. But from my own experience in helping facilitate such repatriations, I know we must be realistic: There’s little impetus or apparent will to act quickly enough or on the scale needed to save most of these children.
Rights groups have been calling on countries for years to take back their citizens. Some countries have repatriated mothers with children as recently as last week; others have taken small numbers of orphans or children who’d already been separated from their parents. But for the most part, the situation today is one in which many countries seem to be dragging their feet or refusing to take back adult ISIS prisoners, mothers and their children.
Given the urgency, there needs to be a safer solution: The Kurdish authorities, with the blessing and financial support of the United States and its coalition partners, should remove the children from the prison camps. That’s the only way to give them a better shot at life and eventually making it back home.
This might sound harsh — removing children from their mothers, who would ostensibly not have a say in the decision. Some argue it’s a violation of rights. But the status quo — leaving them in miserable conditions to grow up radicalized — is worse for the children and the rest of us.
In the two sprawling camps that house most of the foreign children, sanitation is appalling, health care minimal and education mostly nonexistent. Families stay in tents that are freezing in winter and stifling hot in summer.
While that might not sound dissimilar to the squalor found in migrant camps elsewhere, there is a major difference: Radical women dominate here, which creates the potential for their children — and other women’s children — to absorb extremist ideology and become a future generation of jihadists.
While some countries, as mentioned, have taken in women and children, most of these mothers are doomed, unlikely ever to be repatriated. The children need not share their fate — most are still too young to have been indoctrinated.
Instead, children could be placed with Kurdish foster families or in special children’s villages modeled on those created in Austria for unaccompanied children after World War II. Through my work in the region, I’ve discussed these ideas with stakeholders, who have appeared receptive.
The Kurds have women’s committees already caring for children orphaned or stranded in this conflict. I witnessed their effectiveness firsthand when I worked to reunite Yazidi mothers with their children. They provided not only food, clothing and medicine but also love and attention. They would be more than capable of taking on the much larger task of assisting these children.
This isn’t a very costly proposition. At $100 per child per month — a generous amount in Northeast Syria — the annual cost of foster care and children’s villages, including administration, could be under $10 million. This modest expense could easily be covered by countries that refuse to repatriate their adult citizens.
Foster care is a temporary solution. Once out of the camps, children can more easily be repatriated to their countries of origin — which is and should be the ultimate goal. In my experience, most of the children speak the language and have support networks in their home countries. Their home countries almost all have greater resources to devote to these children than do the Syrian Kurds.
The longer these children stay in the camps, the less attractive they become as candidates for repatriation. Removing them from the camps entirely is the best hope to give them a real future.
Forced separation in some cases “layers trauma on top of acute trauma,” according to the United Nations. While a few mothers may welcome the idea of their children having the opportunity to live a life outside of prison, most would undoubtedly resist losing them.
And this would certainly be cruel and painful for the children. But I believe it is even more cruel to condemn a child to a life in prison because a parent made the decision to go to Syria to join a terrorist organization.
Many Western countries — the United States included — do not leave children longterm with parents who are in detention. In the nations that might house children in jails alongside their mothers, those women can eventually be released after serving sentences. Or their children can grow up, and get out. That’s likely not the case for most of the foreign children detained in Northeast Syria.
I act as an informal adviser to the Kurds regarding foreign families. And Kurdish leaders I’ve spoken with consider the present situation unsustainable. More than 10,000 of their fighters died in the battle to defeat ISIS. The last thing they want is for another generation of jihadists to come of age in the prisons they run.
While they’ve privately acknowledged to me that children should be removed from the prison camps, they’ve been unwilling to say so and take this step without express international approval. That’s why such a plan must be endorsed, promoted and funded by the United States — the Syrian Kurds’ most important ally — and the United Nations system.
Once the Kurds have established the alternate arrangements for the children, countries must move promptly to repatriate their child citizens. And there is every reason to think they will. Unlike the adults, children are not seen as dangerous.
This is not an argument I make lightly. There are sure to be objections from human rights and humanitarian organizations who condemn separations as harmful and insist that the solution is for governments to repatriate all their citizens — but we know that this largely will not happen.
The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child states that a child shall not be separated from his or her parents against their will — unless separation is deemed to be in the best interest of the child.
It’s clearly not in any child’s best interest to be surrounded by terrorist ideology or face a lifetime in prison, having committed no crime.
Peter W. Galbraith (@PeterWGalbrath) is a former U.S. ambassador and assistant U.N. secretary general. He has been a mediator between the Kurdistan Regional Government of Iraq and the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria. He also has been an adviser to the Kurdistan Regional Government and previously had business and financial ties in Iraqi Kurdistan.
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