Azdyne Amimour and his wife keep a room ready in their small flat in a Paris suburbpop party online casino, in the hope their granddaughter will soon come to live with them. It’s been ready for years.
The Amimours’ son, Samy, left France for Syria in 2013. In November 2015, he returned to France and entered the Bataclan concert hall in Paris, where he and two others killed 90 people and injured many others. Mr. Amimour died in the attack. About a week later, his daughter was born in Syria to another French national.
The Amimours searched for their granddaughter and eventually located her in a detention camp in Syria. About two years ago, they found out that she and her mother had been repatriated to France. The mother, identified as Kahina El H., was immediately charged with associating with terrorists and detained, and her children were taken into care. The Amimours said they have still not met their granddaughter, an absence that they said feels like a gaping hole in their lives.
The Amimours see their granddaughter as a victim of her parents’ terrible choices, but in many ways, she is one of the lucky ones. Tens of thousands of children are still detained in camps in northern Syria. A large majority are Syrian and Iraqi, but many are foreigners. Roughly half are children under 12. These children are growing up in the same camps as some of the Islamic State’s remaining supporters and, in the case of foreign children, often with the knowledge that they have been rejected by the home countries of their parents — that they are viewed, in fact, as a threat. This is not only inhumane; it is exactly backward. All of the children in the camps are victims of the Islamic State and of indifference. Our research has focused on the Europeans in the camps and the European approach to repatriation. Fear of what these children represent is understandable, but there is evidence that shows these children have the ability to adapt and reintegrate into European society, especially when placed with families. For their sake, and for the sake of Europe’s security, it’s time for these children to come home.
When the Islamic State declared a breakaway caliphate within Syria and Iraq in the summer of 2014, it urged foreign fighters to come to the region and take up arms. People came from all over the world. Some brought families; some married in the so-called caliphate and had children. When the Islamic State was ousted from the last remnants of its territory by American-backed forces in 2019, thousands of people who had been living under its control were herded into former refugee camps in northern Syria, which were refashioned as detention camps. Many of them are still there.
One of us visited the camps several times as research for a documentary and spoke to many women who deeply regretted their choice to leave Europe, and particularly its impact on their children. Some held on to a hope of repatriation and taught their children the language of the country they’d left just in case.
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