The Dutch government announced on Tuesday the repatriation from Syria of 12 citizens suspected of terrorist offenses and their 28 children, the largest exfiltration of families of jihadists ever organized by the Netherlands.

“The women will be arrested after their arrival in the Netherlands and will be judged”, specified the executive in a letter to Parliament, which aims thanks to this special operation to “prevent the impunity of these twelve suspects”.

The district court of Rotterdam (west) had recommended in May to the government to repatriate or to have made a concrete commitment in this direction for these twelve women within four months.

For “reasons of security and confidentiality of the persons concerned”, the government did not indicate where the group came from.

A tricky question

The families of jihadists captured or killed in Syria and Iraq are mostly in camps administered by the Kurdish authorities who are demanding their repatriation to their countries of origin.

Their return has proven to be a delicate issue in most European Union countries - including the Netherlands - since the fall in 2019 of the Islamic State "caliphate".

In early 2022, the Dutch government rescued five ISIS women and their eleven children from the Al Roj Kurdish refugee camp in northern Syria.

A woman from the city of Gouda was the first woman to be repatriated to Dutch territory in June 2021, with her two young boys, from the Al-Roj camp.

She was sentenced to 3 and a half years in prison.

France called to order

Paris announced last July a first "massive repatriation" since the fall of the "caliphate" (35 minors and 16 mothers), followed by another in October (15 women and 40 children).

The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child ruled in February that France had violated the rights of French children held in camps in Syria by failing to repatriate them.

Germany, which has tried to carry out regular repatriation operations, announced in early October the repatriation of seven children and four additional women, considering that it had settled almost all known cases of German families in jihadist prison camps in Syria. .

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