Why Britain still wrestles with repatriating Daesh-linked families from detention camps in Syria

LONDON: During a school half-term break in February 2015, three British girls left their homes and their futures in east London, traveled to Gatwick Airport and boarded a Turkish Airlines flight to Istanbul.

From there they travelled almost 1,000 km overland by bus to Urfa, close to Turkiye’s southern border, where they were met by people smugglers and taken across into Syria.

Kadiza Sultana, 16, Shamima Begum and Amira Abase, both 15, had become part of an extraordinary phenomenon which saw hundreds of women and girls answer the call from Daesh to abandon their families for the terror organization’s so-called caliphate in Iraq and Syria.

Two of the girls are dead. The third, Begum, who is now 26, is one of an estimated 2,300 women and children in the tent city that is Al-Roj detention camp in northeast Syria, where she has spent the past seven years fighting to be allowed to return to the UK.

Two recent developments have put her case, and those of the estimated 15 other British women and 30 children still in Al-Roj, back in the spotlight and increased pressure on the UK to alter its outlier stance toward its citizens still marooned in northeast Syria.

Multiple countries around the world — including Australia, Canada, the US, Belgium, Germany, Denmark, Italy, Finland, The Netherlands, Russia, Sweden and Ukraine — have repatriated hundreds of their citizens from the camps of northeast Syria. The US, among others, has urged the UK to follow suit.

In most cases, repatriations have not been about unalloyed forgiveness. Where there is evidence that individuals have committed crimes, suspects have been charged upon returning to their home countries.

In Britain, the issue is back on the agenda following last week’s return to Australia from Syria of four women and nine children.

Two of the Australian citizens who arrived back in Australia on May 7, after seven years in a Syrian refugee camp, were arrested after arriving at Melbourne airport and charged with crimes against humanity, including owning a slave. A third woman, who flew into Sydney, has been charged with terror-related offences.

The issue of repatriation came to a head in January when control of two camps in northeast Syria was transferred from the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces to the Syrian authorities. Al-Hol, near the border with Iraq, was almost immediately shut down.

The whereabouts of its thousands of internees — including foreigners from as many as 60 countries, held for up to seven years without trial or charge — remains uncertain. At the time, Human Rights Watch said many had simply left in “a largely unplanned and chaotic manner.”

Al-Roj camp, about 100 km to the northeast and 15 km from the Turkish border, still appears to be open. But the Syrian government has already indicated its intention to get out of the refugee-camp business, increasing pressure on the UK and other states with citizens there to act.

“For years, many governments claimed that difficulties negotiating with a non-state actor in charge of the camps was why they couldn’t repatriate their citizens, but now that excuse won’t hold,” said Adam Coogle, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch, in February.

“Seven years is a long time to kick the can down the road. These countries need to bring their citizens home.”

In 2019 Begum said she wanted to return to the UK, but the British government refused her leave to do so and stripped her of her citizenship. It was a controversial decision, not least because legally it hinged on Begum having recourse to a second citizenship and, although she is of Bangladeshi descent, Bangladesh denied she was one of their citizens.

Public opinion in the UK has always been against allowing Begum to return. A YouGov poll in 2019 found 76 percent supported the government’s decision to strip her of citizenship, and in a further survey in November 2025 two-thirds said she should not be allowed to return to the country.

But what both the UK government and the court of public opinion have failed to take into account, said Maya Foa, executive director of UK-based human rights NGO Reprieve, is that many of the young girls and women who were lured to Syria by Daesh are victims of trafficking.

“There may well be people who’ve committed crimes, and our position is if that is the case then they can and should be prosecuted in British courts,” Foa, who has visited the camps many times, told Arab News.

“Of course I can’t say that every woman is a trafficking victim. But I’ve conducted hundreds of hours of interviews with women from many different countries, and it was remarkable how common certain stories were, revealing a pattern of how young women were groomed, seduced or coerced, with propaganda or deceit.”

In 2021 Reprieve issued an exhaustive report, based on multiple interviews conducted in the camps. It highlighted the specific processes by which more than 60 percent of the British girls and women who went to Syria had been trafficked, using tactics similar to those employed by child-sex grooming gangs, and “were subsequently forced into marriage, sexual slavery, domestic servitude and other forms of exploitation.”

Daesh, said Foa, “was an extremely sophisticated trafficking gang, with a state-building project that involved targeting certain groups of people with specific vulnerabilities, including their youth and alienation.

“Whether or not these women were victims of trafficking is not for me, or an NGO or lawyers to decide. It’s the government’s job. The British government has a duty to assess who is culpable and needs to be prosecuted and punished, and who might be a victim and needs help.

“Categorizing these people as victims of trafficking is a legal determination that can be made only by the state. But the UK government is not doing that. And not only is it not bringing them back to the country, it is also not even talking to them.”

The issue, she said, is as much about security as morality.

“I’ve done hundreds of hours of interviews with these individuals and have a really strong view on what we could have done differently, and could do differently going forward.

“But why is the British government not taking this opportunity to better understand the patterns that led to this situation, if only for the sake of our future security?

“There is a big debate in the UK right now about a social media ban for children. If there had been such a ban in 2014 and 2015, would Shamima Begum and many others have ended up in Syria and Iraq? I think probably not.”

She added: “Those sorts of questions are so important. Instead we are just denying this problem, exiling the individuals and outsourcing justice to another jurisdiction, where no justice will be done. That’s clearly not a responsible way to proceed.”

Begum has lost a series of appeals against the decision to remove her citizenship and her case is currently before the European Court of Human Rights. On April 10 the Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion and the International Commission of Jurists filed a joint third-party intervention in the landmark case, arguing that  “states cannot use citizenship stripping to evade their human rights obligations, particularly where there are credible indicators that an individual may have been a victim of trafficking.”

In the words of a report by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, published in 2015 as European authorities were struggling to understand and get to grips with the unfolding phenomenon, “the responsibility of Western women under ISIS-controlled territory is first and foremost to be a good wife to the jihadist husband they are betrothed to and to become a mother to the next generation of jihadism.”

Headlines in the British media put it more directly. Begum and her two schoolfriends had volunteered to become “jihadi brides,” agreeing to marry Daesh fighters, thousands of whom had also been recruited from Western countries.

For two of the three girls from Bethnal Green, as for many of those who answered the Daesh call, the title of the ISD report — “Till Martyrdom Do Us Part” — was prophetic.

Kadiza Sultana is thought to have been killed in May 2016 during US and Russian airstrikes on Raqqa, Daesh’s capital. Her fighter husband had already been killed.

Amira Abase, who had been married to an 18-year-old Australian Daesh recruit, is believed to have been killed in early 2019 during the battle of Baghouz, Daesh’s last stand in Syria.

Shortly after arriving in Syria in 2015, Begum was married to a Dutch convert to Islam. She had three children, all of whom died. The last one, a boy she named Jarrah, succumbed to pneumonia in the harsh conditions of the tent city that is Al-Roj. He is reported to lie buried in an unmarked grave outside the camp.

Concern about the situation among some members of the British parliament prompted the setting up of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Trafficked Britons in Syria, which launched its own inquiry in July 2021.

It found “compelling evidence that British nationals, including children, were trafficked,” and that the UK government had “neglected to take adequate action to prevent this trafficking.”

It accused the government of having “failed to identify at-risk individuals who were particularly vulnerable to trafficking, failed to notify parents and guardians of young girls who were being groomed, and failed to prevent women and girls from leaving the country, despite many being underage or known to be at risk.”

These were not, it added “isolated incidents; rather this was a systemic failure to combat ISIS trafficking operations.”

Now, “rather than honor its international obligations to investigate cases of British nationals who may be victims of trafficking and provide protection and support, the Government’s policy has been to punish potential victims, including by refusing to investigate the circumstances of their trafficking, refusing to repatriate them, and stripping them of citizenship on what appears to be a blanket basis.”

Foa sees Syria’s facilitation of the return of the Australian citizens as an indication that the Syrian government is close to washing its hands of the camps.

“And who can blame them?” she said. “Why would the Syrian government want this detention facility, which is a problem, to be their problem? 

“The new government doesn’t want to have to hold these families indefinitely, without charge or trial. They have a country to rebuild and many other priorities that they need to focus on.” 

What happens next is uncertain — but potentially dangerous. 

“The best-case scenario for the Syrian government, the detainees and their home governments would be repatriations that are done securely, and facilitated with oversight in a stable, sensible way, as happened with the Australian families,” said Foa. 

There is, however, no indication that the British government is going to take this path, “despite the views of many national security experts that the safest thing to do is to repatriate these families and prosecute where appropriate.” 

In a Britain lurching politically to the right and gripped by growing anti-immigrant sentiment, she believes that the UK government’s thinking on the issue “is not based on moral or legal principles, or even on national security interests. 

“What they really are worried about is bad headlines. But if this issue isn’t handled responsibly, I think the headlines could be far, far worse for them.”

For its part, the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office says it will not comment on specific cases or numbers of repatriations, but that it is seeking clarity from the Syrian government and the SDF on the management of Al-Roj camp.

It is “our longstanding policy that each request for consular assistance is considered on a case-by-case basis, taking into account all relevant circumstances, including, but not limited to, national security,” a spokesperson told Arab News.

“Where British unaccompanied minors and orphans are brought to our attention, we will seek to facilitate their return to the UK where feasible, and subject to national security considerations.”

The spokesman added: “Our priority remains to ensure the safety and security of the UK.  We will continue to do whatever is necessary to protect the UK from those who pose a threat to our security.”