France repatriated ten women and 25 children detained in jihadist prison camps in northeastern Syria on Tuesday morning. Among them, Lisa and Sarah, two orphan sisters to whom franceinfo had devoted several reports.
Lisa and Sarah were 7 and 9 when their mother left western France to take them and their two brothers to Syria. A childhood under the caliphate, the bombs and the fall of the Islamic State group in Baghouz where they lost their mother and their two brothers and where Lisa was seriously injured in her legs and arms. Injuries from which she still suffers today.
>> If it had been in our hands, we would never have come here”, explained Lisa last April to franceinfo.
They then spent four years alone, in Kurdish camps, tossed from tent to tent, two orphans dreaming of the country where they were born and where they grew up in part: France. Born of Moroccan parents, without a request for French nationality formally formulated for them, Paris judged that there was an administrative blockage and did not repatriate them.
“Immense relief and at the same time, anger”
Desperate, they had launched an appeal in May, like a bottle in the sea. Their lawyer had seized the administrative court. It ended up paying off. Lisa and Sarah landed in Paris on Tuesday July 4 with ten women aged 23 to 40 and 23 other children detained in jihadist prison camps in northeastern Syria. This is the fourth repatriation operation carried out by France in the past year.
>> TESTIMONIALS. “Help us return to our childhood country”: the appeal of two orphan sisters detained in the Roj camp in Syria
“After four and a half years of fighting, I have quite contradictory feelings running through me.confides Maître Marie Dosé. At first an immense relief and at the same time, anger because, during these four and a half years, we let them waste away. It’s a huge mess. Lisa’s physical injury will be extremely difficult to heal, although she would probably have already been healed if she could have been taken care of in time. Trauma has been added to trauma. For what ?”asks the lawyer again.
“These kids are victims of their parents and of a country that failed to protect them. I am really reassured to know that they are safe today, but I am also infinitely sad.”
Me Marie Dosé, Lisa and Sarah’s lawyerat franceinfo
Among the 25 repatriated minors, a 17-year-old girl, subject to a search warrant, was placed in police custody. The others are cared for under the educational assistance procedure under the responsibility of the Versailles prosecutor’s office. This will be the case for Lisa and Sarah, now aged 14 and 16.
There remains to this day in Syria only one French orphan, a boy of Chechen origin who had been taken away, kidnapped, by his father killed there. The teenager is in a Kurdish rehabilitation center. His mother, in France, still hopes for his return.