“There are 364 children… who benefit from coordination from my office to make sure they have the optimal care,” prosecutor Olivier Christen told France Info radio station.
The parents are suspected ISIS members.
Referring to concerns about extremist tendencies in the children, Christen said that they “in no way seem to me to correspond to that expression,” adding that they are “very young children, while others are fully fledged teenagers.”
He confirmed that the children “are being closely monitored.”
France had a large number of ISIS-linked children held in detention at two camps in Rojava and their family members campaigned to pressure the French government to speed up repatriations, something Paris was resisting.
The prosecutor said that 170 women have been repatriated from Syria and Iraq since 2019 and nearly half of the children were returned in the last two years.
In July 2023, the French foreign ministry said they had repatriated 25 children and 10 women from camps in Rojava.
The women had traveled to territories in Iraq and Syria that were under control of the Islamic State (ISIS) and were captured when the jihadist group was defeated in 2019. Al-Hol camp in Syria’s Hasaka province where the families are kept has been called a “breeding ground” for terrorism, with human rights groups warning of squalid living conditions.
The repatriation of European nationals from the Syrian camps remains an issue. Kurdish authorities in Rojava have repeatedly called on the international community to repatriate their nationals from the camps, but many countries are unwilling to bring back their citizens due to security concerns.
Iraq’s migration and displaced ministry on Saturday said that nearly 18,000 Iraqi nationals remain in al-Hol camp.
