PARIS, France: Three Frenchmen held in Iraq, forced to work for the Daesh group as children, are seeking repatriation on the grounds they were victims of war, their lawyers said Friday.<\/p>\n
International humanitarian law prohibits the recruitment and use of children in hostilities.<\/p>\n
The men \u2014 taken to Syria by their terrorist parents aged 11 or 12 then made to take part in propaganda videos, fight or join Daesh police \u2014 have filed legal documents in France claiming they were the victim of a war crime over their recruitment, a source with knowledge of the case told AFP.<\/p>\n
The three detainees are part of 5,700 suspected Daesh \u201cfighters\u201d of 61 nationalities transferred from Syria to neighboring Iraq earlier this year.<\/p>\n
France is investigating them for alleged \u201cterrorist\u201d crimes while in Syria.<\/p>\n
But according to their lawyers arguing for their repatriation, the French judicial system should instead be considering them as \u201cwar victims.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNo child chooses to be enlisted, and France is displaying the worst kind of indignity in this matter, while also violating the conventions to which it is a signatory,\u201d attorneys Marie Dose and Matthieu Bagard said in a joint statement.<\/p>\n
\u201cInstead of treating them as the victims they are, France refused to repatriate them from Syria and made possible their transfer to a squalid Iraqi prison where they are subjected to inhuman and degrading treatment,\u201d they added.<\/p>\n
Hundreds of French men and women joined the ranks of Daesh after the jihadist group seized large swathes of Syria and neighboring Iraq in 2014, implementing their brutal interpretation of Islamic law in a so-called \u201ccaliphate.\u201d<\/p>\n
Backed by US-led forces, Iraq proclaimed the defeat of Daesh in the country in 2017.<\/p>\n
Kurdish-led Syrian fighters ultimately beat back the group in Syria two years later, detaining thousands of alleged Daesh fighters as well as their family members.<\/p>\n
Syrian Kurdish authorities have long urged the international community to repatriate their nationals, but Western nations have been very reluctant and only brought some home on a case-by-case basis.<\/p>\n
The United States transferred \u201c5,700 adult male Daesh fighters\u201d to Iraqi custody in February after Syrian troops drove Kurdish forces from swathes of northern Syria, sparking questions over the fate of the Daesh prisoners.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
PARIS, France: Three Frenchmen held in Iraq, forced to work for the Daesh group as children, are seeking repatriation on the grounds they were victims of war, their lawyers said Friday. International humanitarian law prohibits the recruitment and use of children in hostilities. The men \u2014 taken to Syria by their terrorist parents aged 11 …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":96193,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-96183","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96183","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=96183"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96183\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":96195,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96183\/revisions\/96195"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/96193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=96183"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=96183"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=96183"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}