Three children born to Nigerian Islamic State (IS) fighters in Syria have been handed over to the federal government.
Syrian Kurdish officials said the orphaned children, aged 4, 6 and 8, were handed over to a Nigerian government representative in the city of Qamishli in northeast Syria last Thursday, September 5.
“We have been in talks with Nigerian officials about these cases,” said Abdulkarim Omar, co-chair of foreign relations in the SDF-led administration in northeast Syria.
“They finally decided to come here and take these parentless children,” he said.
This is the first time that an African country has taken back children of Africans who have traveled to Syria to join the terror group, the Kurdish official said.
Omar declined to give information about the number of Nigerians held in northeast Syria, but there are many Nigerians in custody who joined the IS terror group in recent years.
Musa Habib Marika, a representative of Nigeria’s government, said his country is also considering other cases.
“We have asked for a list of Nigerians who are held in camps and prisons to look into their cases,” Marika said during a press conference with Kurdish officials in Qamishli.
But Omar said that Nigeria and other countries can only repatriate children and women of IS fighters.
U.S.-backed Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) declared victory over IS in March 2019 after pushing out the group from its last stronghold in eastern Syria.
SDF officials say they are holding more than 1,200 IS militants from nearly 50 countries.
There are also about 20,000 women and 50,000 children of IS fighters who have been settled in an overcrowded camp in northeast Syria, the same sources said.
Kurdish officials say they couldn’t bear the responsibility of dealing with IS fighters alone and that a special international tribunal should be established for crimes they have committed in Syria.
“We can’t try these individuals on our own, so the international community needs to step up its efforts to help us address this international problem,” Kurdish official Omar said.
He added that some Western countries have expressed support for establishing such a court for IS foreign fighters.
Marika had requested for the names of all Nigerian citizens in prisons and camps in northeast Syria, ANHA reported.
Marika was said to have declared that Nigeria would only agree to repatriate women and children.
“Nigeria is also affected by the same thing, Boko Haram. We are also fighting them. The Nigerian government is against ISIS everywhere. Whatever they (Syria) decide to do to fight ISIS, for example, the international court, of course we support that,” Marika reportedly said.
There is currently no information available on how many Nigerians are in North and East Syria, the RIC said.
The publication recalled that the US-led Coalition against Islamic State and Syrian Democratic Forces announced the recapture of ISIS caliphate in March after a gruelling months-long battle for the last territory along the Euphrates River in eastern Syria.
Thousands of women and children believed to be ISIS adherents and their children remain in detention by the authorities of the Autonomous Region of North and East Syria.
Despite the loss of its territory in Iraq and Syria, ISIS remains active in both, and has affiliates in Asia and Africa, including Nigeria.
A faction of Boko Haram – which has been active in Nigeria as a violent jihadist group since 2009 – pledged allegiance to ISIS in 2015, becoming the group’s West Africa Province.
ISWAP is one of ISIS’s most deadly branches, regularly attacking military targets in northeast Nigeria and neighbouring Niger, Chad and Cameroon, the report said.
When contacted, spokesman for the ministry of foreign affairs, Mr. Ferdinand Nwonye, said the ministry was yet to receive any report on the repatriation of the orphans.
“We have not received any official report on the repatriation from them, so we have no official reaction. Our Embassy in Syria has been moved to Lebanon”, he said.
It would be recalled that the son of the former Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN), Mr. Ibrahim Uwais, had joined the terrorist group in Syria with his two wives and children in 2015.
His secret movement triggered a bedlam in security circles, which discovered to their chagrin through further investigations that many Nigerians were making secret trips to join the group in Syria.
Ibrahim Uwais and his wives were later killed by US-led air strikes targeting ISIS camps in Aleppo, Syria.
It was not clear whether the orphaned children belong to Ibrahim Uwais.
VoA/ThisDay
