Humanitarians warned for years that the camps in north-east Syria holding tens of thousands of family members of suspected Islamic State (IS) fighters would have to be dealt with. Calling them a “ticking time bomb”, relief groups said the women and children could not just be left to rot in squalid desert camps indefinitely, because eventually they would come home.
Despite the warnings, most states ignored the problem, refusing to repatriate their citizens. At least 8,000 women and children from more than 40 countries have been stranded in the camps of north-east Syria since 2019.
This week, they started to come home. Belgian authorities reported a woman charged in absentia for IS membership had made her way from Turkey to Belgium. An Albanian woman, kidnapped as a child by her father and taken to Syria, managed to smuggle herself to Turkey, where she requested travel documents.
