Ten French women who joined IS go on hunger strike in Syria camp

Women in Syria's Kurdish-administered al-Hol camp

Credit: DELIL SOULEIMAN/AFP via Getty Images

Ten French women who joined the Islamic State have started a hunger strike in their detention camp in Syria in a bid to pressure France to bring them and their children back.

The women have been held alongside over 64,000 people, mainly women and children believed to be relatives of jihadists, in squalid camps managed by Syrian Kurdish forces in the north since Islamic State fighters were defeated in Syria in 2019.

They started the hunger strike "to protest against the stubborn refusal of French authorities to organise their and their children’s repatriation," according to a statement released by two French lawyers representing the group on Sunday.

"Faced with this endless and pointless arbitrary detention, these women have chosen to stop feeding themselves. They are only demanding one thing: to be judged for what they have done," it added.

Earlier this month, human rights experts from the United Nations urged 57 countries, including Britain, France and the United States, to repatriate the wives and children of jihadists stuck in the squalid camps of Roj and Al Hol, in northern Syria.

Women and children live in the camps in squalid conditions

Credit: BAKR ALKASEM/AFP via Getty Images

"An unknown number of people have already died because of their conditions of detention," the UN said.

Dozens of French mothers and around 200 French children of suspected armed extremists live in the muddy camps, where malnutrition, disease and violence are rife.

The issue of how to treat the wives and children of fighters has given way to much debate in France, a country with a high number of citizens who have joined the Islamic State, and where terror attacks claimed by Islamist militants have killed hundreds.

France has repatriated 35 children so far, many of them orphans, but authorities have insisted they will only take back children on a case-by-case basis, leaving mothers behind to face local justice along with their husbands.

Opinion polls have shown a majority of French people are against the repatriations.

Last week, two lawmakers wrote an open letter to President Macron urging the government to repatriate the hundreds of "innocent" French children stuck in Syria.

Russia, Germany and the United States have brought some of their citizens home, and Kurdish officials have been pressing countries to repatriate their citizens for years.