CMC – Over 90 nationals of Trinidad and Tobago, including at least 56 children, are unlawfully detained in life-threatening conditions as Islamic State (ISIS) suspects and family members in northeast Syria, Human Rights Watch said Tuesday.
And accusing the Trinidad and Tobago government of taking almost no action to help them return, the international NGO urged the Dr Keith Rowley-led administration to bring home its nationals for rehabilitation, reintegration, and prosecutions of adults as appropriate.
Human Rights Watch said in its report, ‘Trinidad and Tobago: Bring Home Nationals from Northeast Syria’, that conditions in the camps and prisons holding Trinidadians and other ISIS-linked suspects and family members are increasingly dire.
The report indicated that approximately 90 to 100 Trinidad and Tobago nationals are detained in northeast Syria by US-backed, Kurdish-led regional forces, according to family members and advocates. They include an estimated 21 women, at least one of them a grandmother, and at least 56 children in Roj and al-Hol, two locked camps for families with alleged ISIS links.
Forty-four of the children in the camps are age 12 or younger and 15 are under age 6, family members said. At least 33 children were born in Syria including one child, born in al-Hol, who is only 3. In addition, at least 13 Trinidadian males, including at least one teenage boy, are held in other detention centers. At least six of the older boys and men – the teenager, 17, and five men ages 18 to 20 – were taken to Syria by family members when they were children.
At least 36 countries have repatriated some or many of their nationals from northeast Syria. Repatriations have increased since October 2022 with at least 10 countries, including Barbados and the United States, bringing back some or many of their nationals. Many repatriated children are successfully reintegrating in their home countries, Human Rights Watch research has found.
Yet, the NGO said, authorities in Trinidad and Tobago have not taken steps to bring home their nationals detained in northeast Syria for investigation and, if warranted, prosecution, citing security concerns.
“On February 15, 2023, Attorney General Reginald Armour wrote to Human Rights Watch that his office ‘has been working assiduously with all stakeholders’, including other government ministries, on a policy framework for repatriations, but gave no timeline. A separate February 15, 2023 communication from the Ministry of Foreign and CARICOM affairs also indicated that it was ‘actively engaged’ on the issue,” the organization said.
It called on the government of the twin-island republic to urgently ensure that all its nationals detained in northeast Syria and Iraq can come home, giving priority to children and their mothers, and to particularly vulnerable detainees.
Jo Becker, children’s rights advocacy director at Human Rights Watch, said most of the Trinidadians detained in northeast Syria are children who never chose to live under ISIS.
“These children should have the chance to go home, go to school, and enjoy their childhood instead of suffering because of their parents’ decisions,” Becker said.
Human Rights Watch interviewed six Trinidadians held in the camps and prisons in 2022 and 2019, and seven family members, an attorney, and three advocates representing the detainees from December to February 2023.
It also reviewed court documents related to cases filed by the families seeking to compel the government to bring home their loved ones. The names of those detained are withheld to protect their privacy.
All six Trinidadians interviewed in locked camps and other detention centres in northeast Syria said that, more than anything, they wanted to go home.
Three Trinidadians who came to Syria as adults said they wrongly thought they were going to a Muslim utopia, only to learn once they arrived that ISIS would not let them leave.
Most of the Trinidadians were rounded up in late 2018 or early 2019 by the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) as they toppled the last remnant of ISIS’s self-declared “caliphate” in northeast Syria. They are among nearly 42,000 other foreigners from about 60 countries and more than 23,000 Syrians held as ISIS suspects and family members in northeast Syria.
In addition, four women from Trinidad and Tobago are imprisoned in Iraq with their seven children, family members said. The women were convicted of ISIS links in neighbouring Iraq, where Human Rights Watch has found serious, widespread flaws in prosecutions of terrorism suspects, including of foreign women.
The human rights organization said one of the detained foreigners has been able to challenge the necessity and legality of their detention, making their detention arbitrary and unlawful.
“Their detention conditions are cruel and degrading, and in many cases inhuman, and may amount to torture. Governments that knowingly and significantly contribute to the detainees’ abusive confinement may be complicit in their unlawful detention,” Human Rights Watch said.
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