TORONTO -- A four-year-old rescued from a detention camp in Syria is doing well at her new home in Canada, according to her Canadian aunt — but she keeps crying for her mother, who remains in Syria after allowing other relatives to take the child to safety.
The child, whose identity is being withheld, just can’t understand why her mother is not around, the aunt told CTV News.
More than 20 Canadian children of ISIS fighters are stranded in camps in Syria, a situation that activists and extended family members have decried.
On Monday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau described the child’s rescue as almost a private affair.
“The federal government facilitated the travel documents, but this was something that was done by the family involved,” he said.
This understates Canada’s role slightly. Although the girl’s aunt rescued her with the aid of a former U.S. diplomat, a Canadian diplomat from Baghdad also personally delivered custody and travel documents to the child’s aunt in Erbil, in the Kurdistan region of Iraq.
Peter Galbraith, the former U.S. diplomat who arranged the rescue, described Canada’s involvement as significant.
“This was a case of a mother who wanted to send her child out,” Galbraith said. “So there was no forcible separation. It was a voluntary decision, which Canada rightly facilitated.”
This is only the second Canadian child who has been brought home from a camp in Syria. A five-year-old who was orphaned after her parents were killed in conflict was rescued last fall after months of pleading by extended family who lived in Canada.
According to a February statement from UNICEF, which called for children to be rescued from these detention camps, there are “more than 22,000 foreign children of at least 60 nationalities who languish in camps and prisons, in addition to many thousands of Syrian children.”
The European Union has called on all of the counties in the EU to repatriate European children currently in the Syrian camps.
France has repatriated some of the children detained, largely without their mothers, and Belgium announced recently that they would be repatriating children under 12 years old and will be analyzing the mothers on a case by case basis.
Human Rights Watch Canada released a statement in February accusing Canada of failing to live up to its new international campaign against arbitrary detention because of the country’s lack of action regarding the children stranded in Syria.
The UN Special Rapporteur for the Protection and Promotion of Human Rights while Countering Terrorism, Fionnuala Ni Aolain, also singled out Canada as one of the countries failing to help their stranded nationals.
“Their detention is undeniably arbitrary and involves no due process or protection,” Ni Aolain said last month.
In 2019, Trudeau called it “too dangerous” for officials to make their way to these camps in Syria to retrieve children.
“How can you say it’s too dangerous, when a private citizen can go over there and make it happen?” Lawrence Greenspon, the family’s lawyer, said about the rescue.
Farida Deif, Canada director for Human Rights Watch, said in February that Canada has been turning “a blind eye” for too long.
"The prime minister does not want to spend political capital to return a group of Canadians with suspected ISIS ties," said Deif.
“There could be trafficking victims, victims of ISIS. Certainly, the children are innocent.”
Although it remains unclear when or if Canada could repatriate adults stranded in these camps, the two rescues that have taken place may be a sign that things are changing for the children.
“If there are mothers who want to put their children first and have them go from a prison camp to a life in Canada, that door is open,” Galbraith said.
The choice is agonizing, as the mother of the child newly returned to Canada now knows all too well.
