Emmanuel Duparcq AND Rouba El Husseini -
Three children, not older than five years old, are languishing in cold and muddy camps for the displaced in Syria’s northeast, far away from their family in France.
They are the sons of Julie Maninchedda, a suspected French female militant who was killed in shelling on a former IS group stronghold five months ago, and a captured German.
Now, the grandparents they have never met are trying to get them to France, imploring President Emmanuel Macron to show “humanity” and accept the children immediately.
Behind a fence, one-year-old Suleiman looks around the Kurdish-run Al-Hol camp, where tens of thousands of people displaced by the fight against IS live alongside relatives of suspected militants.
The baby’s face is marked with scars caused by shelling.
The infant is being looked after by a South African woman who once lived in the militant proto-state.
He is one of nearly 40 children living without their parents in informal settlements in Syria’s northeast. According to Save the Children, more than 2,500 foreign children from over 30 nationalities are living in Kurdish-run camps. Nearly half of them fled ongoing battles against the group in eastern Syria.
Maninchedda was killed along with her second husband, a Moroccan IS fighter, in October when shelling hit the village of Al-Shaafa in eastern Syria, two women who were in the area during the attack said. At the time of her death, she had been separated for several months from her first husband and the father of the three boys, Martin Lemke, a German militant who travelled with her to Syria in 2014.
His departure led to the separation of their three sons Suleiman, Shahir, three, and Hassan, five.
The eldest left with his German father, Lemke’s two other wives, and their three children, while the other two stayed behind with their mother. In late January, Lemke, his wives, and their children, surrendered to Kurdish-led forces after fleeing the village of Baghouz, the last IS redoubt in Syria.
Suspected of having worked with IS intelligence, Lemke, was sent to a Kurdish-run detention centre after handing himself over to US-backed forces. Meanwhile, his wives and children were trucked to displacement camps. AFP met Lemke’s wives and children at an SDF screening point outside the village of Baghouz this month.
Wearing a dusty red jacket and sandals that seemed too big, Hassan sat in a corner, silently staring off. As for Shahir and Suleiman, Lemke’s two wives said they had entrusted them to a Syrian woman after the death of their mother. — AFP
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