Western rampant hypocrisy as they condemn children in north-east Syria to a life of abuse

The West accuses Russia of human rights abuses against children, they should look in the mirror

Save the Children report on north-east Syria detention camps.

June 2023 - On International Children’s Day, Ambassador Neil Holland says that Ukraine's children are paying the price of Russian aggression.

Neil Holland was appointed Head of the United Kingdom’s Delegation to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) in May 2023.

In June 2023 Holland made a statement to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OCSE) - ‘Russia’s brutality towards Ukraine’s children’ in which he said:

Mr. Chair, we also continue to receive disturbing reports of the forced deportation of Ukrainian children by the Russian authorities. As the most recent Moscow Mechanism Report makes clear, these children are exposed to the deep trauma of being separated from their parents. They suffer violations and abuses of their rights, including being forced to relinquish their Ukrainian identity and participate in Russia-centric education. Russia’s forced deportation and attempted indoctrination of Ukrainian children is a despicable and systematic attempt to erase Ukraine’s future.

Holland claims that:

“Each day that Russia chooses to press on with its illegal and unprovoked invasion, Ukrainian children suffer. Children who have their whole lives ahead of them. Children whose futures the Russian authorities seem determined to take away.”

Reality is different to UK FCDO propaganda

Just one of the camps converted into housing for refugee families from the Donbass region in eastern Russia. Photo: Vanessa Beeley

The UN Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine said there was evidence of the illegal transfer of hundreds of Ukrainian children to Russia.

In November 2022 I visited eastern Russia and met with refugee families including children in Sterlitamak and the Bashkortostan region. I visited more than three community centres and summer camps that had been converted into reception complexes for these temporarily displaced people who had already endured nine years of ethnic cleansing pogroms by the Kiev regime and Nazi cohorts.

Refugee children and families in Eastern Russia after fleeing the Donbas region. Photo: Vanessa Beeley

One particular camp was organised in 24 hours to receive refugees from the Mariupol area in April 2022. More than 200 refugees were brought by train to the station in the city before being picked up and driven to the camp.

One of the families looking forward to returning to Mariupol after Russia has rebuilt the scarred city. Photo: Vanessa Beeley

Psychological help was provided upon arrival for the traumatised families. Medicine and medical care is free with doctors and pharmacists on site.

In March 2023 the UK State media outlet and narrative manager, the BBC, reported:

In some cases, parents or children told the Commission that once in Russia-controlled areas, transferred children were made to wear "dirty clothes, were screamed at, and called names." They also said that "some children with disabilities did not receive adequate care and medication."

Cabins with water, electricity and heating are provided for all families. Even family pets were vaccinated, vet checked and welcomed. Residents are given three meals per day, children can play outside or inside in safety and there are playgrounds, football pitches and climbing frames in the grounds of the facility.

The children are being helped to keep up their schooling & integrated into the Russian curriculum. Citizenship is now being organised for those who want it but they all have been given the same labour rights etc as Russian citizens. Free buses are laid on every day to take the families into the town centre.

Inside one of the buildings converted into a shelter for refugee families in eastern Russia. Photo: Vanessa Beeley

Margarita Bolycheva who is with the state committee of the Republic of Bashkortostan on foreign economic relations told me she had spent time with Syrian refugees in Berlin and that I should compare their treatment by the German government to the reception given to the refugees from Donbass.

As I said in November 2022:

She is absolutely right. There is no comparison. Here in Russia these displaced people are treated with respect and compassion. They are treated like human beings.

British and EU record of inhumanity towards foreign national children in Syria

In January 2023 a report by Human Rights Watch described the inhumane conditions that British and other nationality children were being forced to endure in north-east Syria.

Caveat: I blame HRW and Amnesty International for much of the propaganda that has provided justification for the regime change war against Syria since 2011. However individuals working for these organisations do provide valuable information from time to time and this report confirms what I have already heard from one or two decent journalists who were able to visit the ISIS camps in the north-east prior to the visits of the HRW staff.

Of the nearly 42,000 foreign Islamic State (ISIS) suspects and family members from 60 countries currently detained in northeast Syria, most are children. Many were taken to Syria by parents who sought to join ISIS or live in the “caliphate.” Others were born in Syria under areas of ISIS control or in the camps where families with alleged ISIS links are detained. Nearly 80 percent of the children are under the age of 12, and far too young to have played an active role in ISIS, yet many governments refuse to take these young nationals back, citing national security concerns or fearing public backlash.

The children are detained in such dire conditions that it might amount to torture. They face increasing risks of becoming victims of torture or radicalisation and recruitment by ISIS. Many children in the ISIS holding camps in north-east Syria - under US direct and proxy occupation - were found to be suicidal.

Many United Nations, counterterrorism, and security experts warn that abandoning these children in the camps and prisons carries greater national security risks than bringing them home.

As of January 23, 2023, nearly 42,000 foreigners remain held in the region along with more than 23,000 Syrians. Nearly 37,000 foreign nationals are detained in al-Hol and Roj, two locked, sprawling camps primarily holding the wives, other adult female relatives, and children of male ISIS suspects. Nearly 27,000 foreigners in the camps are from neighboring Iraq, while nearly 10,000 others are from about 60 other countries. More than 60 percent of the camp detainees are children. Nearly 80 percent of the children are under the age of 12, and 30 percent are age 5 or younger. Approximately 5,000 other foreigners are held in prisons and “rehabilitation” centers, including up to several hundred children.

Detention based only on family ties is collective punishment of these children which amounts to a war crime. Governments whose citizens languish in these makeshift detention camps are complicit in the abuse of these children.

Conditions for these children in Al Hol and Roj camps are “life-threatening, deeply degrading, and in many case, inhumane; their cumulative psychological impact may amount to torture. Medical care, clean water, as well as education and recreation for children are grossly inadequate.”

It is claimed that an estimated 371 children have died in 2019 in Al Hol camp, from preventable disease or hypothermia.

Children have also drowned in sewage pits, died in tent fires, and been hit and killed by water trucks. These children come from many of the countries that have been responsible for the regime change war waged against Syria since 2011.

They suffer violations and abuses of their rights, including being forced to relinquish their Ukrainian identity and participate in Russia-centric education. Neil Holland

According to the HRW report - some younger children attend informal preschool, but most children have no access to education and have missed out on years of schooling.

The camps have become increasingly dangerous and violent, as detainees, including many loyal to ISIS, have carried out attacks against other detainees, camp authorities, and aid workers. The UN reported that 90 people were murdered in al-Hol in 2021, and 42 from January to mid-November 2022.

Child rape and trafficking is rife in these camps.

Conditions are even worse in the prisons and makeshift detention centers where the SDF is holding up to 1,000 detainees, from about 20 countries, who are boys or who were apprehended before they turned 18. In the prisons, overcrowding initially was so severe that many of the detainees slept shoulder to shoulder. Many imprisoned Syrian and foreign boys were initially held in cells with men.

In January 2022, ISIS attacked one prison holding about 700 boys in the city of al-Haskah, sparking a 10-day battle with SDF fighters backed by US and UK forces.

According to local reports more than 500 were killed in this attack including several children. The information and accountability vacuum surrounding the fate of these children could easily suggest that there were more fatalities or disappearances.

Foreign boys can be forcibly removed from their mothers without warning and transferred to “rehabilitation centers”. The majority are as young as 10 and 12. Mothers are not informed of the whereabouts of their sons for weeks, months or not at all. Foreign boys are regularly not allowed contact with their mothers or siblings.

According to Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, the UN special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism:

“The de facto culling, separation, and warehousing of adolescent boys from their mothers is an abhorrent practice inconsistent with the dignity of the child and inconsistent with the most essential of rights any child is entitled to in any circumstances.”

From the HRW report:

From October 2022 to January 14, 2023, at least 10 countries brought some or more nationals home: 1,245 (more than half of them children) to Iraq, 4 women and 13 children to Australia, 1 woman and 2 children to Barbados, 2 women and 2 children to Canada, 16 women and 42 children to France, 5 women and 7 children to Germany, 12 women and 28 children to the Netherlands, 38 children to Russia, 1 woman and 1 child to the United Kingdom, and 2 women and 13 children to Spain. France repatriated an additional 15 women and 32 children on January 24, 2023. [Emphasis added]

Russia is one of the countries that has repatriated the majority of nationals in the ISIS camps.

Save the Children noted in December 2022, at current rates, repatriating the more than 23,000 foreign children still held in northeast Syria could take up to three decades.

It has been proven that repatriation and rehabilitation has been largely successful and that the children do return to normalcy after time.

When asked how the child is adjusting overall to their new country of residence, 89 percent of respondents to the online survey—comprised of family members, teachers, and social workers—reported that the child was doing “very well” or “quite well.” Only 4 percent said the child was having difficulties.

According to HRW:

In a bitter irony, many of the same countries with nationals languishing in the camps have accepted thousands of refugee children, who, like children in the camps, have often survived displacement, conflict-related violence, family separation or loss, and interrupted schooling. Canada, for example, accepted approximately 20,000 child refugees from Syria in 2015-2016, and resettled over 3,800 school-aged children from Afghanistan after the Taliban retook power. It has also offered refuge for thousands of children fleeing the war in Ukraine.

EU countries like France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Sweden have made policy choices that increase the difficulty for children to reintegrate and may even cause additional harm. In these countries authorities have immediately separated children from their mothers if the mother is under investigation for offenses related to ISIS without evaluating if separation is in the child’s best interests. This causes significant emotional and psychological distress for the child.

Grandparents or other family members can face arduous investigations before being allowed to assume care of the children, even if they have been in contact with the authorities for years. “In one case, for example, a girl arrived in France at age 5 but spent three years in foster care, even though her grandparents had sought custody even before she came home.”

More than 60 British children trapped in north-east Syria

In 2019 the then UK security minister, Ben Wallace, said he would not put officials’ lives at risk to rescue UK citizens who went to Syria and Iraq to join Islamic State, insisting “actions have consequences”.

“I’m not putting at risk British people’s lives to go looking for terrorists or former terrorists in a failed state,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

Alison Griffin, Save the Children’s Head of Conflict and Humanitarian Campaigns, said:

Children in Syria who have fled ISIS-held areas are innocent. Their short lives have been full of violence and fear but with the right care they can bounce back, recover and amaze us. They deserve that chance, no matter what they’ve been dragged into by the decisions of adults.

For the British children among them we can and must give them the safety they need by bringing them to be cared for in the UK.

According to Save the Children there are more than 60 British children trapped in north-east Syria after fleeing ISIS controlled areas. The children, many under five years old, have endured cycles of displacement and inhumane conditions in the various detention camps while British officials condemn them to this life of torture and abuse without conscience.

As Alison Griffin stated:

Children whose parents are alive are just as innocent as those who have been orphaned. All have been put through unimaginable horrors. The Foreign Secretary has said he wants to ensure ‘innocents are not caught in the crossfire’. To play his part to achieve that, he needs to act now while there’s still a window of opportunity and bring all the UK’s children home.

Older children who have lived under ISIS occupation will have witnessed appalling acts of savagery which include beheadings, crucifixion and mass killings. These experiences leave the children with physical and psychological scars and increase their vulnerability to radicalisation and recruitment by ISIS.

One British mother with two young children, a baby and an under five, had fled the “hell” of Baghouz where in 2019 the U.S. criminally bombed women and children during the last days of the ISIS occupation. “Her youngest baby was close to death with bronchiolitis when they arrived at the camp” in north-east Syria.

In 2019, the U.S. military killed dozens of people in Syria, including women and children, in airstrikes conducted during the final days of the war against the Islamic State, but did not disclose its actions for more than two years.

The New York Times reported on the war crime in November 2021:

In the last days of the battle against the Islamic State in Syria, when members of the once-fierce caliphate were cornered in a dirt field next to a town called Baghuz, a U.S. military drone circled high overhead, hunting for military targets. But it saw only a large crowd of women and children huddled against a river bank.

Without warning, an American F-15E attack jet streaked across the drone’s high-definition field of vision and dropped a 500-pound bomb on the crowd, swallowing it in a shuddering blast. As the smoke cleared, a few people stumbled away in search of cover. Then a jet tracking them dropped one 2,000-pound bomb, then another, killing most of the survivors.

UK is funding the expansion of ISIS holding camps

In 2021 the UK provided funding for the expansion of one of the ISIS camps in Hasakah, north-east Syria. Rather than repatriate British nationals the UK FCDO condemned them to a life imprisonment in conditions that are described as inhumane by various Human Rights groups.

According to a report in Defense One - the effort will double in size the current facility at Hasakah, a series of three converted school buildings that holds roughly 5,000 prisoners, according to British Army Maj. Gen. Kevin Copsey, the coalition’s deputy commander for strategy. 

A British Ministry of Defense spokesperson confirmed that the U.K. is funding the Hasakah effort, which Copsey called “quite a significant expansion.”

Lt. Gen. Paul Calvert, the commander of the U.S.-led mission admitted the dangers that children faced in Al Hol camp:

A huge proportion of the 65,000 people living at al Hol are children, with two-thirds under the age of 18 and over half under the age of 12. The wives of ISIS fighters are carrying out a daily indoctrination program, he said, and so-called “cubs” are “exported back through the rat lines coming out of al Hol that pushes them down into the Badia desert for additional training and use as [ISIS] fighters.

So, not only is the UK FCDO not showing any enthusiasm for repatriation of British nationals caught up in a terrorist proxy war against the Syrian people that the British regime is facilitating - they are also callously condemning the children of ISIS brides to a lifetime of incarceration with a high risk of abuse, exploitation, trafficking, rape and extremist indoctrination.

Russia’s forced deportation and attempted indoctrination of Ukrainian children is a despicable and systematic attempt to erase Ukraine’s future. Neil Holland

ISIS organ trafficking and role as assassins for the US alliance in Syria

ISIS is also known for increasing revenue through organ trafficking particularly from child victims. According to the World Health Organisation illegal organ trading generates between $600 million and $1.2 billion in profits each year.

Reports from the beginning of the ISIS insurgence in Syria have talked about “medical schools” in northern Syria where organs are extracted. The Iraqi News reported that IS has kidnapped and sold many children in Syria to Turkish organ traffickers in order to finance its operations.

"We... have no reason to doubt them given other similar atrocities that have been documented and other heinous crimes for which ISIL has proudly taken credit," the U.S. State Department said in response to charges of IS's organ harvesting. In December, the U.S. government revealed that it had obtained an ISIS document during a raid by Special Forces in Syria. "The apostate's life and organs do not have to be respected and may be taken with impunity," the document said.

The US military occupiers and oil, private security contractors working in north-east Syria are well aware of these ISIS operations. The UK, a strategic US ally in Syria must also be cognizant of these heinous trafficking rings that will prey on the children trapped in this hostile environment abandoned by their respective governments.

The reality is that the Pentagon has refused to vet proxy militias including ISIS for human rights abuses - apparently preferring to turn a blind eye to the revenue-producing crimes committed by terrorist groups under their control.

It is already well evidenced that ISIS is not an enemy of the US in Syria and Iraq. Very recently, in March 2023, the Pentagon was reported to be training brigades of ISIS and assorted terrorist groups to increase attacks on civilians, infrastructure and Syrian Arab Army positions.

Why was a very recent Al Monitor detailed report on women’s harrowing accounts of experiences in Syria’s trafficking networks retracted and with no trace on the archive websites?

The shame of Shamima Begum

A spy working for the Canadian Intelligence services smuggled Shamima Begum into Syria and Britain later conspired to cover up Canada’s role in the operation, a new book has claimed.

The Telegraph

Begum was just 15 when she travelled to Syria with Amira Abase, 15, and Kadiza Sultana, 16, fellow pupils at Bethnal Green Academy in east London, in 2015. She was a child.

Samantha Begum, now 24 years old.

The Begum family lawyer, Mr Akunjee, said:

“Britain has lauded its efforts to stop Isis and the grooming of our children by spending millions of pounds on the Prevent programme and online monitoring.

"However, at the very same time we have been co-operating with a western ally, trading sensitive intelligence with them whilst they have effectively been nabbing British children and trafficking them across the Syrian border for delivery to Isis all in the name of intelligence-gathering.”

Begum was stripped of her citizenship by then-Home-Secretary Sajid Javid. Javid effectively offered 28 days amnesty to British nationals fighting with Al Qaeda, in Idlib, in 2019 but condemned Begum to stateless abuse in Syria despite the UK Intelligence alleged role in her being trafficked as an ISIS bride, aged 15.

A New Yorker headline in 2020 asked a pertinent question:

If Shamima Begum, the ISIS bride, is no longer British, what does citizenship mean?

2019: Begum identified herself to Anthony Loyd, a war reporter for the Times, after he had stopped by the al-Hawl camp on the last day of an assignment. “I am a sister from London. I’m a Bethnal Green girl,” Begum told Loyd. She was anxious about her unborn child. “I’m scared that this baby is going to get sick in this camp,” Begum said. “That’s why I really want to get back to Britain, because I know it will get taken care of, health-wise at least.” Loyd’s story ran on the front page of the newspaper. Five days later, Sajid Javid, the Home Secretary at the time, stripped Begum of her citizenship. Her baby, a boy named Jarrah, died of a respiratory infection, when he was three weeks old.

When human rights reports were circulating in 2019, estimating 60 British children and 30 women in north-east Syria ISIS prisons, the British government said that, since the United Kingdom does not have a consulate in Syria, it would not be able to “provide assistance”. Since then a handful of orphans have allegedly been repatriated.

At the time of Begum being stripped of her citizenship - the British regime had a policy of turning problematic citizens into former citizens.

Richard Barrett, former head of global counter-terrorism for MI6 told the New Yorker:

I think the government position is precisely that. If there is a way of getting rid of the problem to somewhere else, let’s get rid of the problem somewhere else.

Since 2006, Home Secretaries have been able to deprive a person of her British citizenship if it is “conducive to the public good”—a subjective rather than a strict legal test—as long as it does not leave her stateless.

Journalist Anthony Loyd pointed out the UK FCDO manipulation of the law:

International law forbids governments from rendering their citizens stateless. The British government has justified taking away Begum’s nationality on the grounds that her mother is Bangladeshi, and so she is eligible for citizenship until the age of twenty-one. This is a fiction. Begum has never lived in Bangladesh.

Barrett, the former MI6 official said:

This is a purely political decision. Why one would think that Bangladesh had any better capacity to deal with somebody? It doesn’t make any sense.

In refusing Begum’s appeal last week, the U.K.’s Special Immigration Appeals Commission acknowledged that her situation at the al-Roj refugee camp, in northern Syria, exposes her to the risk of torture and degrading treatment.

Anthony Loyd the Times reporter who met with Begum “ was struck by her guilelessness. She was awkward but direct.”. Yes, she was “unfazed” by some of the ISIS atrocities she had witnessed but I have personally met children who could describe terrorist crucifixion of relatives without batting an eyelid after being incarcerated by Western-backed terrorists for years in different areas of Syria. War does that to children.

Former British Ambassador to Syria, Peter Ford gave me this statement:

The UK, so apparently solicitous regarding the children of Ukraine, appears less concerned about some of its own. To the extent in fact of denying them not just a right of abode in the UK but even a right to UK nationality. The most well known case is that of Shamima Begum, an East London teenager encouraged by British government propaganda demonising Assad to join ISIS, and subsequently stripped of her nationality and forced to fester for years in the extremism incubators which are the ISIS prisoner camps in US/UK-controlled Northern Syria.

The sins of mothers being visited on the children, Begum's children, are consequently also denied their birthright, a chance to live in Britain. For a government which behaves this despicably towards children of its own nation to posture as a children's champion is a sickening hypocrisy. 

Conclusion - the West is collectively hypocritical and is content to incarcerate their own child nationals and put them at risk of torture, abuse and death at hands of terrorists they control

For a government which behaves this despicably towards children of its own nation to posture as a children's champion is a sickening hypocrisy. 

Peter Ford

None of these children, Begum included, exploited and abused by their state of birth should be punished for the alleged crimes of their relatives. The only constructive solution is for western regimes to repatriate their child nationals and provide psychological and trauma support to enable them to reintegrate into society and into their culture of origin.

HRW report:

The unlawful detention in northeast Syria of 23,000 foreign children from dozens of countries has deprived them of their basic rights as children, including the rights to a nationality, health, education, family unity, and freedom from mistreatment and arbitrary detention. Those who have died because of the conditions or circumstances of their detention have been denied the right to life itself.

The HRW report concludes that although several countries have marginally increased the repatriation of child nationals, the rate remains indefensibly low.

Western regimes continue to outsource responsibility for their child nationals to militants, terrorists, child and organ traffickers in north-east Syria. In the process ‘the children’s countries of origin are re-victimizing children who have already endured unimaginable horrors’.

While the West bears responsibility for the mass imprisonment of child nationals in squalid environments where they are preyed upon by all manner of criminals while depriving these children of any meaningful rehabilitation, identity or hope, they cannot take the moral high ground and prosecute Russia for unsubstantiated claims of child abduction in a war zone that the West created.

***