(AFP) The grandparents of two children stranded with their French jihadist mother at a camp in Kurdish-held Syria filed a lawsuit at Europe’s top rights court Monday over France’s refusal to allow them home, lawyers said.
It was the latest challenge to the French government’s opposition to returning the children of suspected jihadists in Syria or Iraq.
The four-year-old boy and three-year-old girl, who were born in Syria, are among an estimated 500 children of French citizens who joined the Islamic State’s so-called “caliphate” before the jihadists’ last Syrian redoubt was overrun in March.
France has said it will consider requests for their return on a case-by-case basis only. Since March it has repatriated just five orphans and a three-year-old girl whose mother was sentenced to life in prison in Iraq.
