When the boys reach adolescence, they are considered a security risk and are therefore separated from their mothers. But according to UN Special Envoy Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, the first UN expert to gain access to the Kurdish-controlled prison camps in northern Syria, there is no evidence that this is the case.
According to Ní Aoláin, especially boys from countries other than Syria and Iraq, some as young as eleven, are kept apart.
“Every single boy I met was clearly traumatized by the separation from their mothers,” she told the AFP news agency, adding that the practice violates international law.
The logic is also flawed, she believes, because grown men are allowed to stay.
A total of 52,000 people from 57 countries – among them suspected members of the terrorist movement IS and their family members – are said to be in the al-Hol and al-Roj camps. Sixty percent of them are children, the majority of whom are under the age of twelve.
Fionnuala Ní Aoláin calls on the world to “urgently” bring home its citizens who are in the camps. Several countries have chosen to bring home only women and children, but repatriation is slow.