Six children of a Canadian mother return from a Syrian camp

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OTTAWA – Six children will return to Canada from a camp in Syria without their mother in Canada.

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According to Lawrence Greenspon, a lawyer representing the mother, Global Affairs Canada plans to return the children between the ages of five and 12.

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He said the government is working with a depolarization clinic in Montreal that supports families affected by radicalization. The clinic accepts children who do not have family in Montreal and may be placed in foster care if the mother does not return home.

Greenspon says the mother is now out of the camp and wants to return to Canada to be with her children. “He probably wanted to find a way back,” he said.

Greenspon said the federal government has refused to repatriate the woman, whose identity has not been released, because officials believe she poses a security risk.

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He said the government has taken steps to address this threat, including repatriating Canadian women from detention camps in Syria and placing them under a terrorist peace treaty.

The family is among scores of foreign nationals in camps and prisons run by Kurdish forces in Syria, which have retaken the war-torn region from the extremist Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

Although the federal government decided not to facilitate the woman's return to the country, it did offer assistance with the repatriation of her six children, leaving her to decide whether to send the children to Canada on their own or keep them with her in al-Roj camp.

Greenspon said “the mother was given an impossible choice.”

There is no timeline for when the children will arrive in Canada, but Greenspon said he is optimistic the government will “move quickly to get the children home safely.”

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