(Zaman Al Wasl)- Around 75 displaced families, mostly women and children, have been freed from the deserted Kurdish-held Al-Hol camp in northeastern Hasaka province over a tribal mediation, local council said Friday.
Deir Ezzor's Civil Council said the freed families have headed their homes in the towns of Baghouz , Shaafa and Al-Hajin near the Iraqi border.
The US-led Syrian Democratic Forces are holding tens of thousands of civilians and ISIS (Daesh) relatives in camps for the displaced. Local activists say most of the families have no ties to ISIS.
About 200 families have left the overcrowded al-Hol camp to Deir Ezzor province in two months.
The United Nations said the Al-Hol camp's population stood at around 70,000 people.
These included more than 30,000 Iraqis, some 28,000 Syrians and over 10,000 foreign nationals, many of them relatives of alleged militant fighters being held in detention.
IS fighters overran large swathes of Syria and neighbouring Iraq in 2014, running a brutal proto-state before their territorial defeat in March last year.
After years of fighting IS, Syria's Kurds hold thousands of foreigners linked to IS in their custody.
These include thousands of foreign women and children, the majority in the camp of Al-Hol.
On Thursday, Kurdish forces handed over 35 Russian orphans linked to the Islamic State group to their home country in the latest such repatriation of parentless children, AFP said.
The boys and girls were handed over to a Russian delegation in the town of Qamishli, he said.
Abdelkarim Omar, a senior foreign affairs official with the Kurdish authorities, said the Russian children were approved for transfer after their identities were verified via DNA testing.
A Kurdish official said they were aged from four to 16 years old.
Anna Kuznetsova, children's rights commissioner for the Russian president, said handovers of Russian children were completed from Iraq.
"We are glad to be continuing this work on the issue of repatriating children that are today in camps," she said.
In March last year, the Kurds handed over three Russian orphans aged five to seven from the Country's Muslim-majority North Caucasus region.
A month earlier, 27 children aged four to 13 were flown from Iraq to the Moscow region. That followed the repatriation from Iraq of 30 children in late December 2018.
Russian President Vladimir Putin in late 2017 called the drive to return the children "a very honourable and correct deed" and promised to help.
Syria's Kurds have repeatedly called for the repatriation of foreign IS suspects and their relatives.
But the home countries of suspected IS members are reluctant to take them back, due to potential security risks and the likely public backlash.
Some Western government -- including France and Belgium -- have however brought a handful of orphans home.
(Zaman Al Wasl, Agencies)
Zaman Al Wasl
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