Will the disabled Chadia from Amsterdam come along with the last flight from Syria? | Inland

Her family still can’t believe it. “We have been disappointed so often in recent years, so we really want to be sure first,” says one of them. But it seems very likely that Chadia B. (33) from Amsterdam has also been recalled by the Dutch government. from the Kurdish detention camp Al Roj in northern Syria. ,,If that is indeed the case, I especially hope that good medical help is available for her.”

The Ministry of Justice and Security reported on Tuesday morning that it was twelve Dutch women and 28 Dutch children from that camp and would fly over to the Netherlands. A spokesperson does not want to confirm that Chadia B. is one of them, but does confirm that it concerns the twelve women who had started proceedings at the Rotterdam court. Chadia B. is one of the twelve women who took part in that procedure.

Chadia B. has been in the news several times recently. While some Dutch women consciously chose to go to Syria and Iraq and join the jihad and terrorist group IS, the Amsterdam story is more complicated. Before her departure, the woman was already struggling with serious psychological problems. She suffers from psychosis, is mentally limited and was temporarily in a juvenile detention center.

After her first trip to Syria, in 2013, where she married a jihad fighter, she soon returned to the Netherlands. Her family confiscates her passport to prevent her from leaving again, they also warn police and other institutions. But Chadia manages to get a new ID card from the municipality of Amsterdam and leaves again. The authorities are not stopping her.

She first appeared in the media when Dutch journalist Harald Doornbos found her in a tent in the Kurdish detention camp Al Hol in June 2019. The caliphate of terror group IS fell a few months earlier and the IS women were captured and detained. Chadia lies confused, soiled and with an amputated foot in a tent. It is unclear how she lost her foot. Unable to take care of herself, she wears diapers and is kept alive by other women in the camp. Sometimes she stands at the entrance of the camp, waiting for her mother, to whom she writes notes to pick her up.

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Her relatives in the Netherlands hire a lawyer. But the summary proceedings that they institute against the Dutch state, in which they ask that state to bring her back to the Netherlands, is lost. The court finds ‘Chadia’s interests very important and the situation extremely distressing’, but the interests of the Dutch state outweigh the judges at the end of 2020. The situation on the spot is still dangerous and bringing the woman back means that The Netherlands must negotiate with those in power in the area, which could cause ‘damage to international relations’, the verdict says.

Now, more than two years later, Chadia seems to be on her way to the Netherlands after all. Lawyers André Seebregts and Jeffrey Jordan initiated proceedings on behalf of 12 women at the Rotterdam court, which in short means that the Netherlands would lose the right to prosecute the women if the government does not make an effort to bring the women to the Netherlands. The ministry then chose eggs for its money and concluded a deal with the Kurdish rulers in the area.

The Kurds already want to get rid of the women, they prefer that they be tried in their (European) countries of origin. They have also gathered all the women in camp Al Roj, where every so often groups of women are collected from, among others, Russia, France and Denmark. Minister Yesilgöz of Justice and Security prefers not to have the women in the Netherlands, but she thinks seeing them walking around here with impunity later is even worse.

That is why earlier this year a group of five women and eleven children. They were arrested immediately after arrival and detained in the special Terrorism Department for women in Zwolle. Their criminal trials are underway and are likely to lead to several years in prison for their membership of a terrorist group: IS. A woman who was the first to be retrieved, Ilham B., was jailed for 3.5 years.

The new group of twelve, who will arrive on Tuesday evening, is also arrested and detained. Their children then go to family or foster families. Whether Chadia also has to appear in court and what she will do then remains to be seen.

The identity of the other 11 women who have been recovered has not yet been released. However, this was the last group of women who had started a procedure, says lawyer Seebregts. They are not the last Dutch women who are still in Syria. Some are still (with or without children) in the detention camps. Others have escaped and now live in the Idlib region of northeastern Syria, which is still under the control of jihadist groups.

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