France will halt mass repatriations of jihadist women and their children held in camps in northeastern Syria in the absence of their will and after carrying out the fourth operation in a year on Tuesday.

“All the mothers who expressed a desire to leave Syria have been repatriated, there will not be another operation of this type,” a diplomatic source said on Friday.

On Tuesday, 10 women and 25 children were repatriated from Syria, an operation that was presented to families at the time as the last of its kind, causing concern.

France cannot “forcefully repatriate people living abroad, certainly not their children,” the diplomatic source told AFP on Friday, adding that 169 children and 57 adult women had returned to French territory since 2019. .

“Some very radicalized women have explicitly stated that they want to stay in Syria,” the same source explained, without being able to name the number of specific individuals. In May, a source close to the case told AFP that nearly 80 French women “did not want to return.”

Another diplomatic source did not, however, rule out the possibility of repatriating some women on an individual and targeted basis.

These French women voluntarily went to the territories controlled by the jihadist organizations in the Iraqi-Syrian region and were arrested at the time of the fall of the Islamic State organization in 2019.

Any adult who went to the Iraqi-Syrian region and remained there is subject to a legal process.

The issue of their repatriation is particularly sensitive in many countries, especially in France which has been hit by jihadist attacks, namely in 2015, which were instigated by the Islamic State.