Tajikistan announced that it has repatriated 104 women and children from Syria, where a significant number of its people joined extremist groups. Among the group that returned home on Sunday were 31 women and 73 children.
The ministry of foreign affairs stated that Tajikistan also returned five citizens of Kazakhstan, comprising of a mother and her four children, at the request of Kazakhstani authorities. The women and children who returned were being held in camps for relatives of radical fighters under the control of Kurdish forces in northeast Syria. In these camps, poor living conditions and unchecked criminal activities are widespread, according to various human rights groups.
Many foreign extremists, accompanied by their families, had joined the Islamic State militant group and had settled in the self-declared “caliphate” that encompassed a vast area of Iraq and Syria in 2014.
