Canada_ (Commonwealth) _ According to their lawyer, two Canadian ladies and three adolescent girls who were scheduled to be deported from Syrian camps for relatives of ISIS suspects were instead held and harassed by their Kurdish guards. Since the repatriation aircraft to Canada departed without the women more than ten days ago, the women have remained missing.
One of the ladies was able to make a brief phone conversation to a relative on Tuesday before the connection disconnected after 4 minutes, Edmonton attorney Zachary Al-Khatib told CBC News. The lady said that the five of them had been held against their will and cruelly treated by Kurdish officials in the “Red Prison” at al-Hol camp and a separate facility.
“They were in serious difficulty,” Al-Khatib said.A short appeal for evidence of life may be heard. They wanted to go back to Canada. The ladies, according to Al-Khatib, demand assistance and medical care. He said there was “no shred of evidence” that the two ladies had gone to Syria in order to join ISIS and that he had no clue why his clients were there.
Al-Khatib claimed that on Tuesday, he got an email from Global Affairs Canada alerting him that the ministry had learned through various sources that the five Canadians were now at the al-Roj camp in northeastern Syria. For those it transported back to Canada earlier this month, the Canadian government utilized the Al-Roj camp as a gathering spot.
The federal government had pledged to return 19 Canadian women and children to their country, including the five Canadians. On April 6, only 14 people managed to board. Just one day before a Federal Court judge was about to rule on whether the government had to repatriate the Canadians, the government reached a last-minute agreement to do so in December 2022.
An al-Hol camp resident who witnessed the ladies being loaded onto a military van and sent to the Red Prison, a detention facility under the control of Kurdish authorities, on April 2 sent a panicked text message earlier this month to family members in Canada.
