Daily Times

Moscow has evacuated 27 Russian children from Syria’s infamous Al-Hol camp where the displaced family members of former Daesh fighters are being held.

Russian children’s rights commissioner Anna Kuznetsova announced that a Ministry of Defence aircraft flew overnight with the children and landed at Moscow’s Chkalovsky Airport yesterday.

The children are between the ages of two and thirteen, and will undergo medical examinations and spend time in quarantine before being sent to their relatives across Russia. “Seventeen children will go to Dagestan,” explained Kuznetsova, “four to Penza region, and two to each of the following regions: Tyumen, Volgograd and Chechnya.”

This is the third such evacuation of Russian nationals, particularly children and orphans, many of whom were born during the ongoing nine-year conflict.

The effort to locate and bring back underage Russians from Iraq and Syria was launched in the summer of 2017. During a visit to Damascus by Russian Commissioner for Children’s Rights Anna Kuznetsova in September 2019, an agreement on humanitarian cooperation in this sphere was reached at her working meeting with Syrian President Bashar Assad. A special intergovernmental commission was set up for the purpose at the Office of the Russian Commissioner for Children’s Rights.

In the course of the intergovernmental commission’s work, a total of 224 children have been returned from hotspots of armed conflicts in the Middle East – 122 from Iraq and 102 from Syria.