Britain is secretly planning to let dozens of “jihadi brides” and their kids come home from Syria, according to a report Sunday.
Aid organizations believe up to 60 children with British citizenship are still in the war-torn country, mostly living with their mothers, with government officials until now ruling out their return.
But Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab are now actively trying to work out how to repatriate them, according to The Sunday Times of London, citing official correspondence.
The move goes against the advice of the country’s Ministry of Defence and Home Office, which fears it will have to keep jihadi brides — women who have married extremist fighters — under surveillance if they accompany their children, the report states.
“The PM made a decision and we will all work some way to sort it, but it is very difficult given the security situation,” a minister who confirmed Johnson’s order to bring home some of the children told the paper.
Another government source insisted, however, that the shift does not mean everyone is guaranteed a return — they will instead be considered “on a case by case basis,” the paper said.
It is a marked reversal for the government, with Home Secretary Priti Patel saying just last month that she was “simply not willing to allow anybody who has been an active supporter or campaigner of ISIS in this country,” according to The Sun.
Officials have already started contacting relatives of some of those trying to return home — with the suggestion that some will be prosecuted on their return to Britain, the Sunday Times states.
Ministerial sources told the paper that repatriated mothers could be charged with child abuse or neglect — removing the need to prove they were actively working as jihadists.
“There is no excuse whatsoever to abandon these children. Indeed they are the legal responsibility of the British state,” former cabinet minister David Davis wrote in an op-ed for the Times.
He spoke of the hellish conditions, including one teenage girl who said she was “raped, forced to marry, and saw my father beheaded.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen conditions as appalling and undignified,” one Save The Children charity worker told him. “There are reports of a four-year-old boy drowning in a fecal pit and a seven-year-old burning to death after his tent was set alight.”
Davis stressed that the children “should not be punished for their parents’ mistakes.”
“Many have been born in the region to British parents who made the grotesquely misguided and irresponsible decision to go to Syria,” he wrote, saying that if left in Syria the children would become “our enemy on the battlefields of the future.”
“The safest way to handle these youngsters is for them to be reintegrated into British society,” the MP insisted.