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UNICEF: Minors remain in Syria prison attacked by Daesh

February 7, 2022 at 8:53 am

Members of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in Syria [AFP/Getty Images]

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said yesterday that minors were still being detained in northeast Syria Al-Sina’a prison, which came under Daesh attack last month.

International rights groups, including Save the Children and Human Rights Watch (HRW) have previously said that 700 boys were in Al-Sina’a prison in the Hasakah Governorate before the Daesh attack on 20 January.

Many of the detained minors, aged between 12 and 18, have adult relatives inside the prison and were transferred from nearby displacement camps housing thousands of children of Daesh militants.

“UNICEF met with some of the children still detained in the Ghwayran detention centre,” the international organisation said in a statement.

“Despite some of the basic services now in place, the situation of these children is incredibly precarious,” it added, without specifying how many minors were still detained.

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Meanwhile, the spokesperson of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), Farhad Shami, told AFP that “hundreds” of minors were still being held in Ghwayran. He refused to give an exact figure of how many were being detained.

“They are being kept in a safe place,” he said

UNICEF said it was working to immediately provide care for the minors and confirmed that it “is ready to help support a new safe place in the northeast of Syria to take care of the most vulnerable children.”

On Sunday, the SDF said in a statement that UNICEF was the first UN agency granted permission to visit the jail since the attack, adding that it had provided the delegation with information on the status of Daesh-linked teenagers.

Video footage of the visit posted on social media showed around a dozen boys, many covered in blankets, in a prison cell.

The Kurdish authorities repeatedly accused the international community of not supporting efforts to rehabilitate and repatriate these minors.