San juan: Human Rights Watch demanded on Tuesday that Trinidad and Tobago return more than 90 of its citizens who are being held in war-torn Syria as Daesh suspects and family members, noting that at least 56 of them are children.
Some of them claimed that as children, family members had escorted them to Syria, while others claimed that they had mistakenly believed they were travelling to a Muslim utopia.
Jo Becker, the director of child advocacy for Human Rights Watch, said, "These children never chose to live under Daesh, yet they are suffering as a result of their parents' choices.
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The majority of the Trinidadians are being held in makeshift camps that activists claim are dangerous and devoid of food, water, medical care, and education. They were detained by Syrian forces fighting the Daesh organisation in northeast Syria in late 2018 and early 2019.
According to the human rights organisation, which claimed to have spoken with six Trinidadians being held in camps, there are approximately 21 women among the more than 90 Trinidadians detained in Syria, and 44 of the at least 56 children detained are 12 years old or younger.
One of them is a 17-year-old boy, who was taken to Syria by his father in 2014. "My dad misled me. The boy was quoted by the group as saying, "He told me we were going to Disneyland. "I'm not to blame. My father is to blame. I only want to return home.
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"My dad told me I was going to go to a hotel in Egypt and swim in a pool," a 19-year-old Trinidadian man said. I was 11 years old," the organisation claims. Human Rights Watch reports that despite at least 130 of its citizens visiting Daesh-held areas between 2013 and 2016, the most of any country in the Western Hemisphere per capita, Trinidad & Tobago has only repatriated a small number of them in recent years.
Rio Claro, Chaguanas, and Diego Martin are three Trinidadian communities from which many of them originated. One of them was even highlighted as a fighter in an online Daesh publication.
Links to terrorism are not rare for the twin-island nation, which was the site of the only Islamic revolt in the Western Hemisphere when a radical group launched a violent coup attempt in 1990.
