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The UK has rescued a British child from Syria as part of efforts to help unaccompanied minors or orphans caught up in the aftermath of the conflict with the Islamic State.
A repatriation team left Syria with the boy on Tuesday, Sky News has learned.
The rescue mission was led by Martin Longden, UK envoy to Syria.
No further details about the child’s identity can be reported for legal reasons.
Last year, Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said the UK would take “the necessary and safe steps” to repatriate minors who are unaccompanied or whose parents have been killed.
“These are children who have experienced the worst horrors of war and bringing them home is the right thing to do,” he said in a statement.
In November 2019, Dominic Raab said that bringing the children back to the UK was ‘the right thing to do’
The UK has already brought home a small number of British children from northeast Syria, where thousands of men, women and babies from dozens of different countries have been held in camps since the collapse of the Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliphate.
It is understood that there are more British minors in these displacement camps.
Save the Children, a UK charity, said last year that until 60 British children could be stranded. But it’s unclear how many of that number are alone or how many are still with one or both parents.
Until now, the British government has resisted pressure to repatriate men and women, including suspected fighters, who traveled to Syria from the UK to join the Islamic State, but are now trapped in crowded, guarded camps or detention centers. by Kurdish forces.
US President Donald Trump has long called on countries, including the UK, to withdraw their ISIS-linked citizens from Syria and process or rehabilitate them at home.
It’s an issue that could come up when Raab meets with his American counterpart, Mike Pompeo, on Wednesday during a trip to Washington.
One of the most prominent cases in the UK is that of Shamima Begum, a London student who joined the Islamic State with two friends in 2015 when she was just 15 years old.
She lived under the rule of the Islamic State before ending up last year in a camp for displaced people while pregnant and has already lost two other children. Her third son also died shortly after she was born.
Mrs Begum’s British citizenship was revoked – a decision you are challenging in a legal battle that must be heard by the UK’s highest court, the Supreme Court.
Alexanda Kotey (left) and Shafee Elsheikh are alleged to have been part of the assassin squad dubbed the Beatles.
Another high-profile case is that of two UK men who are accused of being part of an ISIS kidnapping and hostage-killing group dubbed the Beatles.
The United States seeks to prosecute Alexanda Kotey and El Shafee Elsheikh. The men are currently being held by US forces in Iraq.
