A seriously ill British woman and baby girl detained in a camp in northern Syria have been denied medical help by the UK government, which said it was unable to find their tent or communicate with Kurdish authorities.
Correspondence seen by The Times lists various reasons given by officials at the Foreign Office for their lack of involvement in the case, despite a British doctor saying both were in a “life-threatening” state.
The case underlines the consequences of the government’s refusal since last year to repatriate the 35 British children and 15 women, family members of former Isis fighters, held in two detention camps in Syria.
Conditions in the camps, al-Roj and al-Hawl, have been described as “deplorable” by the UN, while coalition allies, including the US, have criticised the UK’s non-repatriation policy. Aid groups have warned that the camps create the perfect conditions for Isis to radicalise a new generation of children abandoned by their countries of origin.
“The question for the government is how many British women or children must die before they take back the small handful of families that remain in Syria?” said Maya Foa, director of Reprieve, the legal charity. “It is a pointless and barbaric policy that impacts predominantly on the British children who remain there. As the medical assessments show, these family members, including a child under five, have life-threatening conditions that require proper urgent medical attention. Abandoning this young British family could be a death sentence for them.”
Reprieve first asked the Foreign Office for help in the case in late August, noting that both the woman and the baby — not her daughter, but a close family member — who are held in al-Roj camp, are becoming steadily more ill in the absence of proper treatment for chronic conditions including diabetes and asthma.
In correspondence dated September 15, the Foreign Office, having apparently asked an international relief group to follow up the case in the wrong camp, replied: “Unfortunately they say they do not know where individual families are located in the camp and therefore are not able to find the family.”
In the following three weeks Reprieve sent a series of increasingly desperate requests for help, noting that the infant was frothing at the mouth during severe respiratory attacks, and including precise details as to where to locate the family’s tent.
The Foreign Office replied that its aid partner on the ground would be “at a great deal of risk with Roj Camp Admin if they are seen entering individual tents or looking for specific individuals. So I’m really sorry but we can’t support these types of requests.”
The UK has good relations with Syria’s Kurds, who were its principle coalition ally on the ground in the war against Isis, and the administrative staff at al-Roj are frequently visited by coalition special forces and intelligence officers.
The woman and infant are part of a family who handed themselves over to Kurdish-led SDF forces during the battle at Baghuz last year, which marked the downfall of Islamic State’s self-styled caliphate. A total of 13,000 foreign women and children who emerged from Isis territory are now detained in al-Hawl and al-Roj.
Despite worsening winter conditions, the arrival of the coronavirus in the camps, increases in child mortality and US offers to help the UK in transporting the families home, the British government has so far refused to repatriate them, citing security concerns.
Respiratory conditions have killed scores of children in the detention camps over the past 18 months. The newborn daughter of Shamima Begum, one of the Bethnal Green schoolgirls who travelled to Syria to join the jihadists in 2015, died in al-Roj camp on March 8 last year of a chest infection, three weeks after the Home Office revoked her citizenship.
For legal reasons, neither the woman nor the child in the current case can be named. A detailed document seen by The Times describes the woman as being at risk of dying from a combination of severe asthma and type 2 diabetes.
The doctor who assessed their condition is Clive Kelly, a consultant physician with 40 years’ experience who is currently working on Covid-19 wards in James Cook University hospital in Middlesbrough. He did so remotely, using medical case notes. “The information I received concerning this woman and child was very detailed and allowed me to make a definitive report on their conditions,” he said. “Both these cases are life threatening.”
Correspondence between Reprieve and the Foreign office’s Consular Directorate on September 30 — part of a chain of emails from Reprieve that repeatedly asked British officials to arrange, at least, a welfare assessment visit — noted that the woman’s health had deteriorated to the point that “she has struggled to breathe for the last several days and has lost her abilities to walk and eat”.
A medical assessment of the infant described her as suffering repeated severe respiratory attacks, resulting in her frothing at the mouth. A letter to the Foreign Office on August 25 noted the child as being as “risk of pneumonia, permanent scarring of her lungs and possible respiratory failure due to her untreated respiratory issues”. The child was later observed as having “continued to foam at the mouth in her sleep”.
In written response to questions about the case, a government spokesman noted yesterday that “judgments should not made about the national security risk an individual poses based on their gender or age”. “Our priority is to ensure the safety and security of the UK,” the spokesman said. “Every request for consular assistance is considered on a case-by-case basis. We have also made it clear that we are willing to repatriate orphans and unaccompanied British children from Syria where there is no risk to UK.”
