US repatriates 11 Americans, six Canadians from Syria
By Bernd Debusmann Jr
The US has repatriated 11 of its citizens and six Canadian children from camps in north-eastern Syria, the state department announced.
Ten of the US citizens are reportedly members of a single family. The six Canadians are all children.
Four Dutch citizens and a Finnish citizen were also repatriated by the state department, it says.
About 30,000 people from 60 countries – most of them children – remain stranded in two overcrowded camps in Syria.
The camps, Al-Hol and Roj, are run by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which battled the Islamic State group for years until the fall of its so-called caliphate in early 2019.
In a statement on Tuesday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said it was the single largest repatriation of American citizens from camps in Syria to date.
A nine-year-old non-US citizen sibling of one of the American children was also resettled in the US, the statement added.
While the Americans were not named by the state department, US media have identified one of them as a Massachusetts-born woman, Brandy Salman, and her nine children now ranging in age from about seven to 26.
