Aid groups have warned for years that there needed to be a deal with the camps in northeastern Syria that hold tens of thousands of family members of suspected Islamic State (ISIS) fighters.
And calling them a "ticking time bomb," aid groups said the women and children could not be left in filthy camps in the desert indefinitely because they would eventually return home.
Despite warnings, most countries ignored the problem, refusing to repatriate their citizens.
At least 8,000 women and children from more than 40 countries have been trapped in camps in northeastern Syria since 2019.
This week, they began returning home, writes The Guardian, the Telegraph reports.
Belgian authorities reported that a woman accused in absentia of membership in ISIS had arrived in Belgium from Turkey.
An Albanian woman, kidnapped as a child by her father and taken to Syria, managed to smuggle herself into Turkey, where she requested travel documents.
Thousands of other non-Syrian women and children are scattered across the country, their whereabouts largely unknown.
Most of them were residents of al-Hawl camp, once the largest prison camp in the world, which housed some 25,000 family members of suspected ISIS fighters, 6,000 of whom were foreigners.
Security analysts have said the camp became a hotbed for extremist ideology and that by holding ISIS-affiliated women and children in such cramped conditions, a new generation of ISIS members was being raised.
Humanitarians raised the alarm over what they called life-threatening living conditions, under which residents died of asphyxiation every winter as they tried to escape the cold by burning coal in their tents.
Since Damascus took control of al-Hawl as part of its seizure of territory from the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) last month, the camp has slowly emptied.
Smugglers, foreign fighters and family members have been going to the camp every night to pick up residents, most of whom were taken to Idlib, a province in northwestern Syria where many former Islamist fighters live.
Frustrated by the lack of action from their governments, family members have begun organizing the return of people previously held in detention centers.
Belgian and Albanian women were smuggled from Syria to Turkey without the coordination of their governments, The Guardian article highlights.
On Monday, relatives of the 34 Australian women and children organised a minibus convoy from the al-Roj camp in northeastern Syria, where the SDF is holding more than 2,000 families of suspected ISIS fighters.
They left for Damascus, apparently without Canberra's support, with the intention of boarding planes to return to Australia.
They were turned back en route, apparently due to a lack of coordination with Damascus beforehand, but Syrian officials say their return was only briefly delayed.
Damascus, unlike the SDF, seems unwilling to play the role of prison guard forever.
A humanitarian who met with interior ministry officials shortly before Damascus took control of al-Hawl last month said they approached the camp as a child protection issue rather than a security issue.
A new camp that Damascus has set up to house al-Hawl residents who don't want to leave has wifi and an open door - a far cry from the Humvees with mounted machine guns that the SDF kept outside al-Hawl's barbed-wire fences for years.
And governments appear to have missed the chance to manage the repatriation of their citizens - some of whom are said to be linked to ISIS - and instead now face a disorganized and chaotic process of returns, which experts say puts citizens and countries at risk.
The prospect of thousands of women and children wandering through Syria opens the door to new recruitment into extremist organizations like ISIS, or trafficking and exploitation.
Many of the women have no desire to remain in Syria after years of horrific detention, as explained by more than a dozen during a recent Guardian visit to al-Hawl, and will seek to return to their countries of origin.
Coping with their repatriation will be much more challenging for local governments now than it was before, when families were concentrated in camps.
Pressure is mounting to release those women and children still held in al-Roj, which houses mainly European and Russian women.
That's where Shamima Begum lives, the UK-born woman who traveled to Syria at the age of 15 after talking to a man there.
Governments like that of the United Kingdom have refused for years to repatriate their citizens from al-Roj and other camps, preferring to delay the issue and, in Begum's case, strip her of her citizenship.
However, over the past month, the space for further postponement appears to be rapidly narrowing. /Telegrafi/
