55 people, including 40 children, have been rescued by the French authorities from camps in Syria where relatives of alleged Islamic State fighters were being held.
According to local media sources, it is the largest such repatriation in three months and comes one week after France was criticised by a European rights court for refusing to send back two women who were held in Syria.
The minors have been sent to child support agencies, according to the foreign ministry. The court authorities have received the adults.
The hundreds of French youngsters incarcerated in camps under Kurdish authority have not been returned to France in large numbers until lately.
According to European Commission, the Paris authorities insisted on dealing with the detainees on a case-by-case basis, a policy that rights groups criticised as deliberately slow.
Last week the European Court of Human Rights condemned France for its refusal to allow the return of two women and said it should promptly re-examine the request by the women’s parents to let them come home.
The court did not issue a blanket ruling that France returns all citizens held in Syria since the fall of the IS “caliphate”, as sought by rights groups and some Western allies including the United States.
Western countries have faced a dilemma over how to handle their citizens detained in Syria since the end of military operations against the Islamic State (IS) group there in 2019.
Thousands of extremists in Europe decided to join the group as fighters, often taking their wives and children to live in the “caliphate” declared in territory in Iraq and Syria.
Before July, France had prioritised its security over welfare concerns for the detained, pointing to a series of attacks by IS jihadists, including the November 2015 assaults in Paris which cost 132 people their lives.