KEVON FELMINE

Se­nior Re­porter

kevon.felmine@guardian.co.tt

Head of the Repa­tri­a­tion Com­mit­tee, Nizam Mo­hammed, says ef­forts to re­turn ap­prox­i­mate­ly 100 cit­i­zens from refugee camps in war-torn Syr­ia and sur­round­ing states are not yet ready, as they re­quire more in­for­ma­tion on the per­sons in­volved.

Speak­ing to Guardian Me­dia yes­ter­day, Mo­hammed said the com­mit­tee was, in fact, still set­ting up.

So far, its data­base has ap­prox­i­mate­ly 100 strand­ed na­tion­als, with chil­dren ac­count­ing for al­most half while the rest are women.

Mo­hammed said the com­mit­tee had not re­ceived in­for­ma­tion about men who may be sim­i­lar­ly af­fect­ed.

Last month, Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley ap­point­ed Mo­hammed, the for­mer Speak­er of the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives and Po­lice Ser­vice Com­mis­sion chair­man, to head the Repa­tri­a­tion Com­mit­tee, which was tasked with bring­ing home cit­i­zens who left T&T around 2015 to join the ter­ror­ist or­gan­i­sa­tion Is­lam­ic State of Iraq and Syr­ia (ISIS).

The three-mem­ber com­mit­tee al­so in­cludes for­mer Am­bas­sador to Ethiopia and Ugan­da Patrick Ed­wards and Is­lam­ic leader Kwe­si At­i­ba.

Yes­ter­day, Mo­hammed said rel­a­tives of strand­ed na­tion­als were co­op­er­a­tive and had pro­vid­ed the com­mit­tee with much-need­ed in­for­ma­tion. He said the com­mit­tee al­so es­tab­lished con­tacts with for­eign gov­ern­ments.

“We ex­pect we will gain some mea­sure of suc­cess with get­ting near­er to those based in refugee camps and oth­er places abroad,” Mo­hammed said.

He con­tin­ued, “We have opened the of­fice. We have done a con­sid­er­able amount of work gath­er­ing in­for­ma­tion for our data­base. The of­fice is not ful­ly func­tion­al be­cause we are still to get some of­fice equip­ment, which would not af­fect us from mov­ing for­ward.”

He ad­mit­ted that it is a tricky sit­u­a­tion get­ting the cit­i­zens back home.

Mo­hammed said some na­tion­als are in No Man’s Land and refugee camps that are not con­trolled by any par­tic­u­lar gov­ern­ment but by au­tonomous au­thor­i­ties. This, he said, presents some dif­fi­cul­ties, as there is no gov­ern­ment to com­mu­ni­cate with.

He said the com­mit­tee has to gath­er more in­for­ma­tion be­fore the ac­tu­al repa­tri­a­tion re­quests be­gin, which in­cludes di­rect lo­ca­tions. He said repa­tri­a­tions of this mag­ni­tude would al­so re­quire in­ter­na­tion­al help.