Six children aged between eight months and nine years have been taken into care by police and social workers in the Netherlands after the Dutch security services identified all four of their parents as planning to travel to the Middle East to join Islamic State (IS) jihadists.
The two couples, aged 34, 32, 31 and 30, were arrested by anti-terrorist police in the small town of Huizen, about 40km southeast of Amsterdam, at the weekend, after the intelligence service, AIVD, decided that their departure to Turkey en route to Syria was imminent.
It’s understood that all the children – a baby girl and five boys – have been separated from one another and placed in individual foster homes, where they’re expected to remain at least while the criminal investigation into their parents’ alleged extremist links continues.
A spokesperson for the public prosecutions department refused to give any indication as to how the couples had been identified. However, she said police had found evidence in their homes that they were “on the verge” of leaving for Syria, and she confirmed that their passports had been cancelled.
Last Friday, justice minister Ivo Opstelten, revealed that 33 suspected jihadists had so far had their passports withdrawn, with the aim of disrupting the flow of volunteers to IS or al-Qaeda-affiliated groups fighting President Bashar al-Assad in Syria or attempting to spread the IS "caliphate" in Iraq.
The Dutch have also given the identities of another 100-plus men and women to the Turkish authorities to be placed on a red-flagged no-entry list – which has prevented 1,100 European citizens bound for Syria from entering the country through authorised channels since 2013.
The National Counterterrorism Co-ordinator has estimated that some 3,000 European jihadists have gone to fight in Syria and Iraq, of whom around 150 are Dutch. It’s believed as many as 30 have since returned and up to a dozen have been killed.
