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PARIS -- The teenage sisters told their father they were
staying home sick from their suburban Denver school. Instead, they took
$2,000 and their passports and headed off for Syria with a 16-year-old
friend. They made it as far as Germany before border guards detained
them for questioning.
The fact that adolescent
girls could make their way across the Atlantic might come as a surprise
to many parents, but a patchwork of laws and rules governing
international air travel in many cases makes it easy for teenagers to
travel with nobody's permission but their own.
Airlines
have a range of rules governing minors' travel: Many major carriers
including United Airlines and Scandinavian airline SAS place no
restrictions on children over 12, while others let even young minors
travel as long as they are accompanied by someone over 16. Yet others,
including American Airlines, require a parent to accompany travelers
under the age of 15 to the gate, while those 15 and over face no
restrictions.
Countries have a separate set of
laws that is no less haphazard, from a Russian requirement for
notarized parental permission to the U.S. system where adolescents with
valid passports are free to come and go.
In
Spain, both parents must fill out a permission form at a police station
before a minor can travel alone. In Germany, where the American teens
were stopped, border guards are required to verify that minors have
parental permission to travel.
And in France,
which is Europe's single largest source of would-be jihadis, parental
authorization had to be received by city hall - until January 2013.
That's
when a small administrative change took effect suspending the
requirement for parental approval. The government said it would
streamline unnecessary bureaucracy and officials remarked that few
runaways went abroad, and even fewer stayed there.
Fast-forward
22 months, and nearly every week new reports emerge of French
adolescents leaving for Syria. Teenagers from France can travel within
the European Union with a valid ID; outside the EU, they need only a
passport.
Under French law, parents can have
their children flagged if they fear they will leave the country to join
extremists. But for many of those who have left, their families had no
warning.
Lawyer Agnes Dufetel-Cordier
represents a teenage boy from Toulouse who left in January to join the
al-Qaida-linked al-Nusra Front, before coming back to his family to face
criminal charges. She said the teen - now 16 - gave no sign he was
about to bolt for Syria, and his departure came as a shock to his
parents. He was not stopped at the airport in Marseille, nor on arrival
in Turkey or crossing into Syria.
"If you
reverse the regulation that lets them travel without their parents'
permission, you will see right away that minors are no longer leaving,"
Dufetel-Cordier said. "Today in France, in the case of most minors who
go to Syria, the families have absolutely no idea ahead of time."
At
age 17, Sahra Ali Mehenni went so far as to ask her mother to get her a
passport, saying she wanted her paperwork in order before she reached
adulthood. When she left for Syria on March 11, departing from the
Marseille airport just as the teen boy did, she took her burgundy-bound
passport and nobody stopped her before she boarded the flight to
Istanbul.
"If I go out and I run a red light,
they're going to get me right away," said her father, Kamel. "But these
minors are going to Istanbul - and if they're going to Istanbul, it's to
go to Syria. They know it. You can't say they don't know it. And no one
stops it."
The same concerns apply in the
United States, where parental permission is required to obtain a
passport - but none is needed for travel.
The
teens who flew to Germany were stopped because their parents, part of
suburban Denver's tight-knit East African community, reported them
missing quickly, and American authorities contacted German authorities
before they landed.
"Kudos to those family
members in Colorado," said Omar Jamal, CEO of American Friends of
Somalia. "Time is of the essence. They did the right thing."
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