Since January 2014 and early 2015 at least 34 Syrian child brides applied for asylum in the Netherlands, according to a leaked internal report from Dutch Immigration and Naturalization Service (IND). And 22 are on their way to Holland. A law to ban such marriages is in the pipeline, but until this new law comes into force, Dutch immigration authorities and the police cannot do anything about such marriages. According to the IND, two of the girls are only thirteen years old. And a 38-year-old man in Holland claimed to be married to a 15-year-old Syrian girl. “These girls are still children,” Ineke van Winden from the Center Against Child and Human Trafficking (CKM) told the Dutch Radio and TV station “RTV Noord” which also leaked the alarming IND findings. “They are usually coming from refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey where they are forced into early marriages,” Ineke van Winden says. The Dutch newspaper Trouw reports that three Syrian child brides are applying for asylum in Holland every week.
Criminal migrant traffickers in Europe are extremely well organized and often more powerful than law enforcement agencies or even governments. Some very efficient crime networks consist of former asylum seekers from Africa (notably from Somalia and Eritrea) and the Muslim world (notably from Syria and Iraq) who have taken advantage of liberal and humane asylum laws in Holland, Germany and Sweden. These criminals often operate along ethnic lines.
In Holland, for example, a 35-year-old former Syrian asylum seeker was arrested in the city of Eindhoven last September. He and his younger nephew, also a former Syrian asylum seeker, ran an extensive migrant trafficking network smuggling hundreds, possibly even thousands of Syrian asylum seekers to the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark and Sweden. They also operated in Turkey, Greece, Italy, Austria and Hungary and were making huge profits.