AL HOL, Syria – Seen from a helicopter, this massive camp containing the wives and children of dead or captured Islamic State fighters was a sea of white tents set against the desolate landscape of Syria’s drought-ravaged northeast.
From the ground up, the human dimension of this tragedy came into view. As a convoy of armored vehicles made its way across a dusty road, children emerged to stand at the fence among the trash. Some waved. A boy, in a faded “Star Wars” shirt, stood with his hands folded behind his back. Another, in an oversized polo shirt, held up a paper-folded star.
Al Hol is a detention camp for people displaced by the ISIS war – guards do not let residents out of the gates. About 93 percent of the 55,000 people here are women and children, about half under the age of 12. While most have Iraqi or Syrian mothers, thousands come from about 51 other countries, including European countries that are hesitant to repatriate them.
The world’s attention has largely shifted since the last major enclave of the Islamic State crumbled here in 2019. But left behind are tens of thousands of children who grow up in brutal conditions and are intensely vulnerable to radicalisation. They are surrounded by tough, militant women; when boys grow up to be teenagers, they are sometimes transferred to war prisons for combatants.
“We have seen the violence and we also know that we have a huge population of children who are aging,” said Daoud Ghaznawi, who oversees the management of services in the camp by non-governmental organizations, along with security guards being provided. by a Kurdish-led militia that controls the region. “If this continues, nothing good can come of it.”
Rights groups and the military have raised the alarm about the dangers of leaving the detained children of ISIS members to languish in the desert: The dire conditions are not only brutal, but threaten to forge them into a network of extremists stunned to violence and angry at the world.
The women’s and children’s camp is part of a constellation of facilities in northeastern Syria, overseen by the Kurdish-led militia, that also includes nearly two dozen prisons with about 10,000 adult males — suspected ISIS fighters even harder to deal with. repatriation and the risk of breaking out.
At the end of 2018, Al Hol was holding about 10,000 refugees and others displaced by war. But early the following year, when the American-backed coalition besieged Baghuz, the remaining ISIS stronghold, women and children who fled or survived were separated from the men and sent to Al Hol. The population increased sevenfold.
The State Department has been urging countries for years to repatriate their citizens, just like the United States. This is politically unpopular given the prisoners’ association with the Islamic State, and even their younger children are often stigmatized as dangerous. But droplets of women and children have left.
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Iraq, which has the most, is moving slowly: many Iraqis are hostile to the return of ISIS families. At a Middle East Institute conference last week, Timothy Betts, the State Department’s acting counter-terrorism coordinator, said Iraq has repatriated about 600 ISIS fighters and 2,500 other people from Al Hol — about a tenth of its citizens here and in a smaller detention camp.
This month, France has repatriated 16 women and 35 children, including some orphans. About 165 French children and 65 women are said to have been left behind. In particular, many European countries are unwilling to take back men for fear that their incarceration under their legal systems would last only a few years.
Meanwhile, security in Al Hol deteriorates. About 25 murders have been committed this year. While the available data is inaccurate, the rate of homicides has increased since late spring, including one murder last week and a woman found beheaded last month. Tough ISIS women, who have designated themselves as religious police, are blamed for many killings in retaliation for violations, such as talking to camp authorities.
A delegation on a fact-finding mission led by South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham visited the facilities in recent weeks and invited a DailyExpertNews reporter for a rare tour of a senior US official.
The situation can deteriorate quickly here. Turkey considers the Kurdish-led militia that controls northeastern Syria intertwined with a separatist terrorist group. The militia, known as the Syrian Democratic Forces, is the United States’ main ally on the ground in the fight against ISIS in Syria.
Turkey, a NATO ally of the United States, attacked the SDF in 2019 and destabilized the vulnerable region; it has signaled its intention to do so again soon.
Should there be another Turkish invasion, US officials believe hundreds of thousands of people living in the border area could be displaced, adding to the unrest. They also fear that SDF prison guards and a related internal security force at Al Hol would relocate personnel to the front – as happened in 2019 – and could lose control of ISIS detainees.
“If there is actually a Turkish attack, we may have ISIS 2.0,” Brig. Gene. Claude K. Tudor Jr. of the Air Force, the commander of the Special Operations task force working to defeat ISIS in Iraq and Syria, said during a helicopter flight accompanying Mr Graham to Syria.
Warned that militants could try to regroup through mass prison breakouts, he added: “We think ISIS is looking for another prison or wants to do something in Al Hol.”
The SDF’s control is already weak. General Amuda, the head of an SDF commando unit that is a designated partner force of the United States and uses a pseudonym, described in the blazing sun on the roof of a prison administration building in nearby Hasaka an infamous ISIS attack there in January.
A two-week battle ensued, in which dozens of SDF guards and hundreds of ISIS prisoners and fighters were killed. He narrated the attack in vivid detail, pointing to bullet-riddled buildings and a site where militants had burned two guards alive.
When the US military then tried to determine who had been killed or escaped, it became clear that the militia did not have comprehensive records of its prisoners. The Hasaka inmates also included hundreds of teenage boys who had apparently been evicted from Al Hol growing up; other teens have been sent to rehabilitation centers that are said to have insufficient capacity.
“That the militia in charge doesn’t have a particularly accurate picture of what’s going on tells you what you need to know,” said Charles Lister, director of the Syria and Countering Terrorism and Extremism programs at the Middle East Institute. “We are doing nothing to prevent the current generation of inmates from wanting to continue fighting when they are released, and create a melting pot for the next generation.”
dr. Abdulkarim Omar, the regional government’s head of foreign relations, said indoctrinated children aged 12 to 14 should be separated because they could pose a threat or produce babies to ISIS. He denied that teens sent to prisons for lack of space in rehabilitation centers were housed with battle-hardened adults.
Of the approximately 10,000 adult male detainees accused of fighting for ISIS, approximately 5,000 are Syrians; 3,000 are Iraqi; and 2,000 are from some 60 other countries, officials said.
The majority of those 2,000 come from countries in the Middle East or North Africa, including Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria and Saudi Arabia. About 300 are Russian, while more than 250 are from Western and European countries, officials said.
Al Hol is divided in the same way. The main camp is home to about 47,000 Syrians and Iraqis. An outbuilding contains 8,000 women and children of ISIS fighters from other countries. Last year, about 66 babies were born each month, they said.
In 2022, the US military will spend $155 million in Syria to train and equip the SDF, along with related work such as strengthening ISIS prisons. The State Department and the United States Agency for International Development plan to spend $852 million on humanitarian aid in Syria and aid to refugees in nearby countries.
Pentagon funds have helped pay for guards and infrastructure, including metal detectors in Al Hol, and internal fences are expected to be built this month to allow guards to seal off areas during riots or after raids to keep smuggled weapons inside. to clear. The US military also records biometric data, such as DNA, of the adult male prisoners.
In Hasaka, Major General John W. Brennan Jr., the commander of the anti-ISIS task force in Iraq and Syria, said that countries that do not want to repatriate their ISIS citizens should at least pay the SDF for housing.
Mr Graham also suggested that the United Nations could establish an international tribunal to prosecute Syrian ISIS members; the breakaway region is not a recognized sovereign nation with a legal system. But he noted that during a similar visit four years ago, people had suggested the same ideas and compared the situation to false calm after World War I.
“Most people think the war with ISIS is over,” Graham said. “They don’t think about how to repair the damage. What do you do with the prisoners? How do you give young people better options? That’s why they give war numbers – they just keep repeating.’
Most of the children in Al Hol do not go to school – there are not enough of them, and some women refuse to let their children go. Mr Ghaznawi said two schools had to close recently; they had stopped hiring camp residents as support personnel, he said, and were attacked repeatedly.
Kathryn Achilles, the Syria advocate, media and communications director for Save the Children, said it operates six “temporary learning spaces” in Al Hol, including one that was recently rebuilt after being burned down. They teach a basic curriculum of English, Arabic, Mathematics and Science. But the increasing violence, she said, is further traumatizing the children.
“These children did not choose to go to Syria or be born there, and they are caught up in this cycle of violence that punishes them for the sins, or perceived sins, of their fathers,” she said. “The SDF has a responsibility to detain these people. These children are trapped in the system, but what they need is back home.”
Linking improved camp security with quality of life, Mr Ghaznawi downplayed incidents of children in Al Hol throwing rocks at reporters like restless children expressing themselves, but added it could get worse.
“We have a young population that will get older and older,” he said, “and that from violent actions will eventually have more and more ideological ties to ISIS.”
Sangar Khaleel contributed reporting from Iraq.