What is happening to Syria’s IS camps and their former residents? | Syria
Humanitarian experts have warned for years that the camps in northeastern Syria housing tens of thousands of family members of suspected Islamic State (IS) fighters needed attention. Describing them as a “ticking time bomb”, aid groups said women and children could not be left to rot in squalid desert camps indefinitely because they would eventually return home.
Despite the warnings, most states ignored the problem and refused to repatriate their citizens. Since 2019, at least 8 thousand women and children from more than 40 countries have been trapped in camps in northeastern Syria.
They started coming home this week. Belgian authorities reported that a woman accused in absentia due to her membership in ISIS traveled from Türkiye to Belgium. The Albanian woman, who was kidnapped by her father and taken to Syria as a child, managed to sneak into Türkiye, where she requested travel documents.
Thousands of non-Syrian women and children are scattered across the country, and their whereabouts are mostly unknown. Most of them were residents of Al Hawl camp, which was once the world’s largest prison camp and housed some 25,000 family members of suspected ISIS fighters, including 6,000 foreigners.
Security analysts said the camp had become a hotbed of extremist ideologies and that by keeping ISIS-affiliated women and children in such close quarters, a new generation of ISIS members was being trained. Humanitarian workers have been alarmed by what they call life-threatening living conditions, where residents die each winter from suffocation as they try to escape the cold by burning coal in their tents.
The camp has slowly emptied since Damascus took over Al Hawl last month as part of a land grab from the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). Smugglers, foreign fighters and family members arrive at the camp every night to pick up residents who have been taken to Idlib, a region in northwestern Syria where most former Islamist fighters live.
Frustrated by their government’s inaction, family members began organizing the return of people formerly held in detention facilities. Belgian and Albanian women smuggled themselves from Syria to Türkiye without the coordination of their governments.
On Monday, relatives of 34 Australian women and children organized a convoy of minibuses from Al Roj camp in north-east Syria, where the SDF is holding more than 2,000 families of suspected ISIS fighters. Seemingly without support from Canberra, they set out for Damascus with the intention of returning to Australia.
They were turned away en route, apparently because they had not coordinated with Damascus in advance, but Syrian officials say their return was only briefly delayed.
Damascus, unlike the SDF, appears unwilling to play the role of prison warden indefinitely. A humanitarian official who met with interior ministry officials shortly before Damascus took over al-Hawl last month said they were approaching the camp as a protection for children rather than a security issue.
Damascus’s new camp to house Al Hawl residents who do not want to leave has Wi-Fi and an open door; It’s a far cry from the machine-gun-mounted Humvees the SDF has kept outside Al Hawl’s barbed wire fences for years.
Governments appear to have lost the chance to manage the repatriation of their citizens, some of whom are said to be linked to ISIS, and instead now appear to face a disorganized, chaotic repatriation process that experts say puts citizens and countries at risk.
The prospect of thousands of women and children wandering around Syria opens the door to rejoining extremist organizations such as ISIS or to trafficking and exploitation. A foreign woman from a country who fled from Al-Hawl to Idlib last year was immediately kidnapped and had to be released for ransom. His family hasn’t heard from him since that day.
As more than a dozen women explained during the Guardian’s recent visit to Al Hawl, many of the women have no desire to stay in Syria after years of horrific detention and will seek to return to their home countries.
Dealing with their repatriation will now be much more difficult for the country’s governments than before, when families were concentrated in camps.
Pressure is mounting to release the women and children still held in Roj, where mostly European and Russian women are housed. British-born Shamima Begum, who went to Syria at the age of 15 after chatting with a man there, lives here.
Governments such as the United Kingdom have for years refused to repatriate their citizens from Roj and other camps, preferring to scrap the buck and, in Begum’s case, strip her of her citizenship. But over the past month, the space for further delays appears to be shrinking rapidly.
