Women waiting in limbo

“He’s like, ‘It’s obligatory for you to come here. You have no choice, and as your husband I’m telling you to come here.’ And as a Muslim wife you have to obey, even though it was really hard for me to do it,” she told CNN.

Her first husband, a Bosnian, left Canada to join ISIL as a cook, she said. After he was killed, she remarried a Canadian but he was also killed in fighting.

The woman, also a mother of two, said she did not know about ISIL before travelling to Syria.

“I’m not the kind of person who watched the news. I didn’t follow any of this kind of stuff. I used to be a graphic designer and I used to work from home and just take care of the kids. I was never interested in what was going on in the world.”

The two women, like the other refugees, are likely to end up in al-Hol, a grubby field on the edge of what was once ISIL’s self-proclaimed caliphate, now controlled by the SDF.

Some 3,100 foreign women and children are being held in al-Hol and nearby Roj camp. They have been separated from their husbands and other foreign men, who are being detained in prisons around northern Syria. The camp lacks around 2,000 tents, meaning thousands are sleeping rough in its reception area where they are exposed to rain and freezing temperatures. Without enough toilets to accommodate the mushrooming population, children defecate out in the open.

During a visit by The Daily Telegraph this week a group of women from central Asia stood in the rain shouting at the exasperated manager. “There are no more tents and we are out in the cold,” they pleaded. “You can’t just leave us like this, we’ ll die out here.”

He could do little more than tell them they would have to wait until aid agencies delivered some more.

As the drizzle turned into a downpour the women pulled their black abayas up out of the sodden earth and clutched their children, whose clothes are even less suited to the weather.

For locals, al-Hol is a displacement camp which they are free to leave as long as they have a sponsor on the outside and money to do so.

For foreigners, accused of being ISIL members, it is a detention centre, where they wait in limbo as their home countries decide what to do with them.

The role women played in the caliphate varied. Most were housewives, allowed out of the home only to go to the mosque or the market. Others were thought to have been involved in the recruitment and radicalization of other women online.

SDF officials say some of the women have rejected ISIL ideology but a few continue to practise fundamentalist versions of Islam in the camps, which have become increasingly lawless as they have grown in size.

“We thought we could put them (the foreigners) together with the Syrians and Iraqis and they would adapt. But some of them are very extreme and called them infidels and burned their tents,” said Mohammed Ibrahim, the camp’s head of relations.