Children of the caliphate left to toil in squalid refugee camps
Eight-year-old Faisal cast a critical eye at the tent peg, raised a hammer above his head, and began thwacking it into the hard, stony ground. It is heavy work, and he would rather be in school, but he has little choice. “I get about 2,000 lira for putting up one tent,” he said, using the popular term here for Syrian pounds. “I can do three or four a day, so that is 8,000.”
That, he said, is just about enough to feed himself, his mother, and her newborn baby twice a day. “But we can’t eat all the time,” he said. “My mother explained, we can’t spend so much money on food because we need to buy stuff for the baby now.”
Faisal is one of about 41,000 children in al-hol, the largest of three sprawling camps in northeastern Syria which house former members, children, and prisoners of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil).
The fate of the children who emerged from Isil’s doomed caliphate is a matter of humanitarian urgency and critical to international security.
And yet the lack of provision made by world governments, including Britain’s, is striking.
The Daily Telegraph has seen dozens of malnourished infants as families left Baghuz, Isil’s last bastion, in the past two weeks. At least 108 children have already died on route to or soon after arriving at the camp, most of them from severe, acute malnutrition, pneumonia, and dehydration, says the International Rescue Committee. The vast majority of them were aged below five years, and most of those were babies less than a year old. Many were carrying serious shrapnel injuries.
The casualties included Jarrah, Shamima Begum’s newborn son, who died of a lung infection last month. Unicef has described the living conditions for those children who reach the camp as “extremely dire”.
Faisal, who spoke to The Telegraph with the permission of his German mother and on condition that his real name not be used, said he bitterly misses his old life in Europe. “If there was a school, I’d go to it,” he said, as he took a pause in his tent work to talk to us. “But there isn’t one here.”
“When I was in Germany I was learning then, in Doula, I learnt nothing,” he said, using the Arabic word for “State” – the term many Isil families use for the group.
“They just teach like the Koran… and they teach you that you have to fight. But I said: ‘I don’t want to fight’. I don’t like to fight. I just want to be a normal one, I just want to live in a house and make my job. I don’t want to fight, I don’t want to be a warrior.”
He said he left Germany when he was five and only emerged from Isil’s so-called “caliphate” two months ago.
The camp, he said, is a miserable, filthy place. “Kids poop everywhere,” he said. “You have to watch where you walk. You can’t just sit anywhere, like you can in Germany.”
It is not surprising. Adults in the section of the camp where Faisal lives told The Telegraph many of the young children have chronic diarrhoea.
Play, if there is such a thing, involves picking on one another or chucking rocks at moving cars.
“They call me a dog and things. They think it is a joke,” said Faisal, when asked about his friends. “My mother doesn’t like me to be like the other children. She says maybe there is a little baby there, like three years old, and maybe you’ll hit him. Even though I don’t like to throw rocks,” he said.
“It’s not a game. They come, they throw, the glass breaks,” he said. “In Germany it is not like this, you’re not hitting on cars. If you want to play you go to your friends, you have friends, they don’t call you anything, you play.”
Most children in al-hol have little time for that though. Adults here said almost every child from about the age of eight is a low-paid labourer.
Without intervention, these children could grow up in the same toxic ideology that made their fathers terrorists
“They’re already entrepreneurs. They wake up and the first thing they think is ‘who am I going to hit up for money today?,” said Lorna Henri, a 54-yearold from the Seychelles who has become the de facto guardian of two unaccompanied children in the camp. “I try to give them what I can.”
Ms Henri said boys were sent to run errands in the camp market, which children can access more easily, and put up tents. Girls clean or cook.
The market, in the larger and more loosely regulated section for Syrian and Iraqi citizens, is crowded, with small boys hauling hand carts for 200 Syrian pounds per errand.
Such Dickensian scenes are not unusual amid a humanitarian crisis. Across the Middle East, children are expected to pull their weight earlier than in the West. But the prospects for these children are bleak in more than one way.
Radical Isil supporters continue to exert influence inside al-hol, including harassing women who want to remove their veils. There have been reports of tent-burnings by an underground “religious police”, and several women from different countries, who The Telegraph spoke to, said they had been labelled “infidels” by fellow inmates. Without intervention, there is a good chance the children here will be brought up in the same toxic ideology that turned many of their fathers into terrorists.
The United Nations has expressed “alarm” at the situation. Henrietta Fore, the executive director of Unicef, urged member states “to take responsibility for children who are their citizens or are born to their nationals, and to take measures to prevent children becoming stateless”.
Some governments have heeded the call. Earlier this month, the French government said it had taken back five children of jihadist fighters and would continue to do so on a case-by-case basis, though mothers would not be allowed to accompany them.
Kurdish officials have told this newspaper that the UK has refused to take back British Isil members or their children in the camps on the grounds that it has full confidence in the legal and administrative system of Rojava, the unrecognised Kurdish proto-state in northern Syria. Jeremy Hunt, the
Foreign Secretary, claimed that it would have been “too risky” to send British officials to save Shamima Begum’s son, although he remained a British citizen after his mother was stripped of her own citizenship.
However, the al-hol camp is run by the Syrian Democratic Forces, a Kurdish-led, Western-backed armed group that Britain is allied to. Journalists and aid workers visit regularly, safely and without incident.
Nor is it true, as Mr Hunt claimed, that journalists are afforded special protection unavailable to UK officials.
While in al-hol, foreign women exchange rumours about which governments take people back. For the children, who committed no crime, the only thing on the horizon is arduous work. “I’d like to… sell stuff or build houses,” shrugged Faisal when asked what he would like to do when he grows up. Those are the only careers on offer in al-hol camp.
He picked up his hammer, and went back to hitting the tent peg. His blows made little impact on the stony ground.