Kids of IS fighters risk radicalization in camp
‘If this stays this way, nothing good can come out of it’
AL-HOL, Syria — Viewed from a helicopter, this enormous camp that holds the wives and children of dead or captured Islamic State fighters was a sea of white tents against the desolate landscape of droughtstricken northeastern Syria.
From the ground, the human dimension of this tragedy came into focus.
As a convoy of armored vehicles made its way up a dusty road, children emerged to stand at the fence amid garbage. Some waved. One boy, in a faded “Star Wars” shirt, stood with hands clasped behind his back. Another, in an oversized polo shirt, held aloft a star folded from paper.
Al-Hol is a detention camp for people displaced by the Islamic State group’s war — guards do not let residents walk out its gates. About 93% of the 55,000 people here are women and children, about half under 12 years old. While most have Iraqi or Syrian mothers, thousands come from about 51 other countries, including European nations that have been reluctant to repatriate them.
The world’s attention has largely moved on since the Islamic State group’s last major enclave here crumbled in 2019. But left behind are tens of thousands of children growing up under brutal circumstances and intensely vulnerable to radicalization. They are surrounded by hard-line militant women; as boys grow into teenagers, they are sometimes transferred to wartime prisons for fighters.
“We’ve seen the violence, and we also know that we have a huge population of kids that are growing older,” said Daoud Ghaznawi, who oversees the administration of services in the camp by nongovernmental organizations alongside guards provided by a Kurdish-led militia that controls the region. “If this stays this way, nothing good can come out of it.”
Rights groups and the military have been sounding the alarm about the dangers of leaving the detained children of Islamic State group members to languish in the desert: In addition to being cruel, the miserable conditions risk forging them into a network of extremists numbed to violence and angry at the world.
The camp for women and children is part of a constellation of facilities in northeastern Syria overseen by the Kurdish-led militia that also includes nearly two dozen prisons holding some 10,000 adult men — suspected Islamic State fighters who have proved even more difficult to repatriate and pose the risk of breaking out.
In late 2018, al-Hol held about 10,000 refugees and others displaced by war. But early the next year, as the U.S.-backed coalition laid siege to Baghuz, the remaining Islamic State stronghold, women and children who fled or survived were separated from the men and sent to al-Hol. Its population ballooned sevenfold.
For years, the U.S. State Department has urged countries to repatriate their citizens, as the United States did. Doing so is politically unpopular given the prisoners’ association with the Islamic State group, and even their younger children are often stigmatized as dangerous. But trickles of women and children have left.
In the meantime, security is deteriorating inside al-Hol. There have been about 25 murders this year. While the available data is imprecise, the pace of the killings has increased since late spring, including a murder two weeks ago and a woman who was found beheaded last month. Hardcore Islamic State women, self-appointed as religious police, are presumed responsible for many killings as retaliation for transgressions like talking to the camp authorities.
A delegation on a fact-finding mission, led by Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., visited the facilities in recent weeks, inviting a New York Times reporter on a rare tour by a senior U.S. official.
The situation here could soon get worse. Turkey considers the Kurdish-led militia that controls northeastern Syria to be intertwined with a separatist terrorist group. The militia, known as the Syrian Democratic Forces, has been the United States’ main on-theground ally fighting the Islamic State group in Syria.
Turkey, a NATO ally of the United States, attacked the SDF in 2019, destabilizing the fragile region; it has signaled an intention to do so again soon.
Should there be another Turkish incursion, American officials believe hundreds of thousands of people living in the border region could be displaced, adding to the turmoil. They also fear that SDF prison guards and a related internal security force at al-Hol would redeploy personnel to the front — as happened in 2019 — and could lose control of Islamic State detainees.
“If a Turkish attack in fact comes down, we’re going to potentially have ISIS 2.0,” Brig. Gen. Claude Tudor of the Air Force said, using an alternative name for IS during a helicopter flight accompanying Graham into Syria.
Tudor is commander of the Special Operations task force working to defeat the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria.
Warning that militants could try to regroup via mass prison breakouts, he added, “We think ISIS is looking to attack another prison or do something in al-Hol.”
In 2022, the U.S. military is set to spend $155 million in Syria to train and equip the SDF, along with related work like bolstering Islamic State group prisons. The State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development plan to spend $852 million on humanitarian assistance in Syria and support to refugees in nearby countries.
Pentagon funds have helped pay for guards and infrastructure, including metal detectors at al-Hol, and internal fences are expected to be built this month to allow guards to close off areas in a riot or after raids to clear out smuggled weapons. The U.S. military is also logging biometric data, such as DNA, of the adult male prisoners.
Most children at al-Hol do not attend school — there are not enough of them, and some women refuse to let their offspring go. Ghaznawi said two schools were recently forced to close; they had stopped hiring camp residents as support staff, he said, and were repeatedly attacked.
Kathryn Achilles, the advocacy, media and communications director for Syria for Save the Children, said it operates six “temporary learning spaces” at al-Hol, including one it recently rebuilt after it was set on fire. They teach a basic curriculum of English, Arabic, math and science. But the growing violence, she said, is further traumatizing the children.
“These kids didn’t choose to go to Syria or to be born there, and they are trapped in this cycle of violence that is punishing them for the sins, or perceived sins, of their fathers,” she said. “The SDF has been left with the responsibility of holding these people. These children are caught in the system, but what they need is to be returned home.”