Terror incubator inside a Syrian camp.
BEIRUT, Lebanon — In the desert camp in northeastern Syria where tens of thousands of Islamic State fighters’ wives and children have been trapped for months in miserable conditions with no prospects of leaving, ISIS sympathizers torch the tents of women deemed infidels.
Fights between camp residents have brought smuggled guns into the open, and some women have attacked or threatened others with knives and hammers. Twice, in June and July, women stabbed the Kurdish guards who were escorting them, sending the camp into lockdown.
Virtually all women wear the niqab, the full-length black veil demanded by ISIS — some because they still adhere to the group’s ideology, others because they fear running afoul of the true believers.
The Kurdish-run Al Hol camp is struggling to serve nearly 70,000 displaced people, mainly women and children who fled there during the last battle to oust the Islamic State from eastern Syria. It has become what aid workers and American officials warn is a dangerous situation.
The daily ordeals of overcrowded latrines and contaminated water, limited medical care, flaring tensions between residents and guards, and security problems have left the residents embittered and vulnerable. A recent United States Defense Department report that cautioned that ISIS was regrouping across Iraq and Syria said ISIS ideology has been able to spread “uncontested” at the camp.
A core of ISIS followers is menacing the rest with threats, intimidation and, occasionally, violence, said aid workers and researchers.
“Living in conditions that are difficult and being surrounded by people who are highly radical — is that conducive to deradicalization?” said Elizabeth Tsurkov, a fellow at the Forum for Regional Thinking who researches Syria and Iraq.
The Iraqis face being ostracized for their ISIS associations or sent to detention camps if they return to Iraq. The Syrians may not have homes to go back to. And the roughly 10,000 foreigners from at least 50 other countries are largely unwanted at home.
The Kurdish authorities have pleaded for the non-Syrians to be allowed to return to their own countries. But only a few countries, including Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, have repatriated their citizens on a large scale.
“They’re in no man’s land,” said Sara Kayyali, a Syria researcher at Human Rights Watch. “They’re stuck in the desert in a camp that’s not equipped for their needs, with children who grew up in the worst possible conditions, only to get to a place where things are, if possible, even worse.”
Conditions are especially poor in an annex, where those who are neither Syrian nor Iraqi are housed, including more than 7,000 children — about two-thirds of whom are younger than 12 — and 3,000 women.
Medical care in the annex is limited to two small clinics. The number of child deaths — mostly from treatable conditions like severe malnutrition — has nearly tripled since March, according to the International Rescue Committee.
The camp authorities, as well as aid workers, have said extra security measures were warranted by the outbreaks of harassment and violence.
“It’s a cycle of violence,” Ms. Kayyali said. “ISIS has committed atrocities against the world. Policymakers don’t want to deal with anyone connected to ISIS. Then they’re re-radicalized by mistreatment, and they go back to what they know.”