The Al-Hol camp, where members of the Islamic State were held, also sheltered displaced people with no connection to the group. After Kurdish fighters abandoned it to the forces of Damascus, a large number of jihadists and their families fled, raising security concerns that extend beyond Syria’s borders.
Between two rows of white cylindrical shelters, children come and go, running up to the barbed-wire fence that separates them from armed guards. For the first time, they are free — or in any case, freer than at any other moment in their lives.
One of them has a bicycle. Another carries a plastic whistle permanently in her mouth, like a pacifier. At the end of the cluster of hut-like structures resembling greenhouses, a brightly colored playground has been built on a concrete slab. Several dozen families have just arrived after a full day’s journey by bus.
The authorities hope to have transferred the last residents of the Al-Hol camp within a week. Since the fall of the Islamic State (ISIS) back in 2019, it has housed mostly families accused of being linked to the terrorist group, as well as displaced people with no connection to it. The vast camp — in reality an open-air prison — was controlled by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), headed by the Kurds. At the end of January, they withdrew in the face of the advance of Damascus’s army, which regained control of the camp only after several hours.
In the meantime, among the camp’s roughly 24,000 residents, thousands of women and children of foreign jihadists fled. Some were taken to the Idlib countryside, others to Aleppo. Several sources report renewed activity by smugglers along the Turkish border. Some families remain in Turkey, and others have managed to continue illegally toward Europe.
A security vacuum
“As we approached Al-Hol, we asked the SDF — as we had done for the prison in al-Shaddadah — to ensure the site was secured. That was supposed to be a priority, because IS had ordered its members to free prisoners and families linked to Daesh [ISIS] by any means necessary. The SDF did not do so in either case. So by the time we arrived, many jihadists and their families had escaped,” explains a Syrian security source.
In the case of Al-Hol, known as a kind of “mini-caliphate” where the jihadist organization continued to thrive, two Syrian sources confirm an eight-hour security vacuum during which no one guarded the camp. “Many women fled, sometimes with the direct help of ISIS members. The fencing around the annex, where foreign women and children lived, had been cut,” the official continues.
When escaped families are found by government forces in the desert, they speak of serious health problems or describe panic attacks suffered by their children who must be rushed to hospital. They board ambulances and other civilian vehicles. “But we then lose track of them,” he admits.
“The most dangerous individuals were among those who managed to flee, especially during the first hours of the security vacuum between the departure of the Kurdish forces and the arrival of the government army,” confirms Arthur Quesnay, a researcher affiliated with Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University. “They had the money to pay smugglers to get out of the camp and possibly across borders.” Moreover, “knowing that the camp would fall into government hands, and that residents not affiliated with Daesh would probably turn against them to avenge years under their informal but very real rule, the most hardline ISIS militants fled as soon as they could,” the specialist adds.
“Several months ago, we arrested a 14-year-old boy who had also been taken out of the camp and was on his way to Latakia, where he was planning to carry out an attack for ISIS,” a Syrian source adds. “Those who escaped from Al-Hol were already a problem before the events of last January. Today, the situation has worsened, posing an immense risk to the security of Syrians — and even as far as Europe, as some have already crossed borders.”
Women, the disabled, the elderly
Those who remained in the camp did not have the resources or physical ability to escape. In the camp at Akhtarin, one mainly sees elderly women, people with disabilities, old men, young children and their mothers, displaced by the fighting against ISIS years ago. They say they stayed because the prospect of being protected by the army and transferred to a new camp felt safer than suddenly finding themselves in northeastern Syria’s countryside without resources and often without any destination.
This new camp, in the town of Akhtarin about an hour’s drive north of Aleppo, is worlds away from Al-Hol, with its composite-material buildings and moderate size — far removed from the filth, violence and endemic corruption that fostered trafficking and clandestine crossings there.
“Here, the guards are very different from those at Al-Hol,” notes Halima, in her forties, after exchanging a few words with two members of the General Security who inform her of the services that will be available in the camp: a grocery store, pharmacy, schools. “Over there, they humiliated us all the time,” she continues.
“Every six months, they would burst into our tents at dawn, force us outside and make us wait in the desert all day,” recalls Rana. “They said it was to search our tents. But in reality, they would place weapons in front of our tents, or in holes they had dug, and photograph them to post on social media. It allowed them to say we were dangerous.”
“We would see those photos online and think: what a disgrace!” adds Halima, who insists she kept her distance as much as possible from the women in the camp who preached jihadist ideas. “When we returned home, everything was turned upside down, broken, and each time they had stolen our money and some of our belongings.”
For, even more than the Kurdish forces, ISIS members inside the camp imposed terror. Intimidation, torture, settling of scores, executions… The raids described by Rana and Halima were above all counterterrorism operations aimed at limiting Daesh’s grip on the camp. The jihadist organization had its own courts, and the hisba, the morality police, imposed strict rules and barbaric punishments. Children were indoctrinated, trained to become the next “cubs of the caliphate,” whether their families consented or not.
“We heard terrible stories. So we stayed away from those women,” says Noura, a woman in her thirties. “I remained alongside the few people I knew for seven years. I spoke to no one else and kept my children close to me, because a single wrong word could get us killed,” she says.
Discovering the world
But for the children, “that was home and normality,” explains Noura, running her hand through the hair of little Stabrak, aged one and a half. “They thought the camp was the country.” Their world, however hellish, was taken from them overnight. Now they must adapt to this new environment — cleaner, calmer, but more sterile.
“I miss Khamis,” whispers Maria. That was the name (meaning “Thursday”) of the section where she lived. “Here, there’s nothing in the tents. Over there, it was decorated,” adds Hala, seven. “We had put up flowers.” Paper flowers they had made themselves.
The outside world had been only theoretical, intangible and, for some, unimaginable. Salsabil, seven, marvels at having seen cars for the first time. “What I liked best about the journey was seeing trees!” smiles nine-year-old Ala. She had never seen any before. Most of the children around her were born in Al-Hol or arrived there very young. “Here, the walls are hard,” observes Maria, three. Until now, she had known only tents battered by wind and rain.
They learned little about the world beyond. At school, “the teacher would play them a video on a phone and then leave,” says Halima. “It’s true. None of my children can read,” adds Rana, Maria’s mother, who arrived in Akhtarin with her husband and their four children. “In the camp, we will open several schools,” emphasizes director Ismail Zeino.
However, families are not required to stay indefinitely. In about a month, they will be free to leave. “Only those who wish to or who have nowhere else to go will remain in this camp,” he explains. Most of the displaced families interviewed say their relatives themselves live in other displacement camps.
“Here, the wind has no voice”
Rana invites us to visit her shelter, composed, like all the others, of an entrance, a bedroom and a bathroom. A winter gust lifts the edges of her niqab. She steps inside, pauses as if listening, and smiles: “Here, the wind has no voice.” For the first time in seven years, she is sheltered from the elements.
Despite the security and relative comfort, the 30-year-old says her heart is heavy. Abdelrazak, 13, is missing from the family. When the crowd rushed toward Al-Hol’s gates at the end of January, taking advantage of the chaos, he wanted to run too. His parents encouraged him: “We didn’t know what was going to happen; no one understood the situation. Since we have six children, I preferred to lighten our burden inside the camp,” explains his father, Ahmad. His second wife agreed to take him, along with her own daughter, to the city of Aleppo, where her parents live. He is still separated from his family.
Overnight, Abdelrazak was uprooted from everything familiar. “Every night, he used to fall asleep in my arms,” says Rana. “How does he sleep now?” In voice messages sent via WhatsApp, the boy asks to speak to his mother, says he misses his family and wants to join them. In some, he breaks down in tears.
“We were told we would stay in this camp only a week,” says Ahmad. “But now they are talking about a month.” For now, no official details have been communicated regarding the fate of these displaced people. Officials on site say all residents will soon be allowed to leave if they have a guarantor. Faced with uncertainty, the fifty-year-old is determined to persuade the guards to allow his son into the camp.
Where will they go next? “To my parents’ home, in Afrin,” Rana supposes. Another camp, again — but without barbed wire this time. Once more, it will only be temporary. Ahmad makes a broad gesture, pointing to the world around him. He exclaims: “Now all of Syria is ours!”