ISIS Fighters’ Children Are Growing Up in a Desert Camp. What Will They Become?
Leaving captured men, women and children in prisons and camps run by Kurds risks seeding a new global terrorism disaster, rights groups and the U.S. military warn.
By Charlie Savage
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 drought-stricken 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 oversize polo shirt, held aloft a star folded from paper.
Al Hol is a detention camp for people displaced by the ISIS war — guards do not let residents walk out its gates. About 93 percent 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’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 ISIS 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 ISIS 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 American-backed coalition laid siege to Baghuz, the remaining ISIS stronghold, women and children who fled or survived were separated from the men and sent to Al Hol. Its population ballooned sevenfold.