To Rescue a Child

"The SDF [Kurdish-led Syrian Defence Forces] is under extreme pressure from the local Syrian tribes to release women and children from al-Hol. This situation was a major stress factor between the SDF and the tribes in eastern Syria."

"The SDF is essentially relying on the tribes to faithfully implement an honor system that the women and children will not turn into seeds of IS ready to spring up into a new caliphate. The SDF is transferring responsibility onto the tribes to make sure that emptying al-Hol of local women and children, many of whom may still have some sympathy for [IS], does not become a catastrophic security risk."

Nicholas Heras, Syria expert, Institute for the Study of War, Washington-based think tank

 

"The SDF’s waning capabilities and resources and the limitations they place on NGOs place the burden on local communities to integrate deeply traumatized and often radicalized women and children. That said, I doubt that the SDF will risk the security of the area by rushing into releasing all Syrians at once. They fear the chaos that might ensue more than anyone else."

Dareen Khalifa, Syria analyst, International Crisis Group

"Most IS women did not have combat roles and do not have blood on their hands. However, there are also IS diehards and enforcers in al-Hol who are dangerous and should not be amnestied. They have killed, burned tents, harassed and beaten the others who are disillusioned and now hate IS."

Anne Speckhard, director, International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism

In 2019 a little girl was found alone on a road in northeastern Syria whose parents and siblings had been killed it was conjectured in an airstrike during the battle against the Islamic State. The then-four-year-old was recognized as Canadian although she was born in Syria when her parents chose to leave Canada to join the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. They made their choice to join the 'caliphate' to take part in the brave new world of Islamist terror running rampant in the region. Their children paid the price of their parents' dream of an Islamist caliphate.

The government of Canada has been under pressure to bring the child known as Amira to Canada, to a country she has never known, to extended family she has no idea exists, but who are prepared to look after her and raise her, in the absence of her parents. She has been taken from the camp, and is being escorted by Canadian consular officials. She was initially taken to Iraq and from there flown to Canada. The remaining 46 Canadians who chose to leave Canada to join the Islamic State caliphate and make their future there, remain at the Al-Hawl camp with them, their 25 children.

Al-Hawl Camp, run by the Kurdish forces, where captured ISIL fighters and their families are held. Photo by Human Rights Watch

"We are delighted by this news and would like to express our gratitude to everyone who has made this possible."

"We would kindly request privacy as my niece  transitions into her new life in Canada."

Toronto engineer, Amira's uncle Ibrahim

The other 46 Canadians remain in the Al-Hawl camp. There is no question that they are ISIL members and were involved in Islamic State affairs, perhaps including the atrocities infamously committed by the terrorists. Collecting evidence to prove their state of ISIL involvement while in Syria is next to impossible. Returning them to Canada without evidence of their involvement would mean not knowing what kind of mindset is loose and what their presence might mean for the safety and security of the population and the state.

 

The reality is that they made a conscious choice to leave Canada to join an outlawed group of Islamists whose reputation as terrorists for whom no kind of bloodletting, no depth of inhumane treatment of others fazed them, but rather led them to ever more atrocious acts of depraved murder to enhance their formidable reputations as crazed butchers. They are themselves responsible for the miserable life they lead in a squalid prisoner camp, which is likely far better than what prisoners of ISIL experienced.

The al-Hawl refugee camp in north-eastern Syria where the five-year-old Canadian girl has been held by Kurdish forces. Photograph: Crispin Blunt/PA

Canada's Responsibilities for its Islamic State Citizens

"Those Canadian citizens who came here, they came to kill us and they came to kill our kids and to destroy our towns."
"And the moment that we arrested them and had them in our prisons or our camps, we were saving the Canadian people in Canada. We were preventing them from doing any terrorist attacks."
“So doing nothing towards those citizens, [Canada refusing to repatriate them to take them off Kurdish hands currently responsible for them], that’s really not respectful for the sacrifice that we have done."
"The Canadian citizens who are here, they are six men and 12 women and some kids so when we talk about Canada … it’s as big as 10 million metres squared. It’s a very big country compared to our country [Kurdistan]."
"I’m just surprised how a big country like Canada cannot take six or 12 citizens to their country."
"The situation is really getting worse. We have those women in our hands, and every day, they are taking care of the kids, how to make them ISIS, how to make them follow ISIS ideology."
Mustafa Bali, spokesman, Syrian Democratic Forces

"I think it was pretty clear from our experience in Al-Hawl that there’s a small subset of women who kind of run the show at the camp, who are very much kind of overpowering a lot of the other women in the camp, policing what they wear, policing what they can say, policing how they act."
Foreign fighter expert Prof. Amarnath Amarasingam, Queens University, Kingston, Ontario

"The reality is that these individuals are Canada’s problem, yesterday, today and tomorrow. If they show up at our consulates or embassies, they will be a very real problem."
"If they help to reconstitute the Islamic State, they will be an even bigger one. And if they conduct terrorist attacks and take more lives, that will be on us."
Former Canadian Security Intelligence Service analyst Jessica Davis

At Al-Hawl camp in northern Syria, children watch as women confront Kurdish guards in a confrontation that quickly turned violent. Stewart Bell

For the past six months and more, since the Islamic State geographic caliphate was fully dissolved, Al-Hawl (Hol) camp in Syrian Kurdistan has housed an estimated 70,000 ISIL family members, women and children. Among them are 40 Canadians. Along with other foreign-sourced women who were pleased and excited to become part of a bold new Islamist enterprise in the creation of a dominating caliphate whose geographic presence was meant to expand, just as its ideology continues to fester in the Middle East and beyond.

The Canadian government -- like most other Western governments whose citizens answered the call to jihad and fled to Turkey to enter Syria and join the Islamic State terrorist group -- has no intention to reclaim its citizens. This is the very same government that overturned the previous Conservative-led government which had legislated a revocation of citizenship to any Canadians of immigrant status who left the country to go abroad to fight in the name of terrorist jihad with Islamic State. Justin Trudeau made it clear that to him, "A Canadian is a Canadian" and he would have no part of a two-tier citizenship system.

So these are still Canadians, their citizenship is intact (unlike Britain which detached their citizens), but the Liberal government sees no need to exert itself to relieve the pressure on the Kurds whose ill fortune it has been not only to be forced to be the only reliable fighting force to counter the malevolent deadly threat of Islamic State, but to imprison and to guard them, at the cost of manpower and treasury, attempting to handle a poisonous situation no other country is willing to undertake, much less assist with.

Al-Hawl Camp,  Associated Press

As for those Canadian Islamic State members who have returned of their own volition to Canada, many are free to roam the streets of the country, (instead of being peremptorily imprisoned) while Canada's security and intelligence agents twist their hands, and bemoan the fact that unless they are able to amass hard evidence directly implicating these ISIL stalwarts, arresting and imprisoning, much less trying them for the crimes they are suspected to have been involved with, won't pass muster under Canadian law.

The Turkish military invasion of southeast Syria enabled by a brain-distracted Trump administration has had the effect of disabling the Kurdish military from its preoccupation with ferreting out ISIL sleeper cells, as they must now respond to the defence of their nation and their people. Moreover, the hundreds of Kurdish YPG fighters deployed as guards over the prison camps housing tens of thousands of ISIL members and those of their families have been hollowed out in numbers, responding to the emergency imposed by Turkish President Erdogan's ambition to annihilate the YPG 'terrorists' and establish a 'safe corridor' between Turkey and Syria.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan's plan is to forcibly dump Syrian refugees, an estimated two million of the three-and-a-half million living in squalid refugee camps inside Turkey, fearful of returning to Syria where the Baathist regime's Alawite President Bashar al-Assad will resume barrel-and-chemical-bombing them once again. In forcing the Syrian Democratic Forces to withdraw their guards for the urgency of the battlefield against Turkish invasion, the fears now focus on Islamic State prisoners being freed from their prison custody, enabled to resume their reign of terror, as a result.

In the Al-Hawl prison camp where the ISIL women and children are incarcerated, a message from ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi called for his supporters to free the women from what he called the "prisons of humiliation", pleasing the women no end. They had, in effect, the hard-core among them, been effectively running the camp along an Islamic State model, in defiance of the Kurdish guards, and even threatening them with knives and cudgels.

The Kurdish guards speak of the camp as a "ticking time bomb". A dismembered body, days ago, was discovered in a septic tank at Al-Hawl. Some time later the body of a 20-year-old women was found as well, with 16 fatal stab wounds, according to a camp official. Last month, a 14-year-old girl had been murdered, her penalty for refusing to wear a niqab. Guards have reportedly been stabbed by these ferociously Islamist-violent woman of Islamic State. Little wonder that the camp has been described as a "mini caliphate".

Somehow, the camp women have been able to take possession of cellphones, of knives and even, it was reported, guns. The 400 guards who were responsible for the camp prior to this week's redeployment, make no pretense that the women haven't taken command of the day-to-day operations of the camp. They have been making efforts to smuggle themselves out of the camp, efforts that increased after they were called on to "rise up" by Baghdadi.

Guards at Al-Hawl camp in northern Syria arrest women accused of gathering to whip a woman for violating their religious code. Stewart Bell