Raising the New Generation of Islamic State Jihadists at Al-Hol

"All of the women here are radical."

"But the bigger problem is that the mothers are educating their kids according to the Islamic State ideology."

Hokmiya Ibrahim, administrator, Roj camp, Syria 

 

"Repatriation is the priority."

"We are aiming to return people to their countries, not just in al-Hol, but for all the camps inside northeast Syria. Everyone should go back home."

"This camp is a ticking time bomb. We’ve received intelligence from our allies in the international coalition, led by the United States, and from the Iraqi government, that ISIS [the Islamic State] is planning something. But we don’t know whether it will be an external attack or an uprising from within."

"We’re trying to address this together with the National Security Agency and the [U.N. Refugee Agency]."

"[But on the part of the new government], no steps have been taken to relocate these populations."

"Humanitarian cases in al-Hawl need urgent referral to Damascus or elsewhere and, for the past month and a half, we’ve seen no positive moves." 

Jihan Hanan, co-head, al-Hol camp, Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces

 

"Many international organizations have programs for al-Hol, but when it comes to actually moving and supporting families, there is no one there in practice."

"Given the scale of needs and funding constraints, no returnee receives a full package of support immediately upon return. Resources simply do not allow for that."

Mounzer al-Salal, director, Syrian NGO Stabilization Support Unit (SSU) 

Families prepare to return to their hometowns from northeast Syria’s al-Hol camp, 27 April 2025. Reuters

 

"A massive fence confines 39,000 people, 11,000 of whom are foreign nationals. Of these, 95% are women and children — mostly relatives of Islamic State fighters — along with a number of other civilians displaced by war. The camp is divided into six sections. Sections 1 through 5 house about 33,000 Syrians and Iraqis. Section 6, which the camp’s director described as “the most dangerous,” holds the families of foreign fighters from over 42 countries."

"There are 24,000 minors in al-Hawl. Many were born behind barbed wire and have never seen the world beyond the camp. Seven thousand of these children are under 12 years old. As we drive in, children hurl stones at the armored vehicles driven by our escorts from the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a Kurdish-led militia coalition that has battled the Islamic State for years. Others hide. One boy raises his right index finger — a gesture often associated with the Islamic State."

"Since 2019, over 150 killings have been documented inside al-Hawl; an average of more than two murders per month. A few weeks ago, authorities discovered the mutilated remains of a woman in Section 6, partly mummified and discarded in a ditch between tents belonging to extremists."

New Lines Magazine 

Mostly women and children live in the al-Hol camp    BBC

 

Most of the detainees in the Al Hol Camp located in northeastern Syria where a fence with barbed wire surrounds the immense compound, are family members -- the wives, sisters and children -- of the Islamic State fighters imprisoned nearby. Prisons close by the women's prison house over 8,000 of the ISIS fighters. Kurdish-led Syrian forces supported by the United States fought to reclaim land in Syria that ISIS had ruled for years as well as in Iraq, when it established its 'Islamic Caliphate', planning to conquer ever greater tracts of land until it was finally brought to heel.

 

The Kurdish-led forces that had protected the minority groups such as Yazidis, Christians and their own from the  brutal Islamists detained thousands of ISIS fighters and tens of thousands of their relatives, many women who had entered Syria from abroad responding to an appeal from ISIS for 'brides' for their terrorist fighting men. Ever since that wind-down of ISIS and the capture and imprisonment of their cohorts, the Kurds have been left to the task of guarding them. Despite years-long appeals to the international community by the Kurds to repatriate their citizens, few have complied.

 

The United States, allied with the Kurds, is now preparing to completely withdraw their presence and expects the new government of Syria to take responsibility for the thousands of residents in the detention camps, part of its plans to have the  Syrian Democratic Forces led by  the Kurds merge with the reconstituted military of the Syrian government under one-time ISIS affiliate, President Ahmed Al Sharaa, once known as Abu Mohammad al-Julani, in his earlier role as a bona fide jihadist. 

 

Although the Trump Administration has given the new Syrian administration a clean bill of health, that hasn't stopped the Al Sharaa military from aiding and abetting parts of its Sunni alliance jihadist militias in deadly reprisal attacks against the Syrian Alawites as well as Syrian Druze and Christians. Understandably, given the Kurdish experience with Sunni Jihadist militias and its battles over the years to free the geography from the hold of the Islamic State, the Kurds have little trust in the new government and its stated commitment to fight ISIS. 

 

The al-Hol camp holds families of alleged Islamic State fighters [Getty]

 

 Kurds view the likelihood that the former al-Qaeda-linked new government may turn the ISIS prisoners free, despite their public stance of battling ISIS. By no means is the Islamic State dead and gone as a violent ideological threat to global stability and security. It continues to target northeast Syria's Kurdish-led forces, expanding reach and frequency and lethality, reflecting the assessments by the UN and U.S. Two American soldiers were killed in one such attack in mid-December.

 

According to camp officials, ISIS operatives remain inside the camps, their focus that of radicalizing the children. Over 27,000 family members of ISIS fighters are held in Al Hol and nearby Roj camps. And while none of the women have been charged with  any crimes, the officials are under no illusion that many of these women are dangerous as ongoing proponents of the ISIS agenda, intent on teaching their children to become future acting members of the terrorist group. 

 

The most extreme of the detainees are those from countries outside the Middle East; Tajikistan, France and Russia; among them, about 6,000 women and children living separately in the camp, off limits to visitors. Violence and ill-health are the lot of the residents of the camp, where weapons are smuggled in and women and older adolescent boys attempt frequent escapes. Among the hundreds of vehicles entering daily with supplies, some carry human contraband out of the camp. 

 

"Every day people are fleeing, and it seems it is an organized operation", observed Al Hol administrator Jihan Hanan. 

  

All the residents at the camp are under indefinite detention, even though many have no links to the Islamic State and fled to the camp to escape the punishing U.S.-led bombing campaign. Photograph by Ivor Prickett

 

 

 

Imprisoning the Enablers of Islamist Death and Destruction

"I stopped eating almost a week ago. My body just can’t take this anymore…this place guarantees you lose your sanity, your dignity, your humanity one way or another…"

"It’s exhausting trying to protect myself all day, all night. I can’t do it anymore."

"I am continually bleeding My teeth are all broken ... my legs cannot walk or stand. I am dying a slow death here and I have done everything I can think of to get help."

"Nothing has worked."

Canadian Kimberly Polman, 42, convert to Islam, ISIS wife, Al-Hol prison camp, Syria

 

"She was hoping she could go home, she was given reason to believe that that might be the case from someone high up in the camp, especially because of the snap election [in Canada]."

"She’s really devastated [that she can’t come home], she’s been sick for a while, she has broken teeth, she has kidney infections…she’s distraught and says she doesn’t want to live anymore….it’s the last thing she has control over."

"I am all for justice, and the choice she made has consequences beyond anything that she could have ever imagined. But we don’t have our Canadian citizenship on merit…even the most hardened criminals and murderers are granted the rights of a Canadian citizen….they are still human beings, they are still Canadians."

Kimberley Polman's sister, Canada

Women and children related to fighters of the Islamic State group wait to board buses and trucks, leaving the overcrowded al-Hol camp to return to their homes on June 3, 2019, in Hasakeh province, Syria. THE CANADIAN PRESS/AP, Baderkhan Ahmad

The families of Canadians who left the country to join the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant during the time of its growing 'Caliphate', happy to be part of the revolutionary new sharia-led Islamist scourge that marched into Syria and Iraq, invading towns and cities, confronting the military in each country uniformly fearful of the terrorists' well-earned reputation for committing atrocities purposefully, to inspire horror and gaining that reputation for sadistic brutality that worked in their favour to inspire fear and ensure that opposition would melt away, have launched a lawsuit against the government of Canada.

For its inaction in committing to bring back their citizens now festering in a prison camp specifically meant to hold the wives and families of Islamic State fighter-terrorists. Separate from the Islamist women who dedicated themselves to serving the interests of the men, there is another, secure prison that holds the men in confinement. Among them are tens of thousands of ISIL diehards who arrived in Syria to become part of ISIL's purge of minorities and persecution of civilian populations from abroad; North Africa, other areas of the Middle East, countries in Europe and North America.

Not all ISIL terrorists were captured by the Kurdish armed forces, the only real opposition to the menace of the Islamic State. Many managed to evade capture and to leave the area where they were vulnerable to arrest and detention, to return to their countries of residence, covertly or under the watchful eye of policing authorities there. Some countries imprisoned their returnees, others allowed them to remain at large, under investigative watch. And while the Kurdish forces that police the camps appealed to foreign nations to repatriate their citizens, some have, most have not.

For the women and children, humanitarian groups argue that they cannot be held accountable for the crimes committed by their husbands, that they are innocent, and most certainly the children born to them as 'caliphate' offspring are innocent of any wrongdoing, and should be returned to their real home, not left to fester in the crime-infested, dangerous, inhumane and putrid confines of the Al-Hol detention camp. Where the frustrated guards hardly know where to turn next, amidst the confusion, the violence, the attacks against them, and the murders that take place within the camp.

Of the foreign women who recruited themselves to become ISIL 'wives' at part of an exciting new venture as partners in the future with Islamist terrorists who commonly executed their prisoners in the most lurid, despicable displays of inhumanity, protestations of innocence ring hollow. They knew and they approved of everything that the men they supported were inflicting on helpless unfortunates who were captured by the terrorists. In some instances pre-adolescents were taught to emulate their elders in handling weapons, in beating prisoners, in pulling triggers to cause death.

The Kurdish Autonomous Administration is doing all it can to protect the wider global public from future depredations of these criminals. Who continue to flourish elsewhere, in parts of Africa, in Afghanistan, and who  still inspire acts of terrorism by their adherents in the West. The Kurdish forces that took on that responsibility of protecting the wider world from the vicious brutality of the Islamist horde have had no assistance from any other source in managing the camps where human rights groups speak of squalid hygienic conditions and lack of security. 

It is typical of people to feel themselves to be unfairly judged and treated for merely following their goals in life, abandoning what they have in secure citizenship and a way of life that is far removed from that of hate-festering ideologies of death and destruction. They make the choice to leave the familiar and launch themselves into a brave new world of fascinating adventure. An adventure that is deadly to others, a fact they appear willingly oblivious to, yet feel entitled after the fact, to expect their transgressions to be overlooked.

In this May 1, 2021 file photo, women walk in the al-Hol camp that houses some 60,000 refugees, including families and supporters of the Islamic State group, many of them foreign nationals, in Hasakeh province, Syria.   (AP Photo/Baderkhan Ahmad)