Five years after the fall of Daesh’s brutal self-styled "caliphate," tens of thousands of women and children associated with the terrorists are still being held by another group of terrorists, the PKK terror group’s U.S.-backed offshoot, the YPG, in camps rife with violence and abuse, with seemingly no clear plan of what to do with them.
More than 40,000 inmates – half of them children – are cooped up behind the barbed wire fences and watchtowers of the windswept al-Hol camp run by Washington's terrorist group allies.
The YPG terrorist group seized much of northern and eastern Syria from the Daesh terrorist group with U.S. backing. They have since held thousands of Daesh terrorists in prisons, while their wives and children – numbering in the tens of thousands, many of them foreigners – are living in camps.
The camp’s population spiked at more than 70,000 as the U.S.-led anti-Daesh coalition, including the YPG terrorists, began tightening its grip on the last Daesh holdout in Baghouz late in 2018.
Iraqis have always been "the dominant nationality" in the camp, with their numbers at one time reaching 30,000, according to Doctors Without Borders.
At its height, 11,000 foreign women and children – that is non-Syrian or Iraqi – were held there.
After the defeat of the so-called caliphate in March 2019, countries across the world slowly began repatriating their nationals. Many Europeans were transferred to al-Roj, a smaller and better-kept camp close to the Turkish border that today holds 2,500 people, more than 2,140 of them foreign.
The sprawling 320-hectare al-Hol holds more than 43,000 people from 47 countries including France, Sweden, the Netherlands, Russia, Türkiye and Tunisia – 21,500 of them children, according to the latest figures.
Iraqis are the biggest group (20,144), followed by Syrians (16,710). Two-thirds of the 6,612 foreigners are children under 17, according to the camp administration.
YPG terrorists guard and oversee the camp. Dozens of United Nations agencies and international and local nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) provide health, water, sanitation, education and protection services.
But the camp's overall management is handled by the U.S. group Blumont paid for by the U.S. State Department, with France also funding some humanitarian assistance and improvements to the infrastructure.
The camp is divided into two parts. Syrians and Iraqis live in the main camp, with foreigners held in the high-security "annex" that is cut off from the main camp.
Camp "officials" say many of the foreigners have not revealed their nationalities or have given false ones.
Many marriages in the main camp – where some 3,000 men live – are to minors, including girls as young as 13, according to humanitarian workers.
Since the terrorists do not "recognize" child marriage, they are not "registered," nor are their children.
Many men take second wives. These marriages are also not "recognized," by the terrorists. As a result, the camp "bursts with unregistered children," a humanitarian worker said.
Some boys are forcibly taken from their mothers by the YPG as child soldiers once they reach 11 in violation of international law and is a war crime, a U.N. expert found, with the terrorist group admitting the violations but claiming it is to "stop them being radicalized."
They also admit the Daesh terrorists still exercise control in parts of the camp through fear, punishments and even murder.
"Al-Hol is a suffocating place for children to live and grow up," said Kathryn Achilles from Save the Children.
They "have endured acute deprivation, bombardment and have now been in the camp for almost five years. They need more," she said.
In late February, United States Central Command (CENTCOM) Commander Gen. Michael "Erik" Kurilla visited the al-Hol and al-Roj camps to “observe firsthand the current humanitarian conditions, continued improvements in camp security and repatriation, rehabilitation, and reintegration efforts to return residents to their countries of origins.”
The CENTCOM commander emphasized cooperation with the YPG/PKK and also met with the ringleaders of the terrorist organization, much to the chagrin of Ankara who reiterated its call to its ally to end its support for the terrorist group “under the pretext of fighting Daesh.”
The YPG has grown stronger in the region, particularly in Deir el-Zour province, home to Syria’s largest oil wells, thanks to material support from the United States.
The issue strains Turkish-U.S. ties as Ankara warns its NATO ally against aiding terror elements that threaten its national security, something Washington continues to do despite promising to remove the group from the Turkish border area. Türkiye continues regular operations against the YPG presence in Syria.
Ankara has launched a trio of successful counterterrorism operations since 2016 across its border in northern Syria to prevent the formation of a terror corridor and enable the peaceful settlement of residents: Euphrates Shield in 2016, Olive Branch in 2018 and Peace Spring in 2019 – operations that the U.S. had opposed.
