When Hiba Mohammed Yassin Ghalia took her daughter Maria to visit Aleppo's historic citadel for the first time, the eight-year-old thought she had walked into a security raid.
“She asked me, ‘Mama, is there an operation?’ She saw all the equipment, the darkness and all the people and thought it was a security operation,” Ms Ghalia, 43, told The National.
“The children get scared by the simplest things,” she said. “I told her, ‘No, it’s not a security operation, quite the opposite. It’s the Aleppo citadel.’”
Maria was a toddler when the family fled to Al Hol camp, deep in the Syrian Desert near the Iraqi border. She grew up amid night raids by security troops guarding the camp, in a rain-soaked tent, and without schooling. Children in Al Hol had never seen trees, rivers or tall buildings.
They are among 90 Syrian families that have been allowed to leave Al Hol in the past six months, after Kurdish-led troops in the north-east struck a deal with the central government in Damascus for their evacuation.
For these families, the departures mark the end of years of displacement in dire conditions in Al Hol. The notorious camp houses female relatives of ISIS members and sympathisers, as well as civilians who sought refuge during intense bombing campaigns against the group in 2018 and 2019.
“Sometimes I can’t believe that I got out of that nightmare and that we are finally free of it,” Ms Ghalia said.
The shock of normal life has taken time to register for the children who leave.
“After all these years in a desert camp with extremely difficult conditions, these women and children clearly need support and integration,” said Munzer Al Salloul, executive director of the Stabilisation Support Unit.
The non-governmental organisation receives funding from the US State Department to support Syrian families during and after their departure from Al Hol. The UN refugee agency, UNHCR, also assists returnees, with a particular focus on medical cases.
Those who have been allowed to leave typically have medical conditions that cannot be treated in Al Hol, which lies in territory controlled by Kurdish-led authorities who declared autonomy from Damascus during Syria’s civil war.
Hiba’s middle child, Hamza, 12, suffers from seizures and needed medical attention unavailable at Al Hol, where aid groups have long warned of severe humanitarian and security conditions.
Another 103 Syrian families are currently awaiting approval to depart, Mr Al Salloul said.
The departures come as international efforts to resolve one of Syria’s most complex humanitarian and political challenges continue.
Al Hol’s population, mostly women and children, peaked at more than 70,000 in 2019 during the final push to dismantle ISIS control of Syrian territory.
Since then, neighbouring Iraq has repatriated more than 18,000 of its nationals, according to a statement from a UN-hosted conference on Al Hol in September. Thousands of third-country nationals remain, including people from Central Asia and Europe, whose countries have been reluctant to take them back.
Estimates of the number of Syrians remaining in Al Hol range from 14,000 to 16,000. What is clear, humanitarian officials say, is that current donor funding is insufficient for Syrian organisations to provide the level of support needed.
“So far, the Americans have helped us with the departure of families, but what next?” Mr Al Salloul told The National from the SSU office in Aleppo. “We need international support, whether it's for the families, the host communities, infrastructure, and for the security forces so that they can follow up closely and speed up the departure of these families in a way that is safe and reassuring for the Syrian community.”
Mr Al Salloul said he had called on donor countries to up their support for Syrians leaving Al Hol. “There are promises from many parties, but so far nothing.”
Better funding for departure programmes is essential, he said. The SSU plans to establish a vocational training centre and remedial education courses for children who missed out on school in Al Hol.
executive director, Stabilisation Support Unit
Without efforts to ensure their proper reintegration into society and find them secure incomes, families from Al Hol remain vulnerable to ISIS propaganda, according to humanitarian officials.
“The children and women are not guilty of anything, but if the community continues to reject them, they will become vulnerable to recruitment by ISIS,” Mr Al Salloul said.
Ms Ghalia fled her home in Aleppo city more than a decade ago during bombing by the regime of former president Bashar Al Assad, and sought refuge at family property in Tabqa, west of Raqqa city. There, she said, her husband Zakariya, a supermarket worker, was killed in a strike near their home, and the remaining family members later fled to Al Hol. She denies any connection to ISIS.
“I wasn’t with them, we kept ourselves to ourselves,” she said. She laughed as she confirmed that her husband was Syrian – a knowing nod to many foreign ISIS fighters marrying Syrian women.
“Don’t think of us like those in ISIS, with lots of wives,” she said. Ms Ghalia and her eldest daughter, Ghalia, who is 22, both wear full face coverings known as niqab, as well as black gloves, but she said this predates the days she lived under ISIS control. Women in some parts of Aleppo, as well as in other northern cities such as Al Bab and Manbij, wear similarly conservative dress.
The SSU has provided legal aid to help families obtain documentation, access to medical treatment, and Maria and Hamza are now enrolled in school. Her daughter Ghalia said she once thought her life was over during her teenage years in Al Hol, but has since enrolled in a nursing course.
“Because of the war we lived through – when you feel like you see injured people in front of you and you can’t do anything, that’s why I want to do nursing, to be able to help,” she said.
Ms Ghalia's family now live with her brother in a small apartment in eastern Aleppo’s Al Shaar district. The space is cramped, and they hope to move.
“I want us to have our own house, to be independent,” said Ghalia. “We moved from place to place and we want to live in stability in our country.”
Abdulkareem Derbass, an SSU family co-ordinator, says that income and housing are the main concerns for families who have left Al Hol.
“Their financial situation is a bit …” he said, trailing off. “They don’t have work. They rely on aid and the people who are hosting them.”
The fate of Al Hol itself remains uncertain. The Kurdish-led administration said in February that it wanted all Syrian and Iraqi residents to leave by the end of the year. With tens of thousands still in the camp, that target appears unlikely.
According to a US State Department note to Congress in September, US President Donald Trump urged the Syrian government to assume responsibility for the camp during a meeting in May with President Ahmad Al Shara. The note stressed that returning displaced Syrians to their homes is “critical to preventing a resurgence of the ISIS ‘caliphate’ in Syria and the greater region”.
Neighbouring Turkey has also been pushing for Kurdish-led forces to relinquish control of the camps, viewing the Syrian Democratic Forces as an extension of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, which Ankara considers a terrorist organisation.
The handover of Al Hol camp to Damascus-led forces is one element in the larger, complex issue of integrating areas controlled by the SDF into civilian and military formations led from the Syrian capital. Despite the Kurdish-led forces and Damascus reaching an agreement on this in March, disagreements over the exact contours have prevented its implementation.
Mr Al Salloul said better Syrian government access to Al Hol would speed up the departures. He also wants Damascus to push other countries to take back their nationals who joined ISIS or, at least, provide financial support for Syria to deal with them.
“I think that after a period of stability in Syria and agreements across the Syrian territory, the Syrian state must ask other countries to either withdraw their nationals or fund special programmes for them,” he said. “I mean, it's up to the Syrian state to decide on the mechanism, but a solution must be found.”
For Ms Ghalia, the most important thing is ensuring her children make up for the education they missed in Al Hol. Maria and Hamza are now both getting on well at school, and Maria has taken a particular shine to learning English, she said.
“If we don’t educate them, how can they build a nation?” she said. “They won’t gain anything if we don’t educate them, and Syria won’t be rebuilt again.”
Additional reporting by Ahmed Fallaha
