Thick black smoke billowed from Al Hol camp in north-east Syria, the country’s largest centre housing families with alleged links to ISIS, as unrest spread among residents who said they had gone days without food, water or medication.
The smoke rose into a dark cloud, hanging over Syrian security forces guarding the site. Personnel there said they had not entered the camp.
Behind the fence, dozens of families pressed together, their hands clutching the iron bars, pleading for help. A woman wrapped in a black niqab said her children had not eaten for days. A man beside her said his mother was in desperate need of her diabetes medication, while a young man asked for an internet hotspot.
It was unclear what was burning, but families and the former camp director told The National that some residents had attacked administrative buildings and humanitarian centres. Other residents said the Syrian Democratic Forces had burnt some of their centres to hide incriminating evidence.
Al Hol has been completely sealed off since a chaotic handover between the Kurdish-led authorities and Syria’s central government on Wednesday. Intensified clashes between the two sides forced humanitarian staff to pull out, leaving the camp’s 24,000 residents on their own. Security personnel posted around the site said no one had escaped from the centre.
After capturing two resource-rich governorates last week that had been controlled by Kurdish-led forces, Syrian troops have rapidly advanced deeper into Hasakah province, where Al Hol camp and other heavily guarded ISIS-linked centres are located.
The fast-paced military expansion comes as the SDF, which seized vast areas of territory during the civil war after driving ISIS out with US support, has resisted integration into the central government for months. That has posed a major challenge for Damascus, whose leader, Ahmad Al Shara, has pledged to reunify the country.
The SDF, which defeated ISIS in Syria in 2019 with the support of the international coalition, has been a long-time US ally. But it is now facing collapse as Washington pursues an unprecedented rapprochement with Syria’s new government, in a dramatic shift in alliances.
Tom Barrack, the US envoy to Syria, said on Tuesday that the SDF’s role as the primary anti-ISIS force had “largely expired”, and that the government in Damascus was “both willing and positioned to take over security responsibilities”.
'Looting' and 'vandalism'
Jihan Hanan, the camp’s director under the Kurdish-led administration, told The National by phone that the coalition “should have acted as a neutral party, and initiated coordination”.
She said camp administrators and humanitarian staff could not reach the area because of “clashes in the vicinity of the camp” between SDF forces and groups from outside, without specifying whether these were Syrian regular troops or armed tribal factions that joined the offensive against the SDF.
On Tuesday afternoon, she said she was informed of looting and unrest inside the camp, as bursts of gunfire echoed outside. “Residents took advantage of the situation,” she said. “There was no one at the administration, the centres or the organisations, and there was vandalism, looting and theft.”
The handover of ISIS-linked camps and prisons in north-east Syria, which also hold many foreign nationals, is one of the most sensitive files in the SDF’s integration talks, and has raised international concerns about a potential ISIS resurgence, with sleeper cells still active in Syria and Iraq.
On Wednesday, three staff members from Blumont, a US humanitarian aid group that provides most essential services in the camp, were able to enter the centre, while UNHCR was only able to access the perimeter, according to an informed source.
Both sides have blamed each other for the security vacuum inside the camp. The SDF urged the US-led coalition to “bear its responsibilities” for protecting detention sites as its forces withdrew. Damascus, meanwhile, accuses SDF units of pulling out of Al Hol without coordination, in what it says was an attempt to pressure the government over counter-terrorism efforts.
Camp or prison?
Ala Saleh, 30, one of the residents gathered at the edge of the camp, arrived with his mother’s prescription. “I really need it, I swear, or she might get very sick. I would do anything for her,” he told The National, visibly distressed, as he waved the paper.
He said he strongly disapproved of attacks on medical centres. “They destroyed the Doctors Without Borders clinic,” he said. “It’s for the people here. If I find the ones who did this, I’d break their legs, really.”
Yet Mr Saleh said he understood attacks on SDF-linked buildings, after years of frustration, being stuck in limbo, and what he described as ill treatment. “We were being held here like prisoners. It’s not a camp,” he said.
Many residents are not in Al Hol because they are ISIS members, but because they were civilians uprooted by the civil war. Mr Saleh said he fled the front line in Sfireh and was displaced for months across Syria until he reached Baghouz in 2019. From there, he ended up in the camp.
“It was supposed to be a few days,” Mr Saleh said. He has been there for seven years.
The camp also houses many children, who have known little beyond the sprawling tents of Al Hol. Rights organisations have long warned that the camp’s notoriously dire conditions risk fuelling further radicalisation.
During a previous visit last year, The National saw signs of deep deprivation across the camp, with children in worn-out clothes wandering through its alleys.
A separate section for foreign nationals, known as “the annex”, is widely seen as more hardline. Its residents include women and children from about 40 nationalities, many with alleged links to ISIS, including widows of fighters or relatives of suspected members.
During one encounter, a Turkmen woman repeatedly asked in broken Arabic whether The National’s correspondent was “Kurdish” before agreeing to speak.
She said she saw around a dozen families attempt to flee during the clashes, only to return because they could not find a way out and feared being caught in crossfire. A younger relative, who grew up in the camp, translated for her.
During The National’s visit to north-east Syria last year, the SDF told the newspaper the family camps still posed a security threat, adding it had launched several security operations there, and arrested dozens of ISIS members and uncovered tunnels and trenches used by sleeper cells.
No going back
Facing the fence, residents danced on top of a building, performing the traditional dabkeh, blasting celebratory Arabic music and waving the Syrian flag.
For the former camp manager, there is no going back. “The camp cannot return to how it was before, because people have seen that there is change, that someone new is in charge, and they want to leave. They won’t be able to manage them,” she said.
Mr Saleh said he was convinced he would be released soon. “There is no other option,” he said.
Ms Hanan agreed. “Most of them are women and children. We can work with them and we can get them out. In the end, those people were victims, to some extent, of certain policies,” she said.
She said registration should be opened for residents who want to return to their hometowns, with international organisations helping them reintegrate into society. But she did not know whether she would still be working at the camp, and said no information had been shared about the new administration.
The path forward for foreign nationals, whose governments have so far refused to repatriate them, remains unclear.
Outside the camp, members of tribes from Deir Ezzor, some casually carrying weapons slung over their shoulders, said they had come to check on relatives after years of separation, whom they say have been wrongfully detained. They said they would abide by any rules the government decides. “But why wouldn’t they release them?” one of them asked.
The US Central Command said it had launched a new mission to transfer ISIS prisoners to Iraq, in a separate process from the camps, suggesting the situation was not stable enough yet for Damascus to secure the ISIS detention sites.
