Foreign women detained for alleged links to ISIS fighters in north-east Syria are becoming more rebellious, as a handover of the camp to the government nears, a camp administrator who works with the SDF has told The National.
Slogans associated with Islamist militants were found written on a classroom blackboard at Al Roj camp, according to Hukmiya, who works with the women and children held there. They included “ISIS is coming” and chants referring to 'non-believers', she said, giving only her first name.
Al Roj camp houses 2,600 mostly foreign women and their children and is administered by the Syrian Democratic Forces, a Kurdish-led armed group who fought ISIS in the US-led coalition.
Although it is intended as a refugee camp, residents are not allowed to leave because of their suspected links to ISIS, in what rights groups have compared to arbitrary detention.
A Syrian official said on Friday that the government aims to permanently close Al Roj and a larger camp, Al Hol. The two centres collectively hold more than 20,000 men, women and children who fled ISIS-controlled territory almost a decade ago, according to Reuters.
“Now the women tell us: ‘you will be the ones in camps, and we will be outside’,” Hukmiya said.
Most of the women at Al Roj are Russian, but there are 16 women and children with ties to the UK, including Shamima Begum, who travelled to Syria as a teenager to marry an ISIS fighter.
At least two children of British-born women are known to have died in the camps, due to its poor sanitary conditions and lack of access to health care.
But the dire situation could soon change, as a fragile agreement between the SDF and the new Syrian government will see the camp handed over to state authorities.
The ceasefire agreed on Friday would see the gradual integration of the SDF's forces into the army and its institutions into the state. Prisons under SDF control would also be transferred to Damascus.
The SDF had previously agreed to hand over its control of parts of north-east Syria in exchange for minority rights and limited autonomy in Kurdish majority cities. But clashes in the past month between the SDF and the Syrian government have left the future of the camps uncertain.
The SDF withdrew from Al Hol, and Al Shaddadi prison last week after Syrian army advances, allowing an unknown number of detainees and prisoners to flee.
Kurds in north-east Syria worry they will be displaced or expelled from their land, and that the new Syrian government, whose President Ahmad Al Shara led the rebel group Hayat Tahrir Al Sham, will impose a strict interpretation of Sharia.
The lawyers and families of the foreign detainees are hopeful that a handover to the transitional Syrian government would help secure their return to their home countries, where they would face trial for their alleged war crimes and links to a terror organisation.
Ms Begum has brought a new legal challenge to the European Court of Human Rights against the UK government's decision to strip her of citizenship, arguing that she was trafficked to Syria.
Hukayma disagrees, and fears the world is turning its back on the Kurds and the SDF, who were US allies in the battle against ISIS. “Right now the camp is still under control and it’s stable,” she said, suggesting ISIS would become stronger once more as a result of the deal.
“The world came together in the war on terror years ago. Now, the world is closing its eyes and ears,” she said.
She has been a camp manager at Al Roj for five years. She said the camp was small, and in an area with many sects and ethnic groups, which contributed to its stability.
She defended a decision to separate teenage boys from their mothers, by sending them to “rehabilitation centres” within the camps, which the SDF argues is to prevent their radicalisation. She said only the children who were “causing trouble” were sent there.
The camp administrators had no other choice, as children were deliberately missing school and educational programmes, and being taught radical ideas by their mothers at home, she said.
There were five organisations operating in the camp to provide learning activities for the children, but she believed they had “no influence” on the children.
“In the end, the organisations stay until 3pm. Then the children go back to their original school, which is the mother,” she said. “Anything they have learnt is forgotten.”
Three quarters of the children are not going to these programmes or to school, she said. The camp tried to prevent mothers from teaching their children at home by banning notebooks and pens from the camp market, she said.
But the mothers had worked around the ban by registering their children for school, where they are given books and pens, but never sending them to lessons. “The only solution has been to separate the child from the mother,” she said.
There had been unusual outbursts of violence in the camp recently.
Two children were killed in the past few months – the first time this had happened in the camp to her knowledge. A 14-year-old boy died of head injuries inflicted by his twin brother, she added. A ten-year-old Moroccan girl had been found strangled. “She was beautiful, like a rose. To this day I can’t forget her face,” she said.
