IRBIL, Iraq: Women and children held in al-Hol, a sprawling camp of about 57,000 people in northeastern Syria, face miserable conditions and almost daily violence, met by many of its hardline prisoners, who are still Daesh extremists. clinging to ideology. ,
According to Save the Children, violence is endemic inside the camp, where there have been at least 130 murders since March 2019. In 2021 alone, an average of two people per week were killed, often with impunity and children in sight.
The overwhelming majority of these attacks took place in the main camp of al-Hol, which is home to Syrian and Iraqi civilians. The Al-Hol Annex, which has also seen its share of insecurities, houses women and children from at least 60 other countries.
“We provide services, but, at the end of the day, it is still a camp and, therefore, inadequate as a housing project,” said Dr Alan Dahir, an official with the Kurdish Red Crescent, which manages the site. , told Arab News.
“Most children are orphans. While I don’t think they have been forgotten, their respective countries, including foreign women, have yet to come forward and claim them.
Imene Trabelsi, a spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross that provides basic aid in Al-Hol, said living conditions were well below international standards in terms of access to food, water, health care and education.
“There are children who have spent their entire short lives tragically in camps like Al-Hol, who are born and dying there without leaving the periphery,” Trabelsi told Arab News.
“Thousands of other children are spending their formative years – very important to their development – in such circumstances, in the full knowledge and perspective of the international community and their own states of origin.”
In February last year, a fire broke out in a part of the camp, killing at least eight people and seriously injuring several, including more than a dozen children. Often due to the extreme climate and lack of facilities, respiratory tract infections and malnutrition are rampant.
“Children are endlessly exposed to threats and their rights are often overlooked. When children take their first and last breaths in camps or grow up stateless and in limbo, the world cannot continue to look away,” Trabelsi said.
Fastfact
In February 2021, a fire broke out in part of the al-Hol camp, killing at least eight people and seriously injuring several.
Western governments are reluctant to take back their citizens for fear of political blows.
“This is one of the biggest and most complex child protection emergencies of our time and it is high time to find the political will to act before more lives are lost.”
Al-Hol has been housing people displaced by the conflicts that rocked the region for years. But its population suddenly increased in March 2019 after Daesh’s defeat in the group’s final regional holdout of Baghouz in the eastern province of Deir ez-Zor.
Thousands of women and children, many of whom were families of captured or killed militants, were taken from Baghouz to al-Hol in neighboring Hasakah, most of which is guarded by the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces.
“I hadn’t eaten anything for what seemed like weeks at the time. We were literally left to eat grass,” said a young Yazidi Ayman, who was kidnapped as a child after being kidnapped by Daesh ranks in Baghouz. was forced to fight.
“We had nothing. I don’t know how I survived. I ended up in al-Hol and was later rescued thanks to the local efforts of those looking for Yazidi survivors.”
In the summer of 2014, when Daesh militants broke into the Yazidi ancestral homes of Sinjar in northwestern Iraq, thousands of women and children were abducted and forcibly converted to the group’s distorted interpretation of Islam.
By the time the group was defeated regionally in early 2019, many of these former captives were too frightened to identify themselves as Yazidis or to part with their former captives inside al-Hol. were inspired.
“I consider myself lucky,” Ayman told Arab News. “Some of my friends and women I know refused to be saved. They were brainwashed and traumatized and chose to stay in camp under the radar. I don’t know what happened to them now.”
Aid agencies have long called on governments to support the safe, voluntary and dignified return of Syrian and Iraqi families from al-Hol to their communities, and to repatriate the children of foreign fighters and their mothers to their home countries. has done.
“I have been pursuing this issue since 2018, and have managed to bring about 40 people back to their home countries. Most were children,” former US diplomat Peter Galbraith told Arab News.
Western governments have been reluctant to take back their citizens, fearing political blowback, expense, and indeed security risks should the authorities fail to successfully prosecute suspected Islamic extremists.
“Part of the problem is that the United Nations and other NGOs are saying that countries should take back their citizens, but the reality is that no one is really doing that,” Galbraith said. “It doesn’t help to keep yelling about something and not solving it.
“For some countries, like the UK, Canada and France, they find it less complicated and less expensive to get their citizens in northeastern Syria. Bringing them home and prosecuting them, sentencing them, then sending them to prison, putting them in a camp for a hundred dollars It would cost thousands of dollars instead of keeping it in.”
As a result, thousands of children who were injured in the camp through no fault of their own were effectively abandoned by Western governments, left vulnerable to violence, disease and bigotry.
“Children pay for their parents’ mistakes,” Galbraith said. “Every man and woman who decided to join Daesh had agency in some way or another. The children brought up or born here had no choice. Now he has been sentenced to life imprisonment.
“They are also at risk of child marriage and are being raised by hardline extremist women who run the camps. We rescued an American orphan who was raised by a Somali extremist woman when we found her.
“Children run the risk of ending up in the hands of cruel smugglers, human traffickers, who can do anything for a rupee. Some Yazidi women, after all their suffering with Daesh, were being trafficked into prostitution by these smugglers.
“Children should be removed and placed in villages or foster care.”
Rather than expedite repatriation plans, Western governments have sought to outsource the problem to SDF-controlled prisons, neighboring Iraq’s crude justice system, or the cash-strapped Kurdish-run officials and aid agencies operating al-Hol. .
The dangers posed by outsourcing the problem were widely displayed in January of this year when Daesh remnants launched a massive and highly sophisticated attack on a prison in Hasaka, where thousands of its former fighters were lodged under SDF guards. .
Some reports suggest that 374 terrorists were killed during the attack along with 77 prison staff, 40 SDF members and four civilians. There are no traces of about 400 prisoners, indicating that a significant number have escaped.
The incident was only the latest in a series of attacks and attempted escapes in camps and prisons across the region, suggesting that Daesh may be making a resurgence in an area where they were considered a spent force.
Meanwhile, children in Al-Hol are now increasingly adults, radicalized by their mothers and peers, and outraged by their abuse. Unless their plight is addressed promptly, and their psychological needs are properly met, support groups warn of excessive and permanent damage.
“Children cannot live in such dire circumstances,” Sonia Khush, Save the Children’s Syria response director, said in a recent statement.
“The level of violence they experience in Al-Hol is appalling on a daily basis. There is a need to effectively address insecurities at camp without adding more stress and fear to the lives of these children, and they urgently need more psychosocial support to deal with their experiences.
“But the only permanent solution to this situation is to support the children and their families to be able to leave the camp safely and voluntarily.
“It’s not a place for kids to grow up.”
