The Al-Hol Predicament

Failed ISIS Prison Escape Is A Reminder of Global Cowardice.

The Issue of ISIS Trials.

Fiery Crash: The Future of Conflict In The Middle East.

They Eat You Up And Spit You Out.

A three step plan to settle the Al-Hol camp issue once and for all:

An excerpt from, “The Open-Air Prison for ISIS Supporters—and Victims” By Anand Gopal, The New Yorker, March 11, 2024:

Al-Hol was created decades ago, in a stretch of scrubland about ten miles west of the Iraqi border, as a haven for refugees. But in 2019, when the U.S.-led coalition vanquished isis—the armed group that had briefly established a breakaway caliphate within Syria and Iraq, imposing an extremist interpretation of Islamic law—tens of thousands of people who’d been living under its rule were herded to the camp. Guard towers and armored vehicles and concertina-crowned walls appeared, and residents could no longer walk out the gate.

About fifty thousand people are currently imprisoned in Al-Hol, which is named for a dilapidated nearby town. The detainees hail from more than fifty countries: Chinese and Trinidadians and Russians and Swedes and Brits live alongside Syrians and Iraqis. Many of the adults had either joined isis or been married to someone who’d joined. But many others have no links to the Islamic State and fled to the camp to escape the punishing U.S.-led bombing campaign. Some were thrown into isis’s orbit by force: Yazidis enslaved by commanders, teen-age girls married off by their families. More than half the population are children, the majority of whom are younger than twelve. Dozens of babies are born each month. All the residents are under indefinite detention, as no plans have apparently been made to prosecute any of them—imagine if Guantánamo were the size of a city, and its inmates were mostly women and children. The United Nations has called Al-Hol a “blight on the conscience of humanity.”

The camp, which is in a region of Syria still protected by several hundred U.S. troops, is under the aegis of a beleaguered force of mostly Kurdish fighters—soldiers who had previously aligned with the Americans to defeat isis. They are largely backed by the United States, but the Pentagon declines to specify how much it spends annually on Al-Hol. The Kurdish fighters guard the camp’s perimeter in swat vehicles, and a primarily Kurdish civilian administration manages the camp bureaucracy, coördinating with aid organizations to distribute rations and deliver such basic services as sewage treatment and water. But the camp itself—block after block of dirt lanes and tents—is effectively under the control of its isis inmates. All-female squads of religious police pressure women to cover head to toe in the black niqab; violators have been dragged to makeshift Sharia courts, where judges order floggings and executions. Assassination cells gun down inmates accused of passing information to camp authorities.

. . .In 2006, the Syrian government settled a few hundred Palestinian refugee families on a dusty, scorpion-infested stretch of brushland near the Iraqi border, south of the town of Al-Hol, which means, among other things, “the horror.” The Palestinians had been living in Iraq but fled the violence unleashed by the U.S. occupation; they had already been expelled from their ancestral lands by Israel in 1948. The U.N. built cinder-block houses for the refugees. During the Syrian civil war, the camp filled with more displaced families.

In March, 2019, when the caliphate fell, thousands of its residents were corralled into Al-Hol, and the camp was abruptly converted into one of the world’s largest prisons. Today, Al-Hol’s fifty thousand residents are grouped into sectors divided by barbed wire; to walk from one to the next can take half an hour. Most sectors hold Syrians and Iraqis, but the so-called Annex is home to about six thousand Europeans, Asians, and Africans, some of whom have been denied repatriation by their home governments. Horticulture is evident here and there around the camp, with squash and bean plants peeking over tents. A few non-governmental organizations operate health clinics, but detainees complain that malnutrition and water-borne disease are pervasive. Crowds jostle around bathrooms whose pipes are often clogged. Many inmates receive money from relatives—hawala networks, informal cash-transfer systems, are sometimes allowed to relay funds to prisoners. Detainees can use their remittances to buy smuggled goods, including drugs. The chief diversion is the souk, which was built by inmates, and in which you’ll find small grocers next to carts selling makeup next to smoothie stands. A few lucky prisoners own shops, but most stalls are run by outsiders with permits to enter the camp. A mass of black-clad women drifts among the stalls, examining bras, haggling over cigarettes. You can guess who the true believers are: the women who cover not only their faces but also their eyes tend to be loyal to ISIS.

. . .There was a woman from central Syria named Fatima; her husband had joined the democracy protests and then, through the twists and turns of the war, had ended up in isis. Her family insisted that she divorce him, but they had a child, and, according to local custom, custody goes to the man, so she refused—and was disowned. Eventually, Fatima’s husband died in battle, and she was transferred against her will to a “guest house” for isis widows. There she rebuffed isis suitors, wanting only to be reunited with her family. During America’s bombing campaign, she was moved from village to village by isis, and she ended up living in a ditch as ordnance exploded around her. Now she and her child were in Al-Hol, surviving on camp rations, as she waited for a sign from her family. She hadn’t spoken to them in four years.

Not long after arriving in Al-Hol, isis true believers easily cowed the other inmates, who were shell-shocked, heartbroken, and in mourning. The Islamic State’s men and women—more women, because the men were mostly dead or in other prisons—sought to resurrect the caliphate within the camp itself. Supporters on the outside took up collections for their imprisoned “sisters.” Female detainees formed the religious police, Al-Hisba, which targeted prostitution and other alleged misdeeds, often dragging women away on real or imagined charges. isis judges meted out sentences, including execution; before long, four to five people were being killed a month, most by unknown assailants. ISIS agents burned down N.G.O.-run schools and clinics. They murdered aid workers and assassinated suspected collaborators, like Hamid al-Shummari. The aim was to sever links to the outside world, rendering the camp population dependent on isis members and making it easier to cajole inmates, especially children, into joining the group.

ISIS cells are active in every sector of Al-Hol, but the heart of this mini-caliphate is the Annex, where non-Iraqi foreign nationals tend to reside. Many of the women there, unlike those in the rest of the camp, chose to join the Islamic State; they are among the most extreme of the true believers. One afternoon I toured the Annex, which is set apart from the other sectors. Tents were clustered together and encircled by alleys, forming little neighborhoods. Graffiti covered the walls in an array of languages. There was hardly a woman about. As I walked down the main street, I noticed eyes watching me through openings in the tents. Here and there, I saw children: sitting in a sewage ditch, gathered around a well. I approached a pair of boys, one blond and the other with East Asian features. They couldn’t have been more than four or five years old. I asked them where they were from, and the blond boy replied, in stilted, formal Arabic, “We don’t speak to infidels.” As I was leaving, I felt a sharp pain in my shoulder blade and turned to see rocks flying toward me. More boys appeared, eager to take part in the stoning. I ran.

I ended up deeper in the Annex, near a school that had been built by an aid group. It was now abandoned, after warnings from isis cells. A woman appeared. Speaking with a Lebanese accent, she told me she’d moved her tent by the school because other women in the Annex had threatened to kill her for not wearing a niqab. And she was just as afraid of the children, some of whom had been in the camp long enough to grow into teen-agers and terrorize residents.

The Kurdish authorities, who lack the manpower to enforce security, manage the camp’s nine sectors through occasional raids. Sometimes these operations net isis commanders accused of plotting attacks beyond the camp’s fences; occasionally, they have liberated enslaved Yazidi women. But the authorities are so under-resourced that they tend to treat the entire population as hostile. 

. . .I met Tahir, a shy and polite four-year-old with large eyes. He was born in the camp; his father, who had belonged to isis, vanished in the bowels of the prison system. In Al-Hol, meanwhile, his mother was accused by isis members of collaborating with authorities. One evening, she was marched to a sewage ditch and shot. Tahir is now in the care of an ailing grandmother. I asked him if he knew what isis was, and he shook his head. I asked if he wanted to leave the camp, and he again shook his head.

For many children, the realm beyond the camp fence is mysterious, and possibly dangerous. I spoke to dozens of children, and they knew next to nothing about life outside Al-Hol. Many had not heard of Syria, Iraq, America, or even television. (When Abu Hassan, the ISIS commander, smuggled in a flat-screen television, his daughter exclaimed, “Look how big that phone is!”) 

. . .I met Aisha, a seven-year-old, who explained that she was from Aleppo, but when I asked her what Aleppo was she drew a blank. She didn’t know why she was in the camp, and her days consisted of getting in line early to use the bathroom and of avoiding security guards, whom she believed would shoot if she got close.

. . .If Jihan’s limbo felt permanent, it mirrored the world around her. Many of her neighbors, rafted together by war and dictatorship, and imprisoned for the sins of their husbands and fathers, have nowhere to return to. Their homes have been destroyed, or they have been disowned by family. Others elect to survive on camp rations rather than brave the ravages outside. The camp is in a region of eastern Syria controlled by Kurdish forces, who aren’t recognized by any government. The territory’s four million or so people are effectively stateless. Syria itself is merely lines on a map; as a nation, it no longer exists. The country is carved into three zones—one occupied by Russia and Iran, another by Turkey, the third by the United States—and each territory has its guns pointed at the others. It’s possible, and perhaps even comforting, for Western politicians to see all this as the best of bad options, as responsible statecraft. For long periods of time, the iniquities of the Middle East can appear frozen, and, therefore, manageable. A tyrannical government, bankrolled by foreign powers, stifles all political life; a theocracy seeks to commandeer body and soul; an occupying power dispossesses a native population, then subjects it to daily degradations. But at unpredictable moments these injustices erupt into the open—and into our consciousness—through great upheavals, or wanton acts of violence. We then ask where the rage comes from, even though it has been simmering under our noses all along.