‘What they were doing with ISIS, they’re still doing. Killing, stealing, burning tents, and especially in the foreign families’ section, which is the most dangerous and where no one can enter on foot,” Sarah Derik tells me as we sit in her office at the Al-Hawl refugees camp in northern Syria.
It is a cold and rainy March day. Outside, the rain is battering the canvas of the expanse of tents that house the camp’s inmates. Every so often, a woman in full black Islamic niqab dress can be seen making her way quickly from one tent to another.
Derik is the director of security at the camp. Originally established to house Iraqi refugees from the first Gulf War, Al-Hawl is the main holding ground for the families of ISIS fighters captured in the course of the US-led coalition’s war to destroy the ISIS Caliphate in the period 2014-19.
Located close to Syria’s border with Iraq, and today largely forgotten by the world, the camp offers harsh testimony to the continued vigor and strength of Sunni Islamism in general and the Islamic State idea in particular. It also showcases the inadequate and cynical nature of the response of many Western governments to this reality.
Describing Al-Hawl as a “camp” misses its dimensions. It is a tent city. Forty-three thousand people are held there, all living under canvas and behind barbed wire. Forty thousand of these are women and children, along with 3,000 men. The inmates are divided into six sections, according to nationality. The proportions reflect the IS membership. In Western coverage, the focus on foreign fighters sometimes led to the false impression that Islamic State was an external imposition in the Levant. This was never the case. The bulk of IS fighters were from Iraq and Syria. The movement belonged, and belongs, to the local reality in which political Islam remains without serious competition for the loyalty of the mass of Sunni Arabs.
In Al-Hawl’s six sections, the Iraqi contingent is the largest and resides in areas 1-3. Areas 4 and 5 are where the Syrians are held. In section 6, regarded by the camp authorities as the most dangerous and inaccessible area of the camp, 6,480 family members of foreign ISIS fighters are residents.
“The ISIS system and way of ruling is implemented in the camp,” says Jihan Hanan, a senior civilian administrator at Al-Hawl.
“They are openly carrying weapons in the camp. In the last week, they attacked a tent of the International Red Cross. They cover their faces and just go out and attack... They say that Al-Hawl is one of their bases and an important part of their infrastructure.”
Numerous camp inmates killed by ISIS in recent years
One hundred and seventy inmates of the camp have been killed by ISIS in the period since 2019. The organization rules the camp population with the brutality for which it is renowned.
“The security at the camp is quite fragile,” says Derik. “We control the surroundings, but we don’t have any control in the camp, and we aren’t getting any assistance to improve this.”
The Hisba, the ISIS female police force, is organized in the camp and is probably responsible for many of the killings of inmates.
The organization maintains an “Islamic court” at Al-Hawl which issues judgments and punishments. Sleeper cells engaged in smuggling and coordinating escape attempts are active. Communication with the outside is seamless.
“The great majority of them have cellphones,” Derik tells me. “Two factors help with the escapes. The sleeper cells make use of any unrest or chaos to organize breakouts. Also the Turkish airstrikes – whenever there are airstrikes, we see an increase in escapes and smuggling attempts. Ras al-Ain is only a few hours away and is occupied by the Turks and the SNA (Islamist fighters organized by Turkey). They can reach it on foot, and they also receive help from that area.”
Amid the reality of ISIS control in Al-Hawl, no efforts at deradicalization are taking place – and the majority of children over the age of 12 do not attend the schools organized by UNICEF in the camp. Rather, they receive instruction from the ISIS structures.
Efforts at repatriation have picked up over the last 18 months, with the result that the camp population fell below 50,000 in mid 2023, for the first time since 2018. But progress remains slow and sporadic. The Autonomous Administration of North East Syria (AANES), the Kurdish-led governing structure that rules Syria east of the Euphrates, has no official contact with the Syrian regime, and so cannot repatriate Syrian citizens. Some Syrians have been reintegrated into communities east of the Euphrates. Iraq also has set a goal of repatriating 150 families per month.
Western governments, including the US, have made similar declarations of intent.
It is hard not to detect a certain cynicism behind the very slow progress in this area. The Autonomous Administration is not a state and, indeed, its authority is not officially recognized by any country. It cannot, therefore, make the kind of representations to foreign governments that could oblige them to quickly resume responsibility for their own citizens. So the security forces of the AANES, lacking resources and capacity, are landed with the job of looking after tens of thousands of radicalized people in their own largely ignored corner of Syria, and the problem is conveniently moved out of sight.PERHAPS THE most disturbing aspect of the situation at Al-Hawl is the presence of non-Muslim Iraqis and Syrians among the camp population, still held in conditions of enslavement by ISIS.
Islamic State, famously, attempted genocide against the Yazidi people of northern Syria and Iraq in 2014. In the framework of this, many thousands of Yazidi women were taken and held as slaves by the organization and the quasi-state it established at that time. Today, according to information issued by Yazidi House, an umbrella organization of Yazidi organizations in northern Syria, 2,800 Yazidi people remain missing and unaccounted for from that period.
An unknown number of these people are being held at Al-Hawl and similar camps. The families of ISIS fighters, supposedly themselves incarcerated, but in practice self-governing, are currently holding slaves captured during the period of the ISIS Caliphate. These Yazidi slaves are forced to give false information regarding themselves when registering with the camp authorities.
“One Yazidi woman we eventually located had identified herself as a Moroccan Islamic State volunteer – because she was forced to,” Hanan says. “Since then, 16 Yazidis have been reunited with their families. And they told us that captives remain, but we don’t have access to them.”
“In Al-Hawl, ISIS made a film, saying to the Yazidis that ‘If you go back to your home, your families will slaughter you because you became Muslims,” Younes, an official of the Yazidi House, tells me. “Al-Hawl is considered an ‘emirate’ of ISIS, and they have a strong hold there. One of the women we liberated had been forbidden even to leave the tent when she was there.”
Little is written today about Sunni Islamist and jihadi organizations in the Middle East. The contest between Shia Iran with its proxies and Israel and other Western-aligned states is the central strategic process in the region.
But it would be a mistake to ignore the fact that political Islam remains without a serious competitor for support among the Sunni Arab populations across the Levant and Iraq. Their organizations may for now appear beaten and fragmented, but this can rapidly change. The Hamas attacks of October 7, after all, were first and foremost a manifestation of Sunni Islamism, regardless of that movement’s other alignments. Many of the practices witnessed in that day’s events were debuted by ISIS on the Ninawa Plains in the summer of 2014. It’s best not to be surprised.
The Islamic State’s time bomb, ticking quietly away amid the wind and rain of northern Syria, deserves closer attention.