The security situation in the Hol (al-Hawl) refugee and internment camp southeast of the northern Syrian city of Hesekê is highly problematic. ISIS women have formed militias to terrorize the camp's residents. Due to a lack of external support, the autonomous administration is hardly able to stop the attacks. Yet another attack in the camp claimed the life of an Iraqi refuge.

According to the Hawar News Agency (ANHA), the security forces in the camp have found the body of an Iraqi refugee last night, who had been hanged by an electricity cable.

ANHA states that the refugee comes from the Iraqi city of al-Qaim, and she is the mother of a 7-month-old girl.

While available information indicates that the slain woman’s brother had also been killed by ISIS women in the camp in the past, investigations continue to determine the circumstances of the crime.

Murder and stabbing crimes have remarkably increased in the Hol Camp recently. Women are behind most of these crimes in an effort to preserve extremist ideology among their families, and spread it among Iraqi refugees.

In a recent report documenting continuing violations and abuses by nearly every conflict actor controlling territory in Syria, the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic accused the SDF of the long detention or internment of ISIS jihadists and their relatives in prisons and camps under their control, including the Hol Camp.

SDF Commander General Mazlum Abdi criticized the report, saying that the "complex and international dimension" of the situation in the Hol Camp was "unjustifiably" ignored. The camp is home to some 65,000 people from dozens of different countries, including thousands of ISIS members and their families who were apprehended by the SDF after the capture of the terrorist organization's last bastion in eastern Syria last March. "Most states refuse to take back their nationals held in the camp. International organizations have reduced their role to humanitarian aid," said Mazlum Abdi.

Hol Camp

The Hol Camp in the canton of Hesekê consists of eight areas. In the areas one, two and three there are people from Mosul who fled from the ISIS in 2014. Area four houses Syrian internally displaced persons. In areas five, six and seven, ISIS jihadists and their relatives are detained, and the families of foreign jihadists are held in the area called "Muhajarad" (Emigrants).

The ISIS is still tightly organized among the women from former caliphate. Children are indoctrinated, renegades are murdered. Since the Turkish invasion in October 2019 there have been more and more escape attempts. Ali Hesen, the person responsible for the camp's security forces, told ANHA that about 700 escape attempts have been prevented since 2019.

When the territorial rule of the ISIS in Northeast Syria was crushed in the spring of 2019, families from the former "Caliphate" were accommodated in Hol Camp. Currently, about 40,000 ISIS women and children from 53 countries live in the camp under precarious conditions and without any prospects for the future. With few exceptions, the countries of origin refuse to take back their nationals. Only orphans could be repatriated in isolated cases.

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