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), women of ISIS mercenaries in the Hol camp, 45 km east of the Heseke city, continue to undermine the camp’s security through crimes such as stabbing, killing, burning and fleeing, in an effort to preserve the ideology of ISIS.

In yet another incident, ANHA reported that the women of ISIS mercenaries in the camp attempted to kill an Iraqi refugee, called Hatim Abdul Karim, who came from Baaj district.

The accident occurred Sunday evening, in the camp's market, where the Iraqi refugee working as a barber in the market, was injured in his right thigh, and was subsequently transferred to the camp's field hospital.

Murder and stabbing crimes increased inside the camp, and the security authorities confirmed through previous statements that this is due to the mindset of ISIS which mercenaries’ women still hold.

Security authorities indicated that women are behind most of these crimes committed in the camp in an effort to preserve ISIS 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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