KURDISH FORCES TO RELEASE SYRIANS FROM DETENTION CAMP

Authorities in northeastern Syria said Monday that they were preparing to release thousands of Syrian families from a detention camp holding civilians displaced during the final battle to defeat the Islamic State's self-proclaimed caliphate, Louisa Loveluck wrote for the Washington Post. 

Conditions inside al-Hol displacement camp, a sprawl of tents perched in the desert west of Hasakah city, have alarmed humanitarian groups and in some cases aided the radicalization of women and children who spent years under Islamic State rule. Health-care services for the roughly 65,000 camp residents are almost nonexistent, and children who began their education inside the group’s caliphate often have little to no access to schooling. Sewage leaks into tents and wild dogs prowl the perimeter for food. 

“A decision will be issued to empty the Syrians from the camp completely,” said Ilham Ahmed, president of the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Council’s Executive Committee, which is responsible for governing the area. She made the announcement in a video shared on the body’s Twitter page. “Those who remain in the camp will not be the responsibility of the Self-Administration,” Ahmed said, referring to an autonomous region in northeastern Syria. It was not clear what this would mean in practice. The announcement did not refer to the network of prisons holding some 10,000 male detainees, several thousand of them foreigners.

Al-Hol’s population swelled drastically at the beginning of 2019 as a joint Kurdish and Arab force, known as the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), fought a final battle to reclaim territory from Islamic State militants, backed by coalition air power. Thousands of women and children were trucked to the camp nightly, often in pitiful condition and sometimes shell-shocked. As the chaos subsided and camp authorities surveyed the challenge ahead of them, they separated non-Iraqi foreigners — among them, the camp’s most radical elements — from the rest, and locked them in an annex with chain-link fencing. There was also no immediate clarity about whether Monday’s announcement marked a new approach to Syrian residents on the part of the administration, or simply an acceleration of ongoing efforts to release Syrian inhabitants under a program in which families vouch for them from outside the facility.