The dead turned up everywhere. Two decapitated corpses in a cesspit. The remains of a woman with a pierced skull. A child with a bullet hole in his temple. Men clustering around a ditch suggested the worst, as did women running at full speed through the dirt. With each grim discovery, Jihan Omar renewed a promise to herself: she had to find a way out.
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Jihan lived in Al-Hol, a detention camp in eastern Syria which could more properly be called a concentration camp. 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.