They are from France, the United Kingdom, Morocco, Iraq, Turkey, Russia, Indonesia, Finland, etc. They are detained in the Al-Roj detention center, in northeastern Syria. This is a CNN report
We emerged from the bitter cold, through a plastic flap that passed through a door into the darkness.
It was warmer inside the tent, but it was difficult to see anything with just a little outside light coming through the cracks.
“Come in! Come in,” says a female voice in English.
Two children, a girl and a boy, walked back and forth. They were speaking in a mixture of English and standard Arabic that was very correct — the latter immediately seemed strange to me, as no one speaks like that in an informal setting.
We were in Al-Roj camp, a detention center in northeastern Syria where more than 2,000 women and children (although some are no longer children) have been held — some for more than a decade — by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces. They are, for the most part, foreign wives (and, in many cases, widows) and children of men linked to Daesh.
In the darkness, I hear another female voice, with a British accent.
“Journalists? Please, no photographs!”
She asked us not to identify her for fear of complicating her family’s legal efforts to repatriate her to the UK. He tells us that his British citizenship had been revoked.
“I’m afraid because I’m a different person. I’m not a Daeshi. I’m nobody. I’m afraid for my son.”
His 9-year-old son was regularly beaten by other boys in the camp because his mother was no longer loyal to Daesh, he claims.
“I was born in England. I was raised in England”, she says. “I have no one anywhere else. My mother, my father, my brothers — they are all in England. We are completely and completely stateless.”
If you’re thinking about it, this isn’t Shamima Begum, the girl from east London who ran away at 15 to join Daesh in 2015. The UK also stripped her of her nationality.
We even went to what our Kurdish escort, armed with an AK-47, said was Begum’s tent, but it was closed. I called her and told her I would like to speak to her.
“Go away,” replied a female voice with a London accent. “I don’t want to talk to you.”
This was not my first encounter with Daesh women. At the beginning of 2019, I spent two months in Syria covering the final battle against the terrorist group. We spoke to dozens of Daesh women — from France, the United Kingdom, Morocco, Iraq, Turkey, Russia, Indonesia, Finland, etc. Some said they reluctantly followed their husbands to Syria and Iraq. Others insisted, at the time, that they continued to believe in Daesh’s creed.
But here in Roj, the only women willing to talk to us insisted that they had long ago abandoned any illusions. They just wanted to go home.
“I want to go back to my country,” Alma Ismailovic, from Serbia, told me in broken English. “I want to live a normal life with my children.”
Alma was in the camp’s “market,” a dirt square with a handful of shops selling food and other basic goods.
She was wearing a hijab, a headscarf, instead of the face-covering niqab typical of people with harsher opinions.
I asked a group of young men in the market whether they still believed in Daesh’s motto that “Islamic State Daesh is here to stay and spread”. They laughed contemptuously, as if I had tried to make them an old, tired joke.
“There is no Islamic state,” Hanifa Abdallah from Russia tells me in rudimentary, heavily accented Arabic. “It’s over. Only us, the women, are left.”
She also tells us that two of her children had been repatriated, but three were still with her in the detention center. She also states that she is desperate to return home, but explains that Russia would not accept her back. Camp officials said the largest nationality group in Roj is Russian.
Few of the countries that have citizens — prisoners and detainees — in Syria have shown themselves willing to repatriate them.
Our escort took us around the camp, but insisted that we not walk between the tents because the women and children would throw stones at us. Due to the cold, few people were on the street and many of those who were turned around when we passed. Nobody threw stones. No one made threatening gestures, as I saw in reports from the other camps in Syria.
Our visit to Roj takes place at a critical moment in the country. Since early January, Syrian government forces, together with Arab tribal fighters, have driven the Kurdish-led SDF out of vast areas of northern Syria. For more than a decade, the US-led anti-Daesh coalition has aligned itself with the SDF and fought Daesh. But with the overthrow of the Bashar al-Assad regime, the new Syrian government led by the current president, Ahmed al-Sharaa (formerly leader of an al-Qaeda affiliate), is now trying to extend its mandate to the oil-rich autonomous zones of northern Syria controlled by the SDF.
In a recent post on
He urged the SDF, led by the Kurds, to integrate into the Syrian state.
The SDF leadership, under US pressure, reluctantly concluded agreements with the Damascus government that would do just that. But the devil is in the implementation and that could prove deadly.
To the Kurds, the sudden U.S. shift feels like a betrayal — yet another betrayal of the Kurds by those who have supported them for decades.
In the camp administrator’s office, we met the head of security, a 40-year-old woman with a stern, sullen look who identified herself as “Comrade Chavre.”
“We fought Daesh on behalf of the rest of the world and now the rest of the world is turning its back on us,” he says. “I hope all these women and prisoners return to their countries and start attacking them.”
All the time we spent in northeastern Syria, we heard echoes of this anger.
Due to the Syrian president’s previous affiliation with Al-Qaeda, many Kurds are convinced that, behind his suit and tie, he continues to defend the group’s ideology.
Syrian government forces now control Al-Hol, the other largest detention camp in the area. The camp administrator, Hakimat Ibrahim, tells us that the Daesh women who committed to staying in the camp celebrated, with the feeling that they would soon be released.
On January 19, SDF troops guarding Al-Shaddadi prison, around 160 kilometers southwest of Al-Roj – where several thousand Daesh prisoners were being held – withdrew under fire from the Syrian army. The FDS claimed that 1,500 prisoners had escaped. The Syrian government denied the fact, stating that only 120 had escaped and that more than 80 had been quickly recaptured. US forces are currently transferring approximately 7,000 Daesh prisoners to safer facilities in Iraq.
“Now they have hope that Daesh is returning,” says Ibrahim of the women in the Roj camp.
And if that happens, Hakimat reveals that he was told, “We won’t leave any of you alive.”
