34 1GM Thursday November 26 2020 | the times
Wo r l d
checked by The Times with charities,
lawyers, public records and camp offi-
cials show that only 35 British children
and 15 women are in the two camps, and
nine British males are imprisoned at
Hasakah.
Yet the UK advertises its policy of
revoking citizenship and refusing repa-
triation for these individuals as part of a
“zero tolerance” approach to terrorism,
a stance made emblematic by the resist-
ance to the return of Shamima Begum,
a 21-year-old Londoner, whose case isthe subject of a hearing at the Supreme
Court this week.
Evidence on the ground in Syria,
however, proves that the British and
European policy undermines national
security rather than enhancing it, be-
coming vital to Isis’s rebirth by provid-
ing a narrative of injustice central to the
foundation of Islamist terrorist groups
ever since Guantanamo Bay was estab-
lished as a US detention camp in 2002.
“We don’t have the resources to con-
trol what is happening in al-Hawl any
more,” said Abdelkarim Omar, head of
foreign relations in the Kurdish-led
administration that guards the camps
at al-Hawl and Roj. “These children
were victims who did nothing wrong,
yet now they are exposed to hopeless-
ness and taught only about revenge and
injustice and hatred. Having them
detained here in these conditions
doesn’t mean they won’t come back to
be a threat to Europe in the future. Theywill return one day, more angry and
radicalised than they are now.”
The UK government has repatriated
a handful of British orphans from the
camps but has repeatedly said it is too
dangerous to send personnel to repatri-
ate other British citizens from Syria.
The claim baffles US officials. As a
leading coalition partner with the SDF,
British forces and intelligence officials
are in regular contact with staff run-
ning the camps and last month a team
of six members of the British special
forces were clearly visible at Roj camp
during a meeting with Kurdish admin-
istrators. Swedish, French and German
intelligence officers also regularly visit
the camps to question detainees.
US justice officials, who have repatri-
ated all 27 US citizens, including 15
children, from the prisons and camps
held by the SDF, fly their own citizens
on planes directly out of Syria. Ten of
the adults, including one woman, haveAnthony Loyd has won a fifth
Foreign Press Association Media
Award, the 2020 Print and Web Story
of the Year, for “Isis time bomb jail
packed with 5,000 fighters”.Loyd triumphs again
in FPA Media AwardsAbout 1,000 Europeans are among the 65,000 women and children
from Isis-aligned families held in al-Hawl and Roj internment camps
in northern Syria. Caged Pearls, an Instagram account believed to be
run by British women that raises funds for Isis, uses the squalid
conditions in the camps as a propaganda opportunityThe children who sicken and die are
buried in hasty graves beyond the peri-
meter wire. Felled by chest infections,
severe malnutrition and chronic diar-
rhoea, some have their place beneath
the desert grit recorded by unmarked
chunks of broken breeze block: Europe-
ans, Asians, Africans and Arab infants
lying anonymously together on the
windswept Hasakah plain. Others are
put in the ground without even a rock
for a headstone: hundreds, swallowed
from memory far from their homeland.
Inside the wire at al-Hawl camp the
survivors group together in gangs, run-
ning wild through the ragged tents and
piled rubbish; thin, Dickensian figures
with unkempt hair, gaunt frames and
luminous eyes, their skin parchment-
dry due to malnourishment caused by a
lack of fresh vegetables and fruit.
An atmosphere of impending vio-
lence pervades and in the absence of
education, gangs of children fight or
throw stones at the armed guards for
play. The elder boys, inculcated with
malice by their exposure to Islamic
State schools during the era of the cali-
phate, sometimes attack the younger
ones: on occasion in violent sexual
assault. If caught, the perpetrators are
beaten with iron bars.
Schooling is rare, psychological trau-
ma common, deradicalisation non-
existent. A sense of abandonment pre-
vails, and those old enough for memo-
ries of home wish that they had never
been taken to Syria. “I never asked to be
here and I don’t want to be here,” a
French boy aged 13, who cannot be
named for security reasons, told me last
month. “I want to go home to Paris to
see my granny and play football. But
our countries won’t allow us back.”
Deserted by their homelands to a life
of incarceration in northeastern Syria
despite having committed no crime, the
fate of these children and their mothers
is now the basis for a barrage of criti-
cism of British and European policies
towards their citizens who travelled to
live in the caliphate.
Senior commanders in the coalition
against Isis, American justice officials,
the Kurdish authorities running the
camps, human rights groups and chari-
ties have all urged Britain and Europe
to repatriate their women and children,
warning that the camps prove more of
a source of empowerment to Isis than a
containment of threat.
America’s most senior generals are
among the strongest critics. “Unless the
international community finds a way to
repatriate, reintegrate into home com-
munities and support locally grown
reconciliation programming of these
people... we are buying ourselves a
strategic problem ten years down the
road when these children grow up radi-
calised,” General Frank McKenzie,
commander of US Central Command
overseeing American military opera-
tions in the Middle East, said last week.
“If we don’t address this now, we’re
never really going to defeat Isis.”
As many as 13,500 foreign women
and children from Isis-aligned families,
including 1,000 Europeans, have been
held by the coalition’s Syrian Demo-
cratic Forces (SDF) allies along with
Iraqi and Syrian citizens in two
internment camps in northern Syria,
al-Hawl and Roj, since Isis’s defeat at
Baghuz last March. More than 8,000
are children.
In al-Hawl, where some 65,000
women and children are held, includ-
ing Syrian and Iraqis, 371 child deaths
were recorded last year. A further 80
children died there in the first eight
months of this year.
Noting the propaganda opportunity
afforded by the deplorable conditions
and the children’s hopeless plight, Isis
has made the two camps the centre-
piece of a revamped recruitment and
funding campaign, hoping to rebuild its
base on the generation abandoned by
their countries of origin.
“Al-Hawl — the cradle of the new
caliphate” advertises one group be-
lieved to be run by British women,
called Caged Pearls, which raises funds
for the caliphate on an Instagram
account above a photograph of the
camp. Other posts from Caged Pearls,
collated from Isis social media accounts
by analysts at the US-based Inter-
national Center for the Study of Violent
Extremism, refer to the children in
al-Hawl as “our mini mujahidin”. One
shows a drawing of a pistol with the
caption “Can’t wait for the day we can
carry arms again”.
Molly Ellenberg, a research fellow at
the centre, said: “Isis portrays the
camps in Syria as held by oppressors
who are keeping women and children
captive. The posts get a lot of traction as
they call people to support a cause that
seems more noble than Isis itself.”
The conditions have been described
by the UN as “inhumane”, and the re-
lease today of a report by the influential
advocacy organisation Rights & Secur-
ity International calls for the immedi-
ate repatriation of foreign women and
children held there. The report accuses
Britain and other European countries
of creating “Europe’s Guantanamo” in
the two camps, where British women
and children accused of backing Isis are
being held without charge or trial.
The report notes that there are more
European children detained in al-Hawl
and Roj than the entire adult male pop-
ulation of Guantanamo Bay at its peak,
and that most of these are children
under five, who have no legal rights and
are enduring appalling conditions.
In the absence of any deradicalisa-
tion process and learning little of the
world beyond dirt, disease, deprivation
and violence, the future for the children
kettled with their mothers in the camps
points only one way: as today’s fodder
for tomorrow’s extremists.
The number of British citizens held in
the camps is small. Figures cross-Camps teach orphans of Isis
Women and children trapped in a ‘Syrian
Guantanamo’ are at risk of recruitment
by the jihadists, reports Anthony Loyd
an
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