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In 2018, al-Hol held 10,000 residents, mostly Iraqi refugees.īut then came the battle for Baghouz, IS’s last stronghold in Syria or Iraq.Īs Baghouz fell, the camp filled at an astonishing rate. “Don’t judge the whole camp by those people.” “Everyone here has their own way to raise their family,” she says. The camp is locked and the only way out is to be released, transferred or escape. Disobedience is punished with violence.īut Um Mustafa wants us to know not everyone chooses to live this way. In some ways, they live now as they did when the group controlled large parts of Iraq and Syria, under their harsh interpretation of Islamic law. (Ali Zeyno/VOA)Īl-Hol is now packed with more than 60,000 women and children - many wives and offspring of defeated IS militants. The guards are members of the Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF, a Kurdish-led military that is in large part responsible for the defeat of the so-called caliphate in Syria.Īl-Hol camp in Syria is mostly populated with women and children, detained after fleeing the last battles against Islamic State militants on Oct. Sharing information with the administration, meaning the guards, is considered one of the gravest sins against IS in al-Hol camp. “They killed people who work with the administration, so the administration arrested them.” “But it’s their right,” Mustafa explains, defending the military’s right to arrest members of the Hisba. Those believed to be responsible for the killings are women from the Hisba, the self-appointed Islamic State-styled religious police inside the camp. It is not the roughly 80 killings so far this year in al-Hol that she finds shocking, but the people who have been arrested. But Umm Mustafa, from Iraq, speaks quickly and quietly, standing away from the crowds in the market.
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Most of the women we meet in al-Hol camp, a detention center in northeastern Syria, won’t talk about the murders.