Islamic State’s senior enforcer in Roj detention camp was nine years old when the remnant of the terror group’s caliphate was overrun at Baghouz. Now he is 14. A photograph of him held in the director’s office shows a glowering, heavily-built youth dressed in black. His deputy, similarly dressed but paler skinned, is the same age.
Together, the two teenagers run gangs of boys to do their bidding, threaten adult women in the camp with death for perceived transgressions, make improvised weapons, and preach extremist doctrine to children in weekly khutbah sermons.
“He is like the Islamic State ‘emir’ in this camp,” said the director of the Roj detention facility, Rashid Omar, 39, describing the enforcer as he looked at the pictures of the boys. “Everyone is afraid of him and his deputy here. Women get beaten for disobeying his orders, and then are threatened with death to stop them reporting these assaults. Whenever we try looking for him, the other kids start rising against us. There are a lot of teenagers with him in this camp.”
Five years after the last of Islamic State were defeated in Baghouz by Kurdish-led fighters from the Syrian Democratic Forces, the legacy threat posed by bottling thousands of women and children who escaped from the self-styled caliphate in two detention camps has seeded and multiplied, officials running the facilities have told The Times.
Young children who never had any choice in their parents’ decision to take them to Syria to live in the caliphate have grown into angry youths behind the wire, or been exposed to radical Isis doctrine with no hope of a better future. The intransigence of countries, including Britain, to repatriate their citizens from Syria has entrenched the problems, and regular attacks by Turkish drones and jets have multiplied them.
Now, even Roj camp — home for 2,600 detainees, 1,673 of whom are under 18 — which was once regarded as a showcase detention facility with exemplary security when compared with the feral savagery of al-Hawl camp, is sliding backwards.
Knives and improvised welding equipment have been found for the first time in searches there; 95 per cent of women in the camp, from 55 countries, have either chosen to wear the niqab again, or been forced to; water and electricity supplies have been cut; and a simmering atmosphere of defiance towards guards has grown in parallel with nearby Turkish drone strikes on SDF personnel.
“It feels like we are under a kind of siege here,” the director of the camp said. “The Turkish strikes have hit our infrastructure. There is now a shortage of water and fuel and electricity in the camp as a result. As conditions have got worse the women in the camp have started to act as one hand. They hear the Turkish bombing against us and they feel empowered by it. They see me and my staff and they draw their fingers across their throats. They are more organised, more powerful.”
Accusing the Kurdish-led SDF of complicity in attacks conducted by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, the PKK, against Turkish institutions and military posts in Iraq, Turkey has conducted several waves of airstrikes in northeastern Syria since October last year.
The targets have included SDF officers and Asayish security personnel, as well as water towers, grain silos, oil and gas refineries and pipelines, and power stations.
The SDF, who remain the leading force fighting against Islamic State in Syria, have denied any involvement in recent PKK attacks. Meanwhile the Turkish strikes have had a severe impact on conditions and security in the camps.
Water supplies have dwindled. Roj is now dependent on two wells within the camp perimeter for the bulk of its water, but as the drone strikes have cut mains power the water has to be pumped using generators, and fuel prices have soared following the attacks on refineries.
During one wave of recent Turkish strikes over the winter, women in Roj responded to the sound of detonations by lighting fires along the perimeter fence. Two Tunisian families escaped in the confusion. They were not recaptured.
A regermination of Islamic State influence has accompanied the decay in security conditions. Groups of Isis loyalists, who recently arrived in Roj camp after being moved in from Al-Hawl, reinforce dress and behaviour codes. Among them are groups of youths.
“Not every teenager here is radicalised,” Omar continued. “But it’s getting harder to prevent the influence of those who are. In this camp you are considered a man at the age of 13. Every time we try to separate teenage males from radical mothers into rehabilitation centres, we get criticised by UN agencies for rights abuses. What are we supposed to do?”
Between 20 and 25 British families are believed to be detained in Roj, including up to 40 British children. Though Britain is funding detention camps and prisons in Syria, the UK has lagged behind the US and leading European nations in repatriating its women and children.
Since 2019, France, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands, whose citizens comprise more than half of the European nationals who travelled to Syria to join Isis, have repatriated 319 children and 113 women. Many were prosecuted for terror offences on their return, yet have continued to have monitored access to their children in jails.
In contrast the UK, aside from a small number of secret repatriations, has used a policy of citizenship removal to leave women and their children in Syrian detention camps. Since 2019, only two British women and a handful of children, believed to number around a dozen, have been repatriated from Syrian camps.
Roj camp’s best-known British inmate, Shamima Begum, who went to Syria aged 15 and last month lost her appeal against the revocation of her citizenship on security grounds, is considered a model detainee by the authorities there.
“She is one of the few to have refused to wear niqab,” Omar added. “Under the circumstances here, given our difficulties in protecting women, that’s a courageous decision.”
In the absence of repatriation, or any other long-term solution to the problems posed by the two main detention camps in northern Syria, a new generation is being born behind the wire. Though only two new pregnancies have been recorded in Roj camp, in Al-Hawl, home to 30,000 children under 18 and 12,000 Isis-affiliated women from 44 countries, the birth rate is rising fast as boys reach sexual maturity.
“In the Syrian and Iraqi sections of the camp we are getting a monthly average of between 40 and 60 new births,” the director of Al-Hawl, Havel Jinan Hannan, 38, told The Times.
In contrast to Roj, the security situation in Al-Hawl — where there have been more than 180 murders since 2019 — has improved dramatically in the past year after the US-led coalition and SDF forces conducted a series of raids and search operations through the camp, discovering assault rifles, PKC machineguns, explosives, rocket launchers, pistols and knives. No murders have been reported since two teenage Egyptian girls had their throats cut in December 2022, apparently for disobeying Islamic State dress codes.
However Islamic State — which regards the detainees in Al-Hawl, and the 10,000 men held in prisons in northeast Syria, as a strategic resource pool — has conducted several operations to smuggle Isis commanders into the camp.
In January this year coalition and SDF forces cornered a Syrian Isis emir who had managed to enter Al-Hawl two years previously to restructure the terror group’s organisation there. He detonated a suicide belt rather than be captured.
“We think he was inside the camp for two years, but he evaded our every attempt to catch him, until the coalition brought in some special equipment to track him within Al-Hawl,” Hannan said. “Without the support of the coalition there would be chaos here.”
Chaos might still return. In the run-up to municipal elections in Turkey later this month, President Erdogan has made repeated threats of further ground operations in Syria this summer against the SDF.
The last time Turkey sent in troops and Syrian rebel militias to attack SDF territory in 2019, hundreds of foreign women affiliated with Isis escaped in the confusion from a detention camp at Ain Issa. Some fled to Syrian rebel territory in Idlib and disappeared. Others appeared in European countries, including France and Ireland.
Now the threat of a renewed Turkish ground offensive runs daily through the thoughts of detainees and guards alike.
“Until the last round of Turkish bombing we were fine. We were in control,” Roj camp’s director, Omar, said. “But now the women hear us getting hit, they feel they have some kind of ally behind them. They feel escape is coming, so they behave more as they wish. They tell me, ‘Today we are prisoners in the camp, run by you. Tomorrow you will be prisoners in the camp, run by us.’”