al-rozi camp, syria
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We stepped out of the bitter cold, through a plastic flap and through a door into darkness.
It was warm inside the tent, but I couldn’t see anything except for a little bit of outside light coming in through the cracks.
“Please come in! Please come in,” a female voice said in English.
Two children, a girl and a boy, were running around. They spoke a mixture of English and very appropriate standard Arabic. The latter immediately felt strange since no one speaks like that in a casual setting.
We were in al-Roi camp in northeastern Syria. There, more than 2,000 women and children (some no longer children) have been held by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces for more than a decade. Most of them are foreign wives (and often widows) and children of men affiliated with ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.
In the darkness, I hear another female voice with a British accent.
“Are you a journalist? Please refrain from taking photos!”
She asked not to be identified for fear of complicating her relatives’ legal efforts to return her to the UK. She said her British citizenship had been revoked.
“I’m scared because I’ve become a different person,” she said. “I’m not Daci,” which means she’s not an ISIS supporter. “I’m no one. I’m scared for my son.”
She claimed that her nine-year-old son was regularly beaten by other boys in the camp because his mother was no longer loyal to ISIS.
“I was born in England and grew up in England,” she said. “I have no one else. My mother, father and brothers are all in the UK. We are completely and completely stateless.”
In case you were wondering, this is not Shamima Begum, the East Londoner who ran away at the age of 15 to join ISIS in 2015. Britain also stripped her of her citizenship.
We went to what our AK-47-wielding husky Kurdish guards said was Begum’s tent, but it was closed. I called and said I wanted to talk to her.
“Go away,” a female voice with a London accent answered. “I don’t want to talk to you.”
This was not my first encounter with ISIS women. In early 2019, I spent two months in Syria covering the final battle against terrorist organizations. We spoke to dozens of ISIS women from France, the United Kingdom, Morocco, Iraq, Turkey, Russia, Indonesia, Finland, and more. Some say they reluctantly followed their husbands to Syria or Iraq. At the time, some claimed they still believed in Islamic State’s strict tenets.
But here at Logi, the only woman willing to speak to us claimed to have abandoned the illusion a long time ago. They just wanted to go home.
“I want to go back to my home country,” Alma Ismailovic from Serbia said in broken English. “I want to live a normal life with my children.”
Alma was in the “market” of the camp. It was a dirt square with several shops selling food and other daily necessities.
She wore a hijab, or headscarf, rather than the face-covering niqab more common among those with more hard-line views.
When I asked a group of boys wandering through the market if they still believed in the ISIS motto: “The Islamic State is here to stay and grow,” they laughed disdainfully, as if I had played a well-worn joke on them.
“There is no Islamic state,” Hanifa Abdallah, a native of Russia, told me in rudimentary, heavily accented Arabic. “It’s over. We women are the only ones left.”
She said two of the children have been repatriated, but three are still together in custody. She, too, desperately wants to return home, but insists that Russia will not take her back. According to camp officials, Russians are the single largest nationality group at Lozi.
Few countries with prisoners and detainees in Syria are willing to repatriate them.
Our escort drove us around the camp, but insisted we not wander among the tents because the women and children would throw stones at us. Due to the cold, very few people were outside and many who were outside turned their backs as we passed. No one threw stones. No one made any threatening gestures, as I have seen in reports from other camps in Syria.
Our Lozi visit came at a critical time for the country. Since early January, Syrian government forces, along with Arab tribal fighters, have been dislodging the Kurdish-led SDF from large swaths of northern Syria. For more than a decade, the US-led anti-ISIS coalition has been fighting ISIS in conjunction with the SDF. But following the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, the new Syrian government, led by President Ahmed al-Shallah (formerly the leader of an al-Qaeda affiliate), is now seeking to expand its authority into the oil-rich autonomous region of northern Syria, which is controlled by the SDF.
U.S. Special Envoy and Ambassador Turkiye Tom Barrack said in a recent post on X that “the SDF’s original purpose as the main anti-ISIS force on the ground is largely over” as Syria’s new government signals “a westward turn and cooperation with the United States on counterterrorism.”
He urged the Kurdish-led SDF to be integrated into the Syrian state.
Under pressure from the United States, the SDF leadership reluctantly signed an agreement with the Damascus government to do just that. But there are demons lurking in its implementation that can be deadly.
To the Kurds, the sudden change in America’s position looks 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 sullen, frowning man in his 40s who introduced himself as “Comrade Chabre.”
“We fought against the Islamic State on behalf of the rest of the world, and now other countries have turned their backs on us,” she said flatly. “We hope all these women and prisoners will return to their countries and launch attacks.”
The entire time we were in northeast Syria, we heard echoes of this anger.
Syria’s President al-Shalah was previously affiliated with al-Qaeda, and many Kurds are convinced that he still harbors al-Qaeda ideology beneath his suit and tie.
With Syrian government forces now in control of Al-Hol, another larger camp in the region, camp administrator Hakimat Ibrahim said the dedicated ISIS women in the camp are celebrating as they feel they will soon be freed.
On January 19, SDF forces guarding al-Shadadi prison, about 100 miles (160 km) southwest of al-Roj, where thousands of ISIS prisoners were being held, retreated after coming under Syrian military artillery fire. The SDF claimed that 1,500 prisoners had escaped. The Syrian government denies this, claiming only 120 people escaped and more than 80 were quickly recaptured. The US military is currently in the process of transferring approximately 7,000 ISIS prisoners to safer facilities in Iraq.
“They now have hope that ISIS will return,” Ibrahim said of the women in Lozi camp.
And if that happened, they told her, “we will not leave any of you alive,” Hakimat said.
