Murders committed by ISIS cells in Syria’s al-Hol camp

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights has monitored the killing of six people, including four women, since the beginning of this month by members of ISIS inside al-Hol camp, which is under the control of the Kurdish Autonomous Administration in northeast Syria.

The Observatory stated on its website that six people have been killed since the beginning of this month by ISIS “sleeper cells”, the last of whom was shot dead the day before yesterday.

The dead included two men and a woman of Iraqi nationality, as well as two displaced Syrians and another woman, who the Observatory could not identify.

The deaths brought to 86 the number of people the Observatory has documented killed at the camp by ISIS elements since the beginning of the year, most of them Iraqis.

Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman said he feared the camp would become a “time bomb” as “killings and chaos inside the camp increase”.

“The camp is home to around 62,000 people, half of them Iraqis, including around 10,000 families of foreign fighters, who are in a special section under heavy guard”.

“The camp has occasionally been the scene of security incidents, including desertions, attacks against guards or humanitarian workers, or killings of residents”.

The pace of murders dropped following a security operation carried out by Kurdish forces at the end of March, which resulted in the arrest of more than 100 members of the organization before it resumed its rise.

“Since the declaration of ISIS’s elimination in 2019, the Kurdish Autonomous Administration, with limited means, has been calling on the relevant countries to take back their citizens held in prisons and camps, or to establish an international tribunal to try jihadists in Syria, but its appeals are not heeded, and France and a few other European countries have only taken back a limited number of orphaned children”.

The UN has repeatedly warned about the deteriorating security situation in the camp, and the UN Security Council Committee working on ISIS and other jihadist groups reported in a February report cases of “radicalization, training, fund-raising and incitement to carry out external operations” in the camp.

Experts fear that the camp could become an incubator for a new generation of IS fighters amid continuing chaos and violence and a diplomatic horizon that could lead to the return of residents.

The Syrian Democratic Forces, whose backbone is armed by the Kurds, recently handed over to Iraq 100 Iraqi ISIS jihadists who were in their custody.

The situation in al-Hol camp has sparked fears of unrest and rebellions involving extremist wives and widows of jihadists.

Much information is circulating about the formation of a solid core of IS inside the camp, with a growing number of assassinations and death threats, particularly against those suspected of providing information to Kurdish authorities or who refuse to rejoin cells in the camp.