A decade ago, the Islamic State [ISIS] was a wildfire burning out of control. U.S. military and their Syrian Kurdish allies, operating under the rubric of the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS, extinguished it until the Islamic State presence became just an isolated campfire of red-hot embers, carefully contained in northeastern Syria’s Al-Hol refugee camp.
The reason why the Kurds did not fully extinguish the Islamic State but allowed it to continue to burn at Al-Hol was humanitarian. Syrian Kurds do not massacre prisoners. The Kurds hoped that with the Islamic State and their family members confined to a prison/refugee camp, the international community would establish a process to repatriate or subject to justice those who remained. This did not happen, though, because of the mendacity of European states, the myopia of international human rights organizations, and the ideological cohesion of the Islamic State’s true believers.
After the Islamic State’s demise, Europeans especially were reluctant to repatriate their former citizens.
The Islamic State was not purely indigenous to Syria and Iraq. Its recruits came from across the globe, from Texas to Tanzania and from Manchester to Malaysia, passing into Syria with the assistance of Turkish fixers and Turkey’s intelligence service, the former director of which is now Turkey’s foreign minister. After the Islamic State’s demise, Europeans especially were reluctant to repatriate their former citizens. When their citizens had married and had a child in the Islamic State, the question grew even more complicated. Given the mortality of Islamic State fighters and how terrorists would pass around wives and slaves, questions of paternity and citizenship grew.
True Islamic State believers also did not want to leave to return to countries they saw as the abode of ignorance. Al-Hol became their home, a guarded oasis in which they could raise their children and indoctrinate their youth into the theological exegesis of the Islamic State. Like Brazil’s favelas and the hinterlands of the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Sahel, al-Hol essentially became a no-man’s land run by a criminal or terrorist group.
The problem has only become more complicated with time. Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi declared victory over the Islamic State in December 2017, more than three years after Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi first declared his Caliphate. Not only does this mean that every child under age 11 in Al-Hol has known nothing but the Islamic State, but also that impressionable 8- to 10-year-olds at the time of the Islamic State’s declaration are now 19- to 21-year-olds—prime fighting age for the group. Many are themselves now married to widows or their daughters inside the camp.
Knowing someone is guilty and proving that can be two very different things when there are no surviving witnesses to an atrocity.
Some of those in Al-Hol are likely guilty of heinous crimes, yet they evade justice for two reasons. First, international officials will not deport the veterans across the border into Iraq because they might face the death penalty there. Nor will the United Nations facilitate travel to other states with the death penalty. Such ideological disdain for the death penalty was also the reason that groups like Human Rights Watch withheld evidence from an Iraqi court that their researchers had collected about Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s chemical weapons use against Iraqi Kurds. These organizations and European countries essentially approach the region with a colonial attitude, in which they demand ideological concessions and reform if they do not approve of local notions of justice.Even when this is not an issue, Western notions of criminal law intercede: Knowing someone is guilty and proving that can be two very different things when there are no surviving witnesses to an atrocity. After all, if five Islamic State members entered a village and killed all 100 civilians, each of those five can argue that he was not the one who committed the crime.
The Syrian Democratic Forces—the same Kurds who broke the siege of Kobane and liberated northeastern Syria from the Islamic State and Turkish-backed Al Qaeda factions—now control Al-Hol and have kept the residents of the camps secure for years while the international community has deliberated about what to do with the camp and its residents. With the fall of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government to Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, a former Al Qaeda affiliate, both the U.S. government and many within the international community recognized Ahmed al-Sharaa’s interim government and his demand for unity. As a result, diplomats agreed that the Syrian Democratic Forces should end their management of the camp in January 2026, handing the facility over to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
The Kurds theoretically will have security control over the camp perimeter, but it can be hard to do security effectively when unable to develop intelligence from the interior of the camp. It can be akin to preparing for a hurricane without satellite monitoring of brewing storms.
UNHCR officials are experts at administering camps, and ensuring everyone is fed, housed, and registered, but their mission is not security.
The UNHCR does great work across the globe, but transferring Al-Hol to the UNHCR, even if their budget were not being slashed, is a bad idea. UNHCR officials are experts at administering camps, and ensuring everyone is fed, housed, and registered, but their mission is not security; rather, for that, they coordinate with local authorities. If the counter-ISIS coalition and U.N. officials arbitrarily deny recognition of the Kurds as the local authorities, they are sacrificing reality to diplomatic wishful thinking. Even if the Syrian government had real power, it is so faction-riven that some to whom the U.N. might now engage could be those who sympathize with the Islamic State and cheer their attacks on women and minorities.
Too often, de-radicalization—or “countering violent extremism” in diplo-speak—is a snake-oil remedy. Various groups spend tens of millions of dollars on various programs and schemes, but few have lasting effectiveness. Budget cuts have forced UNHCR to slash its education programs, and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) is little more capable when its targets have suffered a decade of indoctrination against tolerance and subject matter not grounded in religion. De-radicalization is not the mission for either. UNICEF talk about “peace-building” is akin to confronting Nazi Germany with New Age candle vigils.
UNHCR seeks to repatriate its charges, but it has never faced a problem like Al-Hol. There could be three outcomes: UNHCR employees will be injured or killed; Islamic State acolytes will be returned to societies they seek to destroy; or Al-Hol will transform into an intelligence black hole from which terror plots could emerge. After all, UNHCR cannot conduct counterintelligence and Kurdish (or other counter-Islamic State) forces cannot conduct military operations inside a UNHCR-run camp.
What transpires is an agreement designed to look good on paper, but one that will not translate well in reality. UNHCR control over Al-Hol could set regional security back years. A new U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees will begin work on January 1, 2026. His or her first move should be to reject any U.N. role for the Al-Hol camp.
