Visit to IS camp stark reminder of hidden but ever-present terrorist threat

This created a detainee crisis, the likes of which the world has never seen.

First-hand look

Last week, I visited northeastern Syria alongside the Commander of US Central Command, General Erik Kurilla, to inspect first-hand the prisons and camps containing a total of nearly 65,000 IS-associated men, women and children from more than 55 countries.

I was to be the first non-military person to be provided access on a single visit to Rumeilan base, inside the al-Hol and al-Roj camps, as well as inside the high-security Ghuweiran Prison and SDF headquarters.

To place the scale of the detainee challenge in context, let us consider the case of Guantanamo Bay. Over 21 years ago, the US placed 780 terrorism suspects into Guantanamo — a dedicated detention facility on an isolated island, far away from any active conflict.

Today, after concerted efforts to close the facility by repatriating prisoners abroad, the facility still contains 31 detainees. Comparing the challenge of 780 individuals to today's 65,000 in Syria drives home the kind of problem we face.

As I flew into the US base in Rumeilan onboard a military C-17, I felt like I knew plenty about the scale of the detainee crisis but seeing it in person revealed the many additional layers of complexity.

From the Rumeilan base, commonly referred to as "RLZ," Arabic-speaking US troops maintain several overlapping lines of engagement with the SDF, local Asayish security units, tribal councils in Iraq and Syria, and the Iraqi government in order to manage a process of returning Iraqis to Iraq.

On average, 50 Iraqi men and 550 women are being returned every six weeks, into the custody of the Iraqi state. This is an absolutely vital effort and represents the most encouraging response so far to the detainee crisis. But even so, at the current rate, Iraq will need at least six years to process the return of a further 25,000 Iraqi women and children and several thousand male fighters.

Beyond returning Iraqis to Iraq, another element of the solution is dealing with the roughly 12,000 Syrian women and children, and 2,000-3,000 Syrian male fighters. According to SDF commanders and senior US State Department officials, almost all Syrians remaining in prisons and camps are from regime-controlled areas of the country. This makes any further Syrian returns all but impossible, so these 15,000 appear to be stuck in varying forms of detention permanently.

Then there are the third country nationals — citizens from at least 55 countries abroad. Of these, there are approximately 2,500 male IS fighters in prisons and roughly 12,500 women and children in al-Roj and al-Hol camps. Repatriation is the only realistic solution here, but convincing foreign governments to take back their IS-linked citizens has been a hugely difficult diplomatic task for the US.

For the first time, repatriation processes and diplomatic engagements gained real momentum in 2022, but even then, only 1% of foreign women and children were brought back to their respective countries. At this rate, it will take at least 30 years to repatriate all the children, by which time they will be middle-aged.

From RLZ, I flew with CENTCOM's General Kurilla onboard a Black Hawk helicopter to al-Roj camp, a smaller secured facility that currently houses approximately 2,500 people. Considerably calmer and safer than al-Hol, the al-Roj camp has schools, newly constructed soccer fields, a souq and hospital.

We walked throughout the camp, meeting female residents — most wearing niqab, a few not. At the souq, we talked with women from Russia, Uzbekistan, Kyrygystan, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Bosnia and more. All wanted to know more about their respective governments' willingness to repatriate them.

American detainees

Twenty-one Americans reside in al-Roj, including Huda Muthana, a 29-year-old US-born woman who joined IS aged 20, from Alabama. After shaking hands with the all-American all-male visitors, Muthana said she had renounced IS and extremism, but was concerned for her security and that of her five-year-old son amid what she claimed was continued extremism amongst al-Roj's population. 

Despite being born in the US, Muthana's citizenship was revoked in 2016 on the basis that it had been awarded unjustly, as her father had purportedly been serving as a Yemeni diplomat in the US at the time. She and her son are therefore stuck in Syria, stateless. She was, therefore, desperate to see if the US military might be able to do something to help her case, though there was nothing to be done. Even the US Supreme Court has refused to consider her appeal.

Al-Hol camp far more tense

From al-Roj, we then flew to al-Hol, a vast camp home to at least 50,000 people – more than 50% of whom are children under the age of 12. While al-Roj felt calm, you could literally feel the tension at al-Hol.

In recent days, female Kurdish security forces responsible for the camp had begun receiving IS threats on their cell phones. A major IS plot to attack the camp using suicide truck bombs had been foiled in a nearby farm weeks earlier.

In September 2022, a weeks-long SDF operation led to the arrest of 300 IS operatives inside the camp, along with caches of weapons and explosives. A rocket-propelled grenade attack inside the camp also killed two SDF personnel.

Several IS schools were discovered too. Aid groups who work in the camp routinely receive threats and young children have been known to attack NGO teachers. The section of the camp dedicated to foreign nationals is essentially a no-go zone for any outsiders.

Notorious Ghuweiran Prison

From al-Hol, we drove in an armoured convoy to Hasakeh city, where we visited the notorious Ghuweiran Prison — home to the 5,000 most dangerous male IS prisoners in Syria. In January 2022, a major IS attack on the prison triggered a 10-day battle that drew in US and UK special forces and led to the death of more than 500 people.

The prison itself is a former high school and was adapted to hold IS's most dangerous — almost all of whom were captured from the last stand at al-Baghouz. Days before we visited the facility, SDF intelligence had foiled an IS attack plot being coordinated by an Iraqi IS 'emir' inside the prison, but also involving operatives on the outside.

While under the authority of the SDF, the prison's defences and infrastructure have been heavily funded by the UK government, using lessons learned from similar facilities previously operated in Afghanistan.

Consisting of over 200 cells, each housing 25 prisoners, the prison is guarded by a force recruited from Hasakeh's local population. Every prison guard was wearing an all-blue uniform and almost all wore matching black New York Yankee baseball caps.

Few if any seemed engaged or invested in their jobs and answered questions posed to them by us in Arabic with barely more than monosyllables. Not an encouraging sign, given widespread reports that the IS attack a year earlier had been facilitated by guards bribed or coerced into cooperating with IS.

All day, our small group led by General Kurilla had been protected by drones, helicopter gunships, Bradley fighting vehicles and multiple layers of elite special forces, including undercover teams in civilian vehicles. They were there for good reason — IS's insurgency remains alive and kicking.

Just as we were leaving Ghuweiran Prison, a US medevac helicopter landed in the adjacent landing pad, carrying an SDF fighter who had just been shot twice in an IS attack in Deir ez Zour. As he was carried off the helicopter, we rushed to his stretcher to check on the state of his injuries. Bullet wounds through both his legs were a stark reminder of the threat that IS poses today — hidden but ever present, in the shadows.

Army in detention

While IS may have fallen away from our newspapers and TV screens, replaced by the war in Ukraine and great power competition with China, it has not gone away in reality. And while its insurgency continues, the terror group's greatest advantage lies in its "army in detention" in prisons (numbering 10,000 in Syria and 20,000 in Iraq) and its potential "next generation" (25,000 children) in al-Hol and al-Roj, according to CENTCOM.

For the US military, this IS detainee crisis represents the second most significant national security threat in the Middle East, trumped only by Iran.

While the US government and the Biden administration has focused diplomatic attention onto the issues of returns and repatriation, we are a long way from being in a place to feel confident about being on a path towards resolution. Without a major international diplomatic and humanitarian mobilisation, IS's future in Syria and Iraq looks worrying secure.