More than 800 Iraqis repatriated from al-Hol camp

More than 800 Iraqis left the al-Hol camp in northeastern Syria on Thursday, where about 27,000 people are held, including members of families of suspected jihadists, according to the director of this Kurdish-administered camp.

"About 850 people are leaving today," said Jihan Hanan, director of the al-Hol camp. Since the beginning of the year, about 10,000 Iraqis have left the camp in eleven phases of repatriation.

More than six years after the defeat of the Islamic State (IS) jihadist group, camps and prisons run by the Kurds in northeastern Syria still house tens of thousands of people, many of whom are suspected of having links to IS or are suspected of being affiliated with it.

According to Hanan, the al-Hol camp, the largest in northeastern Syria, now houses 27,000 people, including 15,000 Syrians and about 6,300 women and children from 42 foreign nationalities. Detainees live there in difficult conditions.

"We suffered a lot in al-Hol, psychologically, physically and financially," said Oum Mahmoud, a 60-year-old Iraqi woman who was about to leave, to AFP. "Look at the children, look how happy they are, it's like a holiday," she added.

While many Western countries have refused to repatriate their citizens, Baghdad has accelerated repatriations and called on other countries to do the same.

In February, Kurdish official Sheikhmous Ahmed said the Kurdish administration aimed to empty the camps in northeastern Syria by sending away thousands of displaced Syrians and Iraqi refugees, including relatives of suspected jihadists, by the end of the year.

The Islamic State seized vast areas of territory in Syria and Iraq in 2014, before its defeat in Syria in 2019. But jihadist cells remain, particularly in the country's vast desert.