Syrian Kurdish guards accompanying women at the Kurdish-run al-Hol camp in northeastern Syria, October 2019. Photo: AFP
QAMISHLO, Syrian Kurdistan,— Around 200 Syrian displaced people, mostly women and children, were heading home from an overcrowded desert camp in the northeast of the war-torn country on Sunday, a Kurdish official said.
Syria’s Kurds, after years of fighting the Islamic State group, are holding tens of thousands of civilians and IS relatives in camps for the displaced.
In June, they started sending home Syrian families that had fled their homes during battles against the jihadists from the overpopulated camp of Al-Hol.
A Kurdish official said around 200 people were leaving the camp on Sunday, to head back to their villages in the eastern province of Deir Ezzor.
“Most are women and children, with just some men,” said Sheikhmous Ahmad, a Kurdish official in charge of the displaced.
The majority were civilians with no ties to IS, he said, while a few might have aligned with the jihadists but today regretted their decision.
The group was headed back to the villages of Hajin, Shaafa or Baghouz, which were the last to be held by IS before US-backed fighters expelled them from the entire area in March.
Ahmad said around 300 people from Al-Hol had already been taken back to the same area last week.
Previously, evacuations had been put on hold after Turkish troops and their Syrian proxies on October 9 launched a blistering military operation against Kurdish forces.
In June, several hundred women and children had returned to the towns of Raqa — once the de-facto IS capital in Syria — and Tabqa, both located in the northern province of Raqa.
That area was taken by Kurdish-led forces from IS in October 2017.
The United Nations said the Al-Hol camp’s population last month stood at around 70,000 people.
These included more than 30,000 Iraqis, some 28,000 Syrians and over 10,000 foreign nationals — many of them relatives of alleged jihadist fighters being held in detention.
The Kurdish authorities have repeatedly called on Western nations to repatriate their nationals, but they have been largely reluctant, except in a handful of cases.
The Kurdish Democratic Union Party PYD and its powerful military wing YPG/YPJ, considered the most effective fighting force against IS in Syria and U.S. has provided them with arms. The YPG, which is the backbone of the Syrian Democratic Forces SDF forces, has seized swathes of Syria from Islamic State.
The Kurdish forces expelled the Islamic State from its last patch of territory in the eastern Syrian village of Baghouz in March 2019.
11,000 Kurdish male and female fighters had been killed in five years of war to eliminate the Islamic State “caliphate” that once covered an area the size of Great Britain in Syria and Iraq.
Syria’s Kurds have detained thousands of foreigners suspected of fighting for Islamic State, as well as thousands of related women and children, during the battle against IS in Syria and are being held in by Kurdish forces in Syrian Kurdistan.
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