The next day, they stole back to the house. It was in ashes. Their possessions, including their identification papers, had been incinerated.
The couple moved from village to village, fleeing the advancing front line and venturing deeper into the caliphate. Tens of thousands of families were doing the same—isis was barring civilians from leaving its territory. But nowhere was truly safe; one day, coalition warplanes struck the hamlet where Jihan and Mahmoud were sheltering, turning the village into an inferno. As they gathered their belongings to flee again, an air strike hit a nearby building; the blast threw Jihan to the ground, and shrapnel just missed her, cleaving a nearby tree. Mahmoud carried her to the car, and they raced off.
There was no choice but to try to escape the caliphate. They joined hundreds of other families trekking through the desert; many had paid their life savings to smugglers, who guided them around isis checkpoints. The caravan proceeded northwest, toward Raqqa, and finally arrived at a checkpoint of the U.S.-backed Kurdish forces. The travellers—who included the sick, the wounded, the pregnant, the dying—begged the soldiers to take them in. The soldiers demanded identification documents, which Jihan and Mahmoud no longer had. In any event, almost none of the people in the caravan were admitted. Most of them were arrested and loaded into cargo trucks. Jihan, who hadn’t eaten in days, was barely conscious. After many hours, the trucks were unloaded. Jihan and her husband stood shivering under floodlights, and were informed that the name of their new home was Al-Hol.
In 2006, the Syrian government settled a few hundred Palestinian refugee families on a dusty, scorpion-infested stretch of brushland near the Iraqi border, south of the town of Al-Hol, which means, among other things, “the horror.” The Palestinians had been living in Iraq but fled the violence unleashed by the U.S. occupation; they had already been expelled from their ancestral lands by Israel in 1948. The U.N. built cinder-block houses for the refugees. During the Syrian civil war, the camp filled with more displaced families. In March, 2019, when the caliphate fell, thousands of its residents were corralled into Al-Hol, and the camp was abruptly converted into one of the world’s largest prisons. Today, Al-Hol’s fifty thousand residents are grouped into sectors divided by barbed wire; to walk from one to the next can take half an hour. Most sectors hold Syrians and Iraqis, but the so-called Annex is home to about six thousand Europeans, Asians, and Africans, some of whom have been denied repatriation by their home governments. Horticulture is evident here and there around the camp, with squash and bean plants peeking over tents. A few non-governmental organizations operate health clinics, but detainees complain that malnutrition and water-borne disease are pervasive. Crowds jostle around bathrooms whose pipes are often clogged. Many inmates receive money from relatives—hawala networks, informal cash-transfer systems, are sometimes allowed to relay funds to prisoners. Detainees can use their remittances to buy smuggled goods, including drugs. The chief diversion is the souk, which was built by inmates, and in which you’ll find small grocers next to carts selling makeup next to smoothie stands. A few lucky prisoners own shops, but most stalls are run by outsiders with permits to enter the camp. A mass of black-clad women drifts among the stalls, examining bras, haggling over cigarettes. You can guess who the true believers are: the women who cover not only their faces but also their eyes tend to be loyal to isis.
When Jihan and Mahmoud moved to their assigned tent, Jihan was surprised to find many detainees with stories like hers. The common denominator appeared to be guilt by association. There was a woman from central Syria named Fatima; her husband had joined the democracy protests and then, through the twists and turns of the war, had ended up in isis. Her family insisted that she divorce him, but they had a child, and, according to local custom, custody goes to the man, so she refused—and was disowned. Eventually, Fatima’s husband died in battle, and she was transferred against her will to a “guest house” for isis widows. There she rebuffed isis suitors, wanting only to be reunited with her family. During America’s bombing campaign, she was moved from village to village by isis, and she ended up living in a ditch as ordnance exploded around her. Now she and her child were in Al-Hol, surviving on camp rations, as she waited for a sign from her family. She hadn’t spoken to them in four years.
Jihan met Da’ad, who was also from Homs. Her family, which was not linked to isis, had fled regime air strikes for Raqqa, then kept moving east to escape U.S. bombs. One day, she and her children travelled to visit her parents; they returned home to find that a coalition air strike had blown up their house. Seventeen people were killed, among them her husband and her in-laws. Now she lives in a tent with her daughters, including a nine-year-old who has a blood disorder and requires transfusions to stay alive. Transfusions are performed at a hospital outside the camp, but an emergency furlough from the authorities is maddeningly difficult to obtain, and Da’ad, who works at a grocery in the souk, can’t always afford the treatments. She has appealed to neighbors and to aid organizations in the camp, without success. “I can’t watch my child withering away in front of me day after day,” she said. “This is a prison, not a camp. I don’t know what crime my daughter committed.”
Local authorities did not comment on conditions in the camp. The U.S. State Department said in a statement that the “humanitarian needs at Al-Hol camp are vast and the international response is underfunded,” and noted that the U.S. is “committed to helping the international community address this shared security and humanitarian challenge.”
I tracked down eyewitnesses and collected corroborating evidence for the strikes that Da’ad and other prisoners described. (The Pentagon declined to comment.) Under U.S. law, civilians harmed in American military actions can be eligible for condolence payments. But most inmates don’t believe that they will ever see a dollar—and they hardly even think about the remote and seemingly toothless world of foreign laws. Afflicted by images they cannot unsee, they must take comfort in the knowledge that the haunting is shared.
Asma was from a stretch of Iraq that was overtaken by isis. When U.S.-backed forces closed in on her village, she and her husband, a taxi-driver, fled with their two daughters; her two brothers had joined isis, and she and her husband feared being branded sympathizers. They took refuge in Syria. Not long afterward, Asma’s husband was in a traffic accident. “I went running to the hospital crying,” she recalled. He died from his injuries. “I saw his body and hugged him and kept screaming.” Five months later, she went to visit a friend. When she returned home, she saw people gathered in front of her house. It was in smoldering ruins, from an air strike by pro-government forces. Both her daughters were dead. “I buried them in the dirt with my own hands,” Asma said. “They were little girls, the age of flowers.” Because a woman cannot live alone, Asma moved in with her brothers Mustafa and Saleh, the isis members, who, with their families, had taken up residence in Syria. She tried to suppress her grief, playing with her nieces and nephews and helping out around the house. One evening, she went to bed around midnight, and woke up in the hospital; Saleh was by her side, crying. He told her, “We are the only survivors.” Asma recalled, “I did not even feel the fractures in my hands and feet. I was screaming, ‘Where is Mustafa? Where are the boys and girls!’ ” Another air strike had wiped out the rest of her family, killing twelve people, nine of them children. She and Saleh fled to a different village, but two months later he was killed in a coalition air strike. In Al-Hol, Asma lived in a tent alone.
I met a young man named Hassan, who was a child when the civil war started; he hailed from western Syria but, through a series of displacements, wound up in the eastern part of the country. isis fighters commandeered the ground floor of the apartment building where he lived with his parents and siblings. Residents begged the militants to leave, but they refused. The residents had nowhere to go, so they remained in their homes. One day, Hassan was talking with his brothers when he heard warplanes. “I woke up to find myself under rubble, trapped between stones and iron,” he recalled. “I started calling for my parents, but nobody answered. My brother was next to me. And I then saw that he was not even a complete body. It was half a body, only the upper half, from his chest to his head.” Three days later, at the hospital, he was told that a coalition bomb had killed ten members of his family, including his parents: “I started howling, and the nurse tried to calm me and remind me of God.”
Deyaa was an Iraqi from Heet, a city that became part of the caliphate. He worked in livestock. One day, he and his wife drove beyond the city limits to collect fodder, and they took their children along. At dusk, as they were returning home, they noticed jets flying low. A terrific blast hit the roadside. Deyaa could no longer hear or see anything. He screamed his wife’s name but got no answer. Her head had been split open. Shrapnel had ripped apart his children’s bodies.
After several surgeries, Deyaa survived. “When they took me home, I couldn’t bring myself to enter—I just stood outside crying,” he said. “I stood like this for a long time, long enough for people to worry that I was losing my mind.” He made multiple attempts to escape the caliphate, but was eventually detained by Kurdish forces and shipped to Al-Hol. He said of his family, “They were the most valuable things I had, and the Americans took them away from me.”
Inmates who had never committed a crime still tended to blame themselves for their predicament—they’d fallen in love with the wrong man, sought refuge in the wrong town. Jihan was overtaken by bitterness and self-reproach. Should she have listened to her parents? Should she have forced Ahmed to quit isis? But how? Using a friend’s phone, she tried to contact her family, but they had changed their numbers. She had convinced herself that if she could only comprehend Ahmed’s path into isis, she could somehow rid herself of his stain. But nobody in Al-Hol had known him, and the authorities had no record of him.
To better understand Ahmed’s story myself, one afternoon I visited a tent not far from Jihan’s, where Abu Hassan, an Islamic State commander, lived. He was a heavyset man with a stern, watchful expression, and I found it easy to imagine him in a grainy jihadi video. His tent was larger than most, provisioned with embroidered floor cushions and velvet drapes. I’d heard that he came from an impoverished family in central Syria, and he confirmed this, describing a childhood spent on the streets with local toughs. “We drank, we smoked,” he told me. “We never talked about Islamic ideas.” They labored for pennies as pushcart venders and construction workers. He got a job painting the sides of buildings, and enjoyed “hanging between land and sky.”
When the revolution erupted, Abu Hassan and his friends joined the protests. “None of us had any idea about the Islamic State,” he recalled. “We were very poor, so we just wanted better jobs, a better economic situation, and freedom of expression.” After several people were detained and then brutalized in regime dungeons, he concluded that peaceful resistance was futile. He and his friends collected donations door to door, bought a few old hunting rifles, and declared themselves a unit of the Free Syrian Army.
“Wi-Fi outages are the new snow days!”
Cartoon by Maggie Larson
As the uprising mutated into war, Abu Hassan found himself on the front lines, sleeping in bombed-out buildings and dodging mortars. At first, Free Syrian Army units received a hero’s welcome wherever they went. But in time the exigencies of fund-raising pushed rebel units—most of which lacked foreign backing—into thievery. He considered quitting. But then a right-wing battalion, Ahrar al-Sham, appeared on the scene; the group, which had a flush arsenal donated by Gulf states, didn’t have to resort to looting. Abu Hassan’s unit joined en masse. For the first time, Abu Hassan was surrounded by young men who spoke of order and responsibility. It was here that he initially heard Islamic ideas; he was amazed to see comrades act as if they were accountable to something greater than themselves.
Before long, isis emerged, announcing its intention to build a state that would promote justice and care for the poor. Abu Hassan and his crew signed up. He was unacquainted with the group’s global ambitions, hadn’t read a word of jihadi literature and knew none of its catechisms—such as “death to the rejectionists,” the Shia. But the terrible bloodshed of the previous years had unsettled all precepts of right and wrong, and it was isis’s message of order, in a world seemingly turned upside down, that resonated with Abu Hassan.