‘Utterly Stateless’: Inside a detention camp for ISIS-linked women and children amid escalating uncertainty in Syria

Al-Roj camp, Syria (CNN) — We stepped out of the bitter cold, through a plastic flap that passed for a door into darkness.

It was warmer inside the tent, but hard to see anything with only a bit of outside light sneaking through the cracks.

“Come in! Come in,” said a female voice in English.

Two children, a girl and a boy, were scampering around. They were speaking in a mixture of English and very proper standard Arabic – the latter immediately striking me as odd since no one in a casual setting speaks that way.

We were in Al-Roj camp, a detention center in northeastern Syria where more than 2,000 women and children (though some are no longer children) have been held – some for more than a decade – by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces. They are the mostly foreign wives (and in many cases, widows) and children of men affiliated with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, ISIS.

In the gloom I hear another, British-accented, female voice.

“Journalists? Please no pictures!”

She asked that we not identify her for fear of complicating her relatives’ legal efforts to repatriate her to the United Kingdom. She told us her British citizenship had been revoked.

“I’m scared because I’m a different person,” she told us. “I’m not a Daeshi,” meaning she’s not a follower of ISIS. “I’m no one. I’m scared for my son.”

Her 9-year-old son was regularly beaten up by the other boys in the camp because his mother was no longer loyal to ISIS, she claimed.

“I was born in England. I was raised in England,” she said. “I don’t have anyone anywhere else. My mum, my dad, my brothers – all are in England. We are utterly and totally stateless.”

If you were wondering, this is not Shamima Begum, the east London native who ran away at the age of 15 to join ISIS in 2015. Britain has also revoked her nationality.

We did go to what our husky AK-47-toting Kurdish escort said was Begum’s tent, but it was shut. I called out saying I would like to speak to her.

“Go away,” a London-accented female voice responded. “I don’t want to speak to you.”

This was not my first encounter with the women of ISIS. In early 2019, I spent two months in Syria covering the final battle against the terror group. We spoke to dozens of ISIS women – from France, the UK, Morocco, Iraq, Turkey, Russia, Indonesia, Finland, etc. Some said they had reluctantly followed their husbands to Syria and Iraq. Others insisted at the time that they still believed in the stark creed of the Islamic State.

But here in Roj, the only women willing to speak with us insisted they had long ago discarded any illusions. They just wanted to go home.

“I want to come back in my country,” Alma Ismailovic, from Serbia, told me in broken English. “I want to live normal life with my children.”

Alma was in the camp’s “market,” a dirt square with a handful of shops selling food and other basic goods.

She was wearing a hijab, a head scarf, rather than the face-covering niqab typical of those with more hardline views.

I asked a group of boys who were hanging around the market if they still believed in the ISIS motto that “the Islamic state is staying and spreading,” and they laughed dismissively as if I had tried out an old, tired joke on them.

“There is no Islamic state,” Hanifa Abdallah, from Russia, told me in rudimentary, heavily accented Arabic. “It’s over. All that’s left is us women.”

She told us two of her children had been repatriated, but three were still with her in the detention center. She, too, said she was desperate to return home, but she claimed Russia wouldn’t take her back. Camp officials said the single biggest nationality group in Roj is Russian.

Few of the countries with nationals – prisoners and detainees – in Syria have been willing to repatriate them.

Our escort drove us around the camp but insisted that we must not stroll between the tents because the women and children would hurl stones at us. Because of the cold, few people were out and about, and many of those who were outside turned away as we passed. No one threw stones. No one made threatening gestures as I’ve seen in reporting from the other camps in Syria.

Our visit to Roj comes at a critical moment in the country. Since early January, Syrian government forces, along with Arab tribal fighters, have driven the Kurdish-led SDF from large swathes of northern Syria. For more than a decade, the US-led anti-ISIS coalition aligned with the SDF and battled ISIS. But with the overthrow of the regime of Bashar al-Assad, the new Syrian government led by President Ahmed al-Sharaa (previously a leader of an al Qaeda affiliate) is now trying to extend its writ into the autonomous oil-rich parts of northern Syria controlled by the SDF.

In a recent post on X, US special envoy and Ambassador to Türkiye Tom Barrack stated, “the original purpose of the SDF as the primary anti-ISIS force on the ground has largely expired” as Syria’s new government has signaled “a westward pivot and cooperation with the US on counterterrorism.”

He urged the Kurdish-led SDF to integrate into the Syrian state.

The SDF leadership, under US pressure, has reluctantly concluded agreements with the government in Damascus that would do exactly that. But the devil is in the implementation, and that could prove deadly.

For the Kurds, the sudden change in the American position looks like betrayal – yet another betrayal of the Kurds by those who backed them for decades.

In the office of the camp’s administrator, we met the head of security, a dour, scowling, woman in her 40s, who identified herself as “Comrade Chavre.”

“We fought the Islamic state on behalf of the rest of the world, and now the rest of the world is turning its back on us,” she snapped. “I hope all these women and the prisoners go back to their countries and start attacking them.”

Throughout our time in northeastern Syria, we heard echoes of this anger.

Because of Syrian President al-Sharaa’s previous affiliation with al Qaeda many Kurds are convinced that beneath his suit and tie, he still holds to the group’s ideology.

With Syrian government forces now in control of Al-Hol, the other, bigger detention camp in the area, camp administrator Hakimat Ibrahim told us the committed ISIS women in the camp celebrated, sensing they will soon be free.

On January 19, SDF troops guarding Al-Shaddadi prison, around 160 kilometers southwest of Al-Roj, where several thousand ISIS prisoners were being held, withdrew under Syrian army fire. The SDF claimed that 1,500 prisoners had escaped. The Syrian government denied that, claiming only 120 had escaped and more than 80 were quickly recaptured. US forces are now in the process of moving the approximately 7,000 ISIS prisoners to more secure facilities in Iraq.

“They now have hope ISIS is coming back,” Ibrahim said of the women in Roj camp.

And if that happens, Hakimat said they told her, “We won’t leave one of you alive.”

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