Thousands of alleged ISIS members have been detained in Syria. They are being held in about two dozen camps and prisons run by the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces.
These facilities were largely created as a result of the defeat of ISIS from 2017-2019 in Syria. When the last major pockets of ISIS control were liberated by the SDF in 2019, thousands of ISIS family members ended up in the hands of the SDF.
After clashes between the SDF and the Syrian government over the past week, an agreement was signed that is supposed to mean the administration of ISIS detainees in eastern Syria will be handed over to the Syrian government.
The detainees in eastern Syria include mostly women, and their children, who had married ISIS members. They also include thousands of foreigners.
This left the SDF with a complex challenge. The ISIS members couldn’t be repatriated without the consent of the countries they were from.
Stripped of citizenship
Many countries, including the UK, didn’t want their citizens to return. Some countries had stripped them of their citizenship, leaving them in legal limbo.
The foreign ISIS members had entered Syria illegally during the Syrian civil war. As undocumented ISIS-supporting migrants, they were not even officially in Syria.
After the SDF took control of some 50,000 people who had ties to ISIS, it was uncertain about what to do with them. The worst offenders, mostly men, were held in special prisons. Several were repatriated to other countries.
Some of the women and children were also allowed to return to their countries, which sent representatives to collect them via Iraq.
This left a large number of people languishing in various facilities. ISIS women in Al-Hol refugee camp formed their own society, replicating the extremism of ISIS in miniature. They killed women who dissented and raised children to become extremists.
This means that as the fighting broke out between the Syrian government and the SDF over the past week, there were concerns about what might happen to the ISIS prisoners.
Videos taken on Sunday show some prisons being taken over by the Syrian government. These appear to be women’s prisons, where women and children were held.
While some accounts on social media claimed 3,000 ISIS members had been allowed to leave prisons, the real figure is likely much lower. Furthermore, it’s not clear if those people who fled prisons on Saturday and Sunday were actually ISIS members.
What will happen next to the ISIS member detainees?
What matters now is what will happen with the ISIS detainees.
According to Devorah Margolin, the Blumenstein-Rosenbloom senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, six years after ISIS was defeated, “many of these populations remain detained and are being held across roughly 27 facilities, including 25 detention facilities (including two youth rehabilitation centers) and two detention camps (Al-Hol and Roj) in northeast Syria, and run by several different actors, including the SDF and affiliated security forces like the Internal Security Forces, as well as by the civilian wing, the DAANES,” she wrote in a post on X/Twitter.
Al-Hol camp holds 25,000 people
Daanes is the civilian authorities who run eastern Syria, essentially the civilian arm of the SDF. They are largely a Kurdish organization.
“There are approximately 25 detention facilities (including two youth rehabilitation centers – Houri and Orkesh) under the umbrella of ‘IS in detention’ today holding around 9,000 mostly adult men, but also including 1,000 teenage boys and young men initially detained as minors, as well as 100 women,” Margolin wrote.
This population, she added, includes “5,000 Syrians, 3,000 Iraqis, and 2,000 third country nationals (TCNs). Gathering concrete information on these individuals remains extremely difficult – and sometimes unreliable – for numerous reasons, including security reasons, as well as the fact that they are run by non-state actors, the SDF and the DAANES.”
The population Al-Hol camp is now believed to be about 25,000 people, she wrote, adding that another large camp, called Roj, has around 2,400 people.
“Today the majority of those held in Al-Hol are Syrians, then Iraqis (today only about 13,000 left), and less than 10,000 third country nationals,” Margolin wrote.
“Iraqis used to be the largest group held in Al-Hol, but the Iraqi government has repatriated more than 20,000 people from the camp, including more than 11,000 in 2025 alone.”
Baghdad is now ready to take in the rest of the Iraqis, Kurdistan Region-based news channel Rudaw Media Network reported. This comes as Iraq is also deploying forces along the Syrian border, afraid the fighting may spill over.
“We are preparing to return all Iraqi families remaining inside al-Hol camp to Iraq as soon as possible,” an Iraqi source told Rudaw. The “Iraqi interior minister and acting minister of migration and displaced, Abdul-Amir al-Shammari, is overseeing the process and is scheduled to visit the Jadaa camp in Nineveh province on Monday.”
Ahmed Sheikhmous “who oversees camps for internally displaced people (IDPs) and refugees in Rojava, told Rudaw that ‘due to attacks by Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham [HTS] militants [who are a now major part of the Syrian interim government], there is a serious threat to the camps and prisons holding ISIS militants, because those attackers are just like ISIS.’”
Large number of foreigners, still remain in the camps and prisons
The Iraqi data indicates that “fewer than 100 Iraqi families remain in al-Hol camp,” Iraqi Ministry of Migration and Displacement spokesperson Ali Jahangir told Rudaw on Monday. “Preparations are beginning, and it is scheduled that the repatriation of all of them will start at the beginning of next month.”
With the Iraqis back home, the largest number of people in the camps will be Syrians. There are a large number of foreigners, estimated at thousands, still in the various camps and prisons.
Some of the foreign ISIS members, particularly the women, have children in these facilities. The children are apparently growing up without any proper documents if they are the children of foreigners. That would appear to mean that there may be hundreds or thousands of stateless children.
One of the well-known cases is that of Shamima Begum, a British woman who traveled to Iraq to support ISIS as a 15-year old teenager.
The British home secretary would “robustly defend” the decision to strip Shamima Begum of her British citizenship, the BBC reported two weeks ago.
“The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has called for an investigation, but a government source said the decision had already been upheld by UK courts,” the report said.
Begum is now 26. While her case is well known, there are many other women, and some of them have children. With countries refusing to repatriate them, it is not clear what Syria will do with them.