The women huddle for shelter from the rain under a corrugated iron roof, their long black cloaks dragging in the mud as they wait in line for food and pray for the return of the ISIS caliphate.
The squalid al-Hol camp, in the Kurdish-majority region of Syria known as Rojava, is filled with more than 72,000 people — most of them women and children who came out of the last piece of ISIS-held territory in Baghouz.
They include thousands of Iraqis and Syrians who believe they will usher in a new caliphate. And they pose a risk to the Iraqi government, seeking to repatriate the Iraqis, and to Syrian Kurdish authorities, having nowhere to send the Syrians.
"This is injustice — we pray for the caliphate to return," says one of the women, who says this is the third day they have been turned away from promised cartons of food. Everything is in short supply here.
"If it weren't for the airstrikes on our tents and camps killing our children," she says, "we would not have left the caliphate." All refuse to give their names.
All of the women are completely covered in long black cloaks, with only a slit for their eyes. A few have covered even their eyes.
"Convert, convert!" a group of women and girls shout at me, urging me to recite the shahada, the Muslim profession of faith: "There is no god but God, and Muhammad is his messenger."
"If you became Muslim and cover like us and became a member of our religion, you would not be killed" in the ISIS caliphate, one woman tells me.
To the world, to the governments it threatened and the hundreds of thousands it killed in Iraq and Syria, ISIS was one of the most brutal organizations known.
To its followers — who number in the tens of thousands and escaped the fall of the last ISIS territory in Syria with their beliefs intact — ISIS could do no wrong.
In their caliphate, they say there was justice. There was no bribery or corruption or wasta — the influence-peddling at the heart of most countries in the region.
"Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and any shepherd were on the same level," says an Iraqi boy, referring to the ISIS leader now believed to be in hiding.
They say when there was food in the caliphate, it was distributed. Here at the camp, they say they come every day to be humiliated and told there's nothing for them.
Malnourished infants have died due to lack of shelter and medical care in the camp in this breakaway region of Syria, according to the World Health Organization and other aid groups. With the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Syria, the Rojava region now faces an uncertain future.
The women in the camp believe its harsh conditions are deliberate — part of what they believe to be a continuing war against Muslims around the world.
They say everything under ISIS was what God wanted.
"Of course there were beheadings — why should I lie?" says a Syrian woman. "It's based on the Quran and the rules of God."
Asked about the Yazidi minority, which ISIS targeted with a campaign of genocide, the women shout: "Devil worshippers!"
Misconceptions about the ancient Yazidi religion have led to dozens of massacres over the centuries. When ISIS took over a third of Iraq in 2014, thousands of Yazidis were killed or captured as sex slaves.
"If they don't convert to Islam and they don't become Muslim like us and worship God, then they deserve it," an Iraqi woman says.
This camp, they complain, is full of infidels. There is music. Male and female guards wear tight clothing and smoke cigarettes. They say the men harass women.
They insist that everything was better in what they call al-dawla — the state.
"There, a woman would walk with her head held high and a man would lower his eyes," a Syrian woman says. "Here, it's the opposite."
The region's Kurdish Syrian leadership views the large numbers of radicalized women and children as a continued danger.
"The women and children who have been raised on the mentality of ISIS and terrorism need to be rehabilitated and reintegrated into their communities," says Abdulkarim Omar, a foreign relations official in the Kurdish region of northeast Syria. "Otherwise, they will be the foundations of future terrorism."
But there is little money or political will for reintegrating ISIS families in either Iraq or Syria.
At a smaller camp run by the Kurdish Syrian forces, ISIS wives from Western countries are exposed to lectures about how ISIS is not Islam and what ISIS did to Yazidis and other women.
But there are no similar programs at al-Hol camp for Syrian and Iraqi ISIS families — and there are very few in Iraq.
"Any official who goes for an hour and speaks to them can't change anything — are you a prophet that they would believe in you?" says Hisham al-Hashimi, an Iraqi counterterrorism expert in Baghdad.
"We have proposed [deradicalization] programs in the past, but no one has implemented them," says Ali Abbas Jahaker, a deputy director at Iraq's Ministry of Migration. Jahaker says the Iraqi government plans to repatriate 30,000 Iraqi women and children over three months but will not force the families to return against their will.
In Syria, camp officials say so far, fewer than 1,000 Iraqis have indicated they want to go home.
The women at al-Hol say they are there because ISIS leader Baghdadi told them to escape to save their children.
"This is the next generation of the caliphate," one of the women says. "If you talk to them, they have the true creed implanted in their minds. The true creed will remain."
And in fact, it's a girl from the Iraqi city of Tikrit who is among the most fervent in the group. She appears to be 11 or 12.
On judgment day, the girl tells us, God will pour molten metal in the ears of those who listen to music.
"The ones who are not covered, now I ask God in the next life to light the fires of hell with their hair!" she declares.
She says she went to school under ISIS — what she calls a proper school, with boys and girls segregated — and vows she won't go to school again until the caliphate returns.
They all believe it's just a matter of time.
Copyright 2024 NPR
