A notorious camp in Syria tied to alleged IS families is emptied as final convoy departs

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DAMASCUS, Syria (AP) — A notorious camp in Syria that once housed tens of thousands of women and children with alleged links to the Islamic State group has been emptied, officials said Sunday.

Fadi al-Qassem, the Syrian Foreign Ministry representative for the al-Hol camp administration, said the final convoy left the camp Sunday morning.

Hundreds of residents of the remote camp in northeastern Syria have been transferred to the Akhtarin camp in Aleppo province in recent weeks and others have been repatriated to Iraq.

Officials have said the decision to empty the al-Hol camp was made because of its remote location in the desert — far from services and close to areas where the authorities do not have complete control of the territory.

The U.N. refugee agency said it assisted in the return of 191 Iraqi citizens from Syria’s al-Hol camp to Iraq on Thursday.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a U.K.-based war monitor, also reported that an unspecified number of residents "left the camp individually, without waiting for the organized convoys.”

After the defeat of IS in 2019, around 73,000 people were living at al-Hol, most of them Syrian and Iraqi citizens but also including thousands from other countries. The camp’s residents are mostly women, including wives or widows of IS members, and their children.

Since then, the number has declined, with some countries repatriating their citizens, leaving about 24,000 as of last month.

The camp’s residents were not technically prisoners and most have not been accused of crimes, but they had been held in de facto detention at the heavily guarded facility for years.

Last month, Syrian government forces captured the al-Hol camp in a weekslong offensive against the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF, which had been running the camp near the border with Iraq for a decade. A ceasefire deal has since ended the fighting.

During and after the fighting, many families are believed to have escaped from the camp.

The fate of the similar but smaller Roj camp in northeastern Syria, which is still under SDF control, remains unclear. Most of the residents of that camp are foreigners, whose countries have largely refused to take them back.

Syrian authorities turned back a group of 34 Australian women and children on Feb. 16 after they left the Roj camp, headed toward Damascus to board a flight back to Australia. Australian authorities later said they would not repatriate the families.

A Syrian government official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment publicly said Sunday that the issue stemmed from “the lack of prior coordination with the Syrian government” by the SDF and families of the would-be returnees before attempting to send them to Damascus.

The official added that “whether they will be allowed (to return) will depend on the Australian government.”

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Associated Press writer Abby Sewell in Beirut contributed.