At just 12 years old, Ali has endured things no child should see, spending half his life in a makeshift prison camp for families associated with jihadists, tucked away in the desolate reaches of northeastern Syria
He knows not to dream of freedom. Instead he fantasizes about having a football. “Can you get me one?” he said, as if he was asking for the Moon.
Five years after the fall of the Islamic State group’s brutal “caliphate”, tens of thousands of women and children linked to the jihadists are still being held by the US-backed Kurdish forces in camps rife with violence and abuse, with seemingly no clear plan of what to do with them.
More than 40,000 inmates, half of them children, are cooped up behind the barbed wire fences and watchtowers of the windswept al-Hol camp run by Washington’s Kurdish allies.
The children of the jihadists’ failed project live out a grim existence in tattered, tightly packed together tents with little water and limited access to sanitation. Few go to school.
Many have never seen a television or tasted ice cream.
Some boys are taken from their mothers by the guards once they reach 11 in violation of international law, a UN expert found, with the Kurdish authorities claiming it is to stop them being radicalized.
They admit the jihadists still exercise control in parts of the camp through fear, punishments and even murder.
One former inmate told AFP that ISIS paid pensions to some widows.
Even Ali is old enough to be terrified of them. “They enter tents at night and kill people,” he said.
“It’s not a life for children… they are paying the price for something they didn’t do,” an aid worker told AFP.
When the extremists were finally defeated in March 2019, families of suspected jihadists were trucked north to al-Hol from the last holdout in Baghouz.
Five years on, dozens of countries are still refusing to take back their nationals with SDF leader Mazloum Abdi, whose soldiers guard the Western-funded camp, calling it “a ticking time bomb”.
“How can our children dream if they’ve never seen the outside world?” a mother of five held in the high-security annex reserved for foreign women and their children told AFP.
Two thirds of the annex’s 6,612 inmates are children, according to the camp’s administrators.
