One of his sons ran at the attacker and was shot in the face. As Hamid turned to greet him, the man fired a pistol. He was wearing Adidas sneakers and track pants, as if he had just come from the soccer field, and he’d covered his face in a shemagh. As Hamid paused in front of his tent, to suggest to his family that they erect a wall to protect themselves, a man approached. Teen-agers were loitering on a lot that served as a soccer field, though it lacked goalposts. Some days later, Hamid and a few of his sons were walking home from a tent used as a mosque. The role filled him with pride-his great fear wasn’t penury or dispossession but to be thought of as not useful. Before long, he was serving as an advocate for the camp’s tens of thousands of Syrians to the authorities. He roved from tent to tent, insuring that detainees received their allotments of the camp’s two official provisions: bread and cooking gas, both of which are supplied by non-governmental organizations. But Hamid threw himself into camp life, befriending neighbors and smoothing over daily calamities. He and his family had arrived in Al-Hol after fleeing the war-an outcome that might have reduced someone less resourceful to despair. Hamid, who possessed the regal bearing of a man accustomed to addressing tribal gatherings, had a well-grooved Bedouin face and wore a checkered shemagh scarf swirled around his gray hair. One afternoon in January, 2021, I visited Hamid’s tent, which he’d outfitted with floor cushions and hanging bulbs, in an homage to the bungalow that he’d had on the outside. “There isn’t a problem on this earth I cannot solve,” Hamid told me. Identifying an intermediary who had the ear of the jailers was crucial, and after much searching Jihan believed that she’d found just the person: a fifty-four-year-old inmate named Hamid al-Shummari, who promised that he would raise her case with the authorities. Such beneficence could take years, though, or might never come. The safest approach was to wait for the camp’s security officials to decide, through a secretive process that no prisoner quite understood, that you didn’t pose a threat, or to confirm that you’d never belonged to isis in the first place. This carried great risk, though, and required huge sums of cash. Some guards were corrupt, and she occasionally heard of prisoners bribing their way out. Jihan, who arrived in the camp in 2018, spent years plotting escape. The smell of sand and raw sewage is overwhelming. Some days, simoom winds blast open tent flaps, covering residents with dust. Above this canvas metropolis loom red water towers whose tanks are known to teem with worms. To stand in one of the camp’s alleys is to feel a type of vertigo: in every direction, rows of tents-U.N.-issued blue nylon and polyester patched together with white and beige scraps of fabric-stretch to the horizon. Assassination cells gun down inmates accused of passing information to camp authorities.įor years, I have been visiting Al-Hol with a health-related humanitarian organization. All-female squads of religious police pressure women to cover head to toe in the black niqab violators have been dragged to makeshift Sharia courts, where judges order floggings and executions. But the camp itself-block after block of dirt lanes and tents-is effectively under the control of its isis inmates. The Kurdish fighters guard the camp’s perimeter in swat vehicles, and a primarily Kurdish civilian administration manages the camp bureaucracy, coördinating with aid organizations to distribute rations and deliver such basic services as sewage treatment and water. They are largely backed by the United States, but the Pentagon declines to specify how much it spends annually on Al-Hol. troops, is under the aegis of a beleaguered force of mostly Kurdish fighters-soldiers who had previously aligned with the Americans to defeat isis. The camp, which is in a region of Syria still protected by several hundred U.S. The United Nations has called Al-Hol a “blight on the conscience of humanity.” All the residents are under indefinite detention, as no plans have apparently been made to prosecute any of them-imagine if Guantánamo were the size of a city, and its inmates were mostly women and children. More than half the population are children, the majority of whom are younger than twelve. Some were thrown into isis’s orbit by force: Yazidis enslaved by commanders, teen-age girls married off by their families. But many others have no links to the Islamic State and fled to the camp to escape the punishing U.S.-led bombing campaign. Many of the adults had either joined isis or been married to someone who’d joined. The detainees hail from more than fifty countries: Chinese and Trinidadians and Russians and Swedes and Brits live alongside Syrians and Iraqis. About fifty thousand people are currently imprisoned in Al-Hol, which is named for a dilapidated nearby town.
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