Officials from the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES) announced the permission for residents of the al-Hol camp in eastern al-Hasakah to leave and return to their original areas in Syria.
AANES announced on Thursday, January 23, 2024, that it would allow Syrian citizens residing in the al-Hol camp to return “voluntarily” to their homes from which they were displaced.
It added that this decision had been made previously, on October 5, 2020, but the families residing in the camp refused to return due to the presence of the Assad regime. With the fall of the regime, there is now no reason for fear or to remain in the camp, according to AANES.
It pointed out that it will provide all necessary facilities and secure transportation for families wishing to leave the camp.
In a statement issued from inside the al-Hol camp, AANES called upon international humanitarian organizations to provide support and assistance to Syrian citizens who have been displaced to areas under its control due to the war in the country and are currently residing in the al-Arrisha, Mahmoudli, Tuwaihina, and Abu Khashab camps.
It said, “We also emphasize the necessity for the United Nations and the international community to take a firm stand regarding the issue of the displaced from Afrin, Tal Abyad, and Ras al-Ain, to enable them to safely return to their areas, with UN guarantees to protect them and secure their return.”
Since the fall of the Syrian regime, Washington has undertaken intensive efforts to urge countries to recover their citizens from Syria, who were accompanying fighters from the Islamic State group that controlled the region before 2019.
The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which is the military wing of the Autonomous Administration, manages prisons containing elements and fighters from the Islamic State group, part of whom are foreign. The SDF has previously urged their countries to retrieve them but has not made progress in this file.
After an American visit
On January 16 of this year, an American delegation visited the al-Hol and al-Roj camps for displaced persons in northeastern Syria, which together house more than 40,000 displaced individuals, according to the US Central Command (CENTCOM), which provided the latest figures regarding the camp’s inhabitants.
The US State Department had previously reported on July 19, 2024, that the al-Hol and al-Roj camps host approximately 27,000 people from more than 60 countries.
CENTCOM also noted that many of the camp residents are associated with the Islamic State group, warning of the “risks of creating a new generation of the group” without international efforts to return the fighters to their countries and rehabilitate and reintegrate them into their communities.
It added that the detention camps for Islamic State fighters contain more than 9,000 detainees from over 50 different countries, distributed across 12 detention centers guarded by the SDF, which constitutes a “military force of the group in detention.”