ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - A refugee was killed early Saturday morning in the notorious al-Hol camp housing thousands of Islamic State (ISIS) affiliates in northeast Syria (Rojava), a conflict monitor reported.
The Syria man was gunned down “at dawn today [Saturday] in front of the Syrians mosque inside the camp,” the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) said.
The conflict monitor attributes the crime to ISIS sleeper cells that are active in the camp.
“The unknown gunman is likely to be from the Islamic State [ISIS] group,” SOHR noted.
The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) arrested thousands of ISIS fighters and their wives and children when they took control of the group’s last stronghold in Syria in March 2019. Most of these people are held at al-Hol, which is home to more than 60,000 people - mostly women and children of different nationalities.
The recent killing of the Syrian refugee is one of several recent incidents of murder at the camp. At least six people, including Iraqis, were killed in al-Hol last month, AFP reported SOHR as saying.
The camp reported 73 crimes that led to the death of 79 people, including security members, in the first eleven months of 2021, according to SOHR.
However, a media outlet affiliated with the Kurdish authorities in Rojava raised the toll to 126 crimes during that year, marking 2021 as “the deadliest” at the camp.
Al-Hol has been branded a breeding ground for terrorism. The camp’s internal security forces (Asayish) in late November, arrested 14 Iraqis that “confessed to killings, chaos, raiding reception centers and targeting internal security forces” inside the camp.
There have been repeated calls from Kurdish and US officials asking the international community to repatriate their nationals from al-Hol, but only a few countries have responded positively as they are worried about security concerns.
Russia has so far repatriated 233 children. A group of 194 people from 48 families left the camp in November.
