ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Security forces in northeast Syria (Rojava) rescued a Yazidi girl from the notorious al-Hol camp which houses Islamic State (ISIS) suspects, local media reported a month after two other Yazidi women were rescued from the facility.
A 15-year-old Yazidi girl was rescued by security forces in the camp, Hawar News Agency (ANHA) cited a Yazidi official as saying, adding that the camp’s administration has confirmed the girl’s rescuing.
The girl is from the village of Solagh in the ethnoreligious community’s heartland of Shingal across the Iraqi border.
North Press Agency (NPA) also confirmed the rescuing, saying the girl was kidnapped by ISIS when she was ten years old in 2014 during their brazen offensive across swathes of northern Iraq, when the terror group seized Shingal and inflicted countless atrocities on the Yazidi minority.
In September, the Kurdish Women’s Protection Units (YPJ) rescued two Yazidi women from al-Hol camp during a weeks-long operation targeting ISIS cells in the squalid facility that saw the arrests of 226 suspects, including 36 women, as well as the confiscation of various weapons and the dismantling of tents used by ISIS cells as courts and torture centers.
ISIS overran the Yazidi heartland of Shingal during their conquest of parts of Iraq and Syria in 2014, committing genocide against the ethnoreligious group. More than 6 thousand Yazidis were abducted and thousands remain missing with little done to bring solace to the rescued.
The majority of captives are held in the notorious al-Hol camp, according to data obtained by Rudaw English from Khayri Bozani, former head of the Yazidi affairs at the Kurdistan Regional Government’s (KRG) endowment ministry.
Al-Hol camp is located in Hasaka province and has infamously been branded a breeding ground for terrorism, with authorities describing the sprawling camp as a “ticking time bomb,” saying the situation in the camp is “very dangerous.”
The facility is home to around 56,000 people – mostly women and children of different nationalities that have links to ISIS and were taken to the camp after the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) overran the terror group’s last stronghold in Syria in 2019.
