Iraqi authorities have returned to the country hundreds more citizens of that country, linked to the extremist group Islamic State, from a large camp in northeastern Syria, Iraqi and Syrian officials announced today.
The Iraqi Ministry of Migration and Displaced Persons announced that around 700 Iraqis, mostly women and children, arrived last night in a camp near the city of Mosul, in northern Iraq, where they will go through a rehabilitation program with the help of international agencies to distance them from extremist ideology. .
Despite an aggressive repatriation campaign from Baghdad, Iraqis remain the most numerous of the nearly 43.000 residents of the Al-Hol camp in northeastern Syria, which houses women, widows, children and other family members of Islamic State extremists. Syrian nationals are second in number, while more than 6.000 people from 57 other countries are accommodated in the special Annex area.
Iraqi officials state that the Iraqis remaining in the Al-Hol camp would mean that they are "a ticking time bomb that could threaten the security of Iraq."
In 2014, the Islamic State declared a caliphate over much of the territory of Iraq and Syria and attracted tens of thousands of supporters from around the world. The international coalition led by the USA defeated the extremists in Iraq in 2017 and in Syria in 2019, after which tens of thousands of people associated with them were taken to the Al-Hol camp.
At one time, 73.000 people lived in the heavily guarded camp, which is overseen by the Kurdish-led, US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces.
According to Kurdish officials overseeing camps for displaced people in northeastern Syria, 187 families with 697 Iraqis were returned to Iraq yesterday, the 15th group to return home.
The Iraqi authorities state that so far 7.556 citizens have been returned to Iraq from Al-Hol and that they do not have accurate data on how many Iraqis are still in that camp.
The Hawar News news agency, which covers the autonomous Kurdish areas in Syria, states that there are another 42.781 people in the Al-Hol camp, among them 19.530 Iraqis, 16.779 Syrians and 6.461 members of other nationalities, while 11 residents have not been identified.
Bonus video:
