A total of 780 individuals were returned to Iraq on Saturday evening and will be placed in al-Jadaa Center for Community Rehabilitation in Nineveh province, a member of the Iraqi parliament’s migration and immigrants committee told Rudaw English’s Karwan Faidhi Dri on condition of anonymity.
The MP said the families will stay in al-Jadaa camp until they are given clearance from the Interior Ministry to return to their homes after receiving their identification documents.
Al-Hol camp is located in northeast Syria’s Hasaka province and houses over 50,000 ISIS-linked people. The camp has infamously been branded a breeding ground for terrorism, with authorities describing it as a “ticking time bomb.” The camp residents come from around the world, but the bulk are Syrian and Iraqi.
The group of Iraqis who left the camp on Saturday traveled in buses with heavy security measures in place, according to the UK-based war monitor Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
Iraq has repatriated a total of 1,559 families, numbering 6,987 individuals, to al-Jadaa from Syria, according to documentation from the camp that Rudaw English has seen. The majority originally come from Iraq’s western Anbar province. Over half of the people in al-Jadaa camp are female, and more than 60 percent are under 18 years of age.
The repatriation of ISIS-linked citizens has sparked opposition in Iraq, with tribes unwilling to accept and welcome people associated with the group that committed atrocious human rights abuses and war crimes from 2014 to 2017, when they controlled vast swathes of the country.
Iraq has also brought home men accused of fighting for ISIS. Foreign Minister Fuad Hussein told American officials in June that Baghdad had returned around 3,000 ISIS-affiliated Iraqi fighters who had been detained in northeast Syria (Rojava). Most have been put on trial. The fighters had been arrested by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).
