Syria
A member of Kurdish security forces watches as families load their belongings onto trucks before leaving al-Hol camp on November 16, 2020. Photo: Delil SOULEIMAN / AFP
ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — Doctors Without Borders (MSF) has expressed “profound concerns” over the security situation in northeast Syria’s al-Hol camp after a staff member was killed in February, the NGO announced on Tuesday.
“During the night of 24 February, a member of our team was killed in the tent in which they lived,” MSF said in a statement.
Alarm has been raised over the increasingly volatile security situation in the camp, where many people, including several Iraqi refugees, have been killed in recent months.
According to MSF, around 30 people have been killed in al-Hol since January, most of them killed with guns, others either caught in the crossfire or other incidents.
“The authorities have a responsibility to provide people with safety and security at all times,” said Will Turner, MSF’s Emergency Manager. “This is not a safe environment and certainly not a suitable place for children to grow up in. This nightmare must stop.”
Sheikhmous Ahmed, head of the office for internally displaced persons and refugees in the self-ruling Kurdish administration, said two Syrian children and a woman died on February 27 after a fire started during a wedding at the camp.
The child of an off-duty MSF staff member also died in the fire, and three other colleagues were injured, MSF added.
Al-Hol houses nearly 62,000 refugees and displaced Syrians, the largest camp in the country. More than 80 percent of them are women and children. Foreigners in the camp are families of ISIS members. Most have been living in the camp since the territorial defeat of the group in 2019.
Conditions at al-Hol have been condemned by Human Rights Watch as “filthy and often inhuman.”
The camp is known to house thousands of foreign children born to families with suspected links to ISIS. UNICEF has called for all children in camps in northeast Syria to be immediately repatriated and reintegrated into society, as alarm grows over the increasingly unstable conditions in al-Hol.
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