BAGHDAD— The
Al-Hol camp for displaced people in Syria is an extremist threat and should be
dismantled, a senior Iraqi security official said on Saturday.
اضافة اعلان
Al-Hol, in the Kurdish-controlled northeast,
is Syria’s largest camp for displaced people. It houses about 56,000 including
displaced Syrians and Iraqi refugees, some of whom maintain links with Daesh.
About 10,000 are foreigners, including
relatives of Islamist extremist.
“Each day that passes with the camp still
there, hate grows and terrorism thrives,” Iraq’s national security adviser,
Qassem Al-Araji, told an international conference about the camp.
Daesh “continues to represent a real threat
at Al-Hol,” Araji told delegates who included ambassadors from the US and
France.
The overcrowded camp is controlled by the
autonomous Kurdish administration and lies less than 10km from the Iraqi
border.
Araji called on foreign governments to
repatriate their citizens from Al-Hol, and urged rapid dismantlement of the
camp.
Most of Al-Hol’s residents are people who
fled or surrendered in Syria during the dying days of Daesh’s self-proclaimed
“caliphate” in March 2019.
Since then, Syria’s Kurds and the UN have
repeatedly urged foreign governments to repatriate their nationals, but this
has only been done in dribs and drabs, out of fear that they might pose a
security threat back home and trigger a domestic backlash.
Baghdad proclaimed victory against Daesh at
the end of 2017 but remnants of the group have continued to mount hit-and-run
attacks.
In January, Daesh fighters carried out their
biggest assault in Syria in years, attacking a prison in the Kurdish-controlled
northeastern city of Hasakeh, aiming to free a few Islamist extremists.
Almost a week of intense fighting left more
than 370 people dead, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a
Britain-based monitoring group.
Prisons run by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces
hold an estimated 12,000 Daesh members, and the group aims to mount further
operations similar to the January attack in a bid to free them, Araji said.
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