GENEVA, Switzerland — More than 100 people,
including many women, have been murdered in a
Syrian camp in just 18 months,
the UN said Tuesday, demanding countries repatriate their citizens.
اضافة اعلان
The Al-Hol camp is increasingly unsafe and the child
detainees are being condemned to a life with no future, said Imran Riza, the UN
resident coordinator in Syria.
Al-Hol, in the Kurdish-controlled northeast, was
meant as a temporary detention facility.
However, it still holds about 56,000 people, mostly
Syrians and Iraqis, some of whom maintain links with
Daesh, which seized
swathes of Iraq and Syria in 2014.
The rest are citizens of other countries, including
children and other relatives of Daesh fighters.
Some 94 percent of the detainees are women and
children, Riza, who has visited Al-Hol a handful of times, told reporters in
Geneva.
“It’s a very harsh place and it’s become an
increasingly unsafe place,” he said.
There have been “around 106 murders since January
last year in the camp” and “many” of the victims were women, he added.
“There’s a great deal of gender-based violence ...
There’s a lot of no-go areas.”
The UK-based
Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said violence was spiking in the camp, with another murder Tuesday — the
seventh since June 11.
Out of 24 people murdered inside the camp this year,
16 were women, the Observatory added.
Riza said there were around 27,000 Iraqi detainees,
18–19,000 Syrians and around 12,000 third-country citizens.
While there have been some repatriations to Iraq,
many other countries which “need to be accepting their people back” were
refusing to do so.
“The majority of the population there are children.
They are innocent. If you leave them in a place like Al-Hol, you’re essentially
condemning them to not having a future.”
Riza said that when boys get to 12, 13, and 14, they
are taken away from their families and put into a different center, where their
future is one of radicalization and joining a militia.
“The only solution is emptying the camp,” he said.
Syria’s civil war erupted in 2011 after the violent
repression of protests demanding regime change.
It quickly spiraled into a complex conflict that
pulled in numerous actors, including Islamist extremist groups and foreign
powers. The war has left around half a million people dead and displaced
millions.
Riza said the levels of need in Syria were
unprecedented and increasing, with 14.6 million people requiring humanitarian
assistance — up 1.2 million since 2021 and the highest since the civil war
began.
Riza said the country was facing a “cascade of
crises”, with the key factor now the economic decline dragging down
socio-economic conditions.
“The impact on Syrians is devastating and families are
increasingly pushed into destitution,” he said, with more than 90 percent of
the population estimated to live below the poverty line.
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