Thread by @thetimes

#WorldatFive🌏: Richard Spencer reports from al-Hawl in Syria on the thousands of families living in internment camps after being displaced by the fall of ISIS.
thetimes.co.uk/article/soon-t…

Islam Haitham was found dead in a sewage ditch.

Her face is framed by curly black hair. Her eyebrows are unkempt, but they added extra character to a look that could easily be imagined as laughing. The entrance wound in her right cheek from the shot that killed her is neat.

No one knows why she was killed, at least among the camp authorities. The 20,000 black-clad women who occupy the Iraqi and Syrian section may have an inkling. They nod knowingly when asked about Islam but scurry on and refuse to talk about it.

Islam was almost certainly punished for a “crime” as judged by the Islamic State’s internal police force, the Hisbaa, which still operates in al-Hawl, beyond the authorities’ view, beneath its enforcers’ black abayas and veils.

“We don’t know why,” Mohammed Bashir, a camp administrator, says. “Maybe they killed her because they wanted to kill her.”

The details of Islam’s life are as unclear as those of her death. No one claimed her body. No mother mourned her.

Islam was 17, the 74th person and third child to be murdered this year in al-Hawl, the giant camp for Islamic State families in northeast Syria.

Al-Hawl is a modern phenomenon, a godforsaken place no one can forget, a gap in the world’s consciousness and conscience, its occupants neither ignored nor cared for, neither convicted nor helped – just collectively placed beyond sympathy and redemption.

Al-Hawl residents include families who fled the fighting and bombing of the coalition’s war on Isis in western Iraq, only to become stuck behind Isis lines as its last hold-outs over the border were surrounded by the Syrian Democratic Forces.

There are 58,000 occupants of al-Hawl, of whom about 60% are under 18. Of these, only about one in five attend lessons regularly. The rest loiter around their tents, or, as they get older, make trouble. There is, after all, very little point to their existence here.

This month, some families were moved from al-Hawl to northeast Syria’s second camp in al-Roj, best known as home to Shamima Begum.

Begum, along with other Western women and their children, are held in limbo at the camps.

Save the Children say that 1,163 young people have been repatriated from the camps since 2017. But the countries prepared to do so have finished their work. The figure for this year adds up to 14.

Britain has taken four, in total, out of about 60 with a claim to nationality.

You can read the full story here: thetimes.co.uk/article/soon-t…