“The forces managed to capture ten ISIS terrorist cells that had been involved in terrorist acts and were preparing for other terrorist acts” in the fourth day of the operation, said the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in a statement.
While combing the “female migrants” section of the camp – which houses foreign women with suspected links to ISIS – the SDF said they found “a decaying body of a woman who had been tortured and killed by the terrorist women of the so-called ‘Hisba’” which refers to the jihadists’ religious police.
Al-Hol camp is located in Hasaka province and has been branded a breeding ground for terrorism. The majority of people in the camp are originally from Syria and Iraq, though it also houses people from around the world who traveled to the Middle East to live in the so-called ISIS caliphate.
Kurdish authorities in northeast Syria have repeatedly called on the international community to repatriate their nationals from al-Hol, but many countries are hesitant to bring back their citizens due to security concerns.
The SDF, which controls northeast Syria, fought the lion’s share of the battle against ISIS and arrested thousands of the group’s fighters along with their wives and children when they crushed ISIS territorially and took the group’s last stronghold in Syria in 2019.
ISIS rose to power and seized swathes of Iraqi and Syrian land in a brazen offensive in 2014. While the group was declared territorially defeated in 2019, it continues to pose serious security risks through hit-and-run attacks, bombings, and abductions on both sides of the border.
