When the shooting starts, Sara tells her children to lie flat on the ground; the bullets, she said, can go straight through her family’s tent. Sara, who asked that her real name not be used, has been arbitrarily detained for nearly a decade in Roj camp in Syria’s far northeast, which holds more than 2,300 children and mothers, many of whom are held on the basis of alleged family or other associations with ISIL. Her children have grown up behind guarded fences topped with barbed wire and tangled with rubbish that often blocks the view of the barren, windswept landscape beyond.
United Nations experts and human rights groups describe open-ended detention in camps such as Roj as a breach of international law. In recent months, women in the camp told Al Jazeera that the situation has steadily escalated: gunfire at night, stones thrown by guards and a boy left with a serious head injury. Complaints to the administration, they say, bring promises but little else.
Al Jazeera cannot independently verify their accounts, but they match reports by UN investigators and NGOs. On September 8, the UN Independent Commission of Inquiry on Syria told the body’s Human Rights Council that conditions in Roj had worsened over the past year, with regular night raids, extortion and violence by camp security. It described the camp as the world’s largest site of mass arbitrary detention of women and children on security grounds.
The violence comes amid sweeping change in the region. On August 25, the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), once a key US ally in the fight against ISIL, announced it would dissolve as an independent military force under an agreement with Syria’s central government in Damascus. After a government offensive in January, the SDF lost much of the territory under its control and agreed to merge with the national army.
Its commander, Mazloum Abdi, has since been appointed a presidential adviser. Roj, which the SDF had controlled until last month, is now the Syrian state’s responsibility. But inside the camp, detainees said the transition has been anything but smooth.
One woman described to Al Jazeera a divided security presence, with those who accepted integration with the government on one side and holdouts who refused or were rejected on the other, and tensions between them that play out over the heads of the women and children. In an open letter published on Monday, 11 mothers in Roj wrote that many of the same guards remain. Children from more than 50 countries remain stranded in Syria.
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