SOHR: Iraqi official warns of jihadist threat from Syrian camp

Al-Hol, in the Kurdish-controlled northeast, is Syria’s largest camp for displaced people. It is home to around 56,000 people, including displaced Syrians and Iraqi refugees, some of whom have links to the Islamic State (IS) group.

About 10,000 are foreigners, including relatives of jihadists.

“With each passing day with the camp still there, hatred grows and terrorism thrives,” Iraq’s national security adviser Qassem al-Araji told an international conference about the camp.

IS “continues to pose a real threat to Al-Hol”, Araji told delegates who included ambassadors from the United States and France.

The overcrowded camp is controlled by the Kurdish Autonomous Administration and is less than 10 kilometers (six miles) from the Iraqi border.

Araji called on foreign governments to repatriate their citizens from Al-Hol and urged the rapid dismantling of the camp.

Most of Al-Hol’s residents are people who fled or traveled to Syria during the final days of IS’s self-proclaimed “caliphate” in March 2019.

Since then, the Kurds in Syria and the United Nations have repeatedly urged foreign governments to repatriate their nationals, but this has only been done sparingly, lest they pose a security threat. in them and trigger an inner reaction.

Baghdad declared victory against ISIS in late 2017, but the remnants of the group continued to mount blitzes.

In January, IS fighters carried out their biggest assault in Syria in years, attacking a prison in the Kurdish-held northeastern town of Hasakeh, in a bid to free other jihadists.

Nearly a week of intense fighting has 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 house around 12,000 ISIS members, and the group aims to stage other operations similar to the January attack in an effort to free them, Araji said.

Since that assault, Iraq has started building a concrete wall along the border in an effort to stop jihadist infiltration.

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