The women of IS: Part one

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1:22You might mistake these sounds for a small market town, but this is no ordinary place. This was recorded in 2025 at the Al-Hol camp in northeastern Syria, which at its peak held some 70 ,000 people. In the middle of this desert, suddenly there's a massive city of tent appear, and then you go inside the city, every element is there. They had a bazaar, they had a tailor, they had a baker. You could see people sell stuff. They talk about 60 nations having presence in these camps. Some children grew up in the camps having never seen a normal building, a street, normal shops. It's a detention facility that is heavily guarded.

2:16In January, the Kurdish-led forces that were in charge of the camps withdrew, leaving them in the hands of the Syrian authorities. This power shift changed things beyond recognition and brought new uncertainties for the residents, most of whom are the women and children of jihadists from the Islamic State group. But there were many others with no link to the group who ended up there, and that's where the complexity of this story lies. The central problem is that it's almost impossible to tell who is genuinely committed to IS's ideology and who's just simply caught up in the whole ordeal. The weathered camps of Syria are back in the spotlight as their fate collides with a fast-changing geopolitical landscape.

3:05We explore the trauma behind the camps and find out what next for the women of IS.

3:17Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service. I'm Krassi Ivanova-Twigg and this is the Global Jigsaw from BBC Monitoring, where we look at the world through the lens of its media, exploring the narratives, the propaganda and the disinformation.

3:53The sprawling tent cities in the Syrian desert are remnants of a turbulent era. The US-led invasion of Iraq, the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, the Syrian uprising and the decade-long war that followed, and the rise and fall of the Islamic State Caliphate. The largest and most notorious of these camps is called Al-Hol. Our regional expert is Mohamed Al-Jumaili. The Al-Hul camp was actually established decades ago, in 1991 initially, for Gulf War refugees from Iraq. A United Nations refugee camp by the village of Al-Hul in northeast Syria, near the border with Iraq. And then it was closed. Iraqis were transferred back to Iraq.

4:37But then it reopened again in 2003. Actually, at the time when a lot of IS detainees were transferred to the camp, many of the residents of those camps had nothing to do with IS. They were there from before and they were kind of refugees. The camps for displaced people became a dumping ground for the women and children linked to an organisation notorious for its brutality. The Islamic State group, which once controlled large parts of Iraq and Syria, murdered tens of thousands of people and displaced and terrorised millions of others. The camps have frequently been described as a ticking time bomb.

5:14After the fall of Mosul in 2017, the recapture of other Iraqi territory that IS held, thousands of Iraqi IS fighters and their families fled across the border to Syria, where IS still had territory.

5:35So when IS lost its last bits of territory in Syria in 2019 in Baghuz, The SDF pretty much rounded up all these fighters and their families, and families were transferred to Al-Hol. The SDF, or the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, were instrumental in defeating the Islamic State group. In the aftermath, they became the custodians of a number of detention facilities holding IS fighters and their families. Jihar Gol from BBC Persian has reported on this story from the ground. The Kurds were the woods on the grounds to fight ISIS with the support of U.S.-led correlation. These people were the most reliable ally.

6:19More than 9 ,000 people died defeating ISIS.

6:26The last battle in Baghuz, most battle-hardened ISIS foreign jihadists who has nowhere to go, they eventually surrounded. I remember this image of the Kurdish women lining them up and transporting them to a prison. It was a historic image because ISIS was pretty much about controlling women, controlling or enslaving Yazidi Kurdish women. A few years later, those people were themselves in the hand of these women. They were put behind bars. They housed them in the Kurdish-controlled region in northeast of Syria. As the years rolled on, the temporary holding sites for IS families became anything but.

7:10Tens of thousands languished there for years. Our jihadist media analyst Mina Al-Lami has been keeping a close watch. It was thought of as a temporary solution for IS-linked families in 2019, but it's grown into this odd city of tents. It's really subject to overbearing heat in the summer and the cold and the rain in the winter. It's like a slum made of tents where the humanitarian conditions are relatively poor. Because there was a huge influx of families and women and children. And there was no real plan initially of how to, I guess, rehabilitate them and repatriate. Many Iraq was reluctant to receive them because they didn't have the appropriate facilities to bring them back and screen them, allow them to reintegrate into society.

8:01The legal frameworks as well hadn't been established. The camps' residents weren't only from Iraq and Syria. That's just one piece of the jigsaw. Many of those jihadis were from like a Balkan, from former Soviet countries like Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Uyghur from China or Europeans, British. Their country of origin didn't allow them to go back. Many of those Iraqis were afraid to go back because of the revenge by Shia against them. Many Syrian families of the jihadists, they were afraid to go back because their husband, their brothers, their father, they killed many people. The camps became home for tens of thousands of people from all over the world.

8:45Victims of unimaginable atrocities, living side by side with those accused of committing them. During his visits, Jiar got a glimpse of life inside the tent city.

9:01They had a bazaar, they had a tailor, they had a baker. Women, they were selling vegetables, they were selling goods. Like a small town, but obviously with less facilities. And I was struck by so many children. And it was clear many of them were born in the camp. It was no longer a refugee camp in any meaningful sense. Anyone entering required heavy protection, especially in one section called the Annex, where hostility came from all corners.

9:37Those young children I came across, seven, eight years old, they're spitting on us, raising on Allah, but Daesh, Islamic State, is still alive. We are alive. When they see you are a foreigner, they try to attack you, they try to insult you, they try to spit on you, they try to throw a stone at you. And it's very sad. I think you see these children being indoctrinated by their own parents or because they believe in the cause. Many of these people in the past, I'm sure, they had a house, they had a family, they had a tribe, they had relatives around them, and suddenly found themselves in a camp.

10:13Obviously, they have lost their family members, their husband, their wives, their sons. They're very vengeful. There were so many people also caught in the middle of this conflict, had nothing to do with it. Because of the mix of backgrounds and the ever-present threat of violence, the tent city was divided into its own segregated neighbourhoods. One section is the families, the children of Iraqi and Syrian ISIS families. But there was a section called Foreign Section, which was the most dangerous part of it. You couldn't enter without proper guard and armored vehicle.

10:58We were told there might be a weapon inside the camp. We were told there is smuggling going back and forth. They may tunnel and go out, come back. and we have to be guarded in a moment your neck could be slashed because still there is ISIS sleeper's cells.

11:19Women come toward us saying we are from Afghanistan, from Tajikistan, from China, some of them British, some of them German. And I asked them, why you don't want to go back to your country? Your children, they need a school.

11:36and women say oh they don't need school we teach them here they have their own sharia police in the foreign camp they had their own sharia court. Zhiar took away the impression that the power structure had formed inside the camp. Those seemingly in control made their allegiance clear by raising an IS flag. When we were entering the camp there were clearly some people in charge. It looked like actually they are the one who allow somebody to talk, what to say, how to say it. Some of them knew a few words in English when they were interviewing, you are terrorists. And America is the British are terrorists, BBC is terrorists.

12:16They were very angry. Their anger has been fuelled by their treatment at the camp. One of the guards had a sexual relationship with some of those women, most likely forcibly. By the time we went there, the entire guards of the foreign camps, it was only women and children. It was only a stiff woman. Kurdish women guarding the site. Kurdish women, no men anymore. And the reason I was told was because we would have taken advantage of some of those women. And what are the Kurds saying about those accusations? There was an Amnesty International report. I talked to them, Ashi. They said there is always bad apple everywhere, but we removed them, we punished them.

12:52An Amnesty International report details a catalogue of abuse directed at IS detainees kept in facilities in Syria, including beatings and sexual violence. Their Kurdish guards are said to be on the receiving end of retaliation attacks. So what, if anything, have we heard from the women in Al-Hol? Mina has been monitoring the jihadist chat rooms. We have, of course, come across accounts that claim to be from the camps and that they always share images and footage of their daily life and what they're going through. Or if there was a security operation by the SDF and they're claiming that there have been violations, they would upload these and say, look, they've searched our tent and look at all the destruction.

13:36So there have been such accounts. I would say some of them might be genuine accounts from the camps. These women clearly seem to have mobile phones. And we see actually from the IS supporters, there's calls for money to top up because they need to communicate with the outside world. Violence and raids were not the only issues upsetting the residents of Al-Hol and Al-Raj. One of the issues that really angered the women was the move by the SDF to separate families. When they reached puberty, the boys would be removed and they would be even actually moved in prisons holding IS fighters. In other situations, it would be in facilities holding adolescent boys.

14:17That was also very controversial. On the other hand, it's the possibility of further radicalization. As boys grew up in the camp, many under the influence of their devout mothers, they became a potential security risk in the eyes of their Kurdish guards. But human rights organizations stress that this separation policy violates international law. And the mothers have been vocal. I came across a mother. They normally don't talk to foreigners, but they were coming to our dozen pleading, can you help us to bring my son? I haven't seen him. I want him to be with me. It's a very delicate situation.

14:55How do you want to deal with that? I don't know. Also, there was Omnis International complaining about removing young men from those camps. And actually, I asked the authorities. They said, those kids, when they reach puberty, they want to marry them off to very young girls. They say when there was a protest there, those young boys were more violent, attacking these guards. They set many tents on fire, difficult to control them. Simply they take them to another place to re-educate them. That was the term they used. What Zhiar described earlier as brief moments of danger for visitors has been a constant threat for many of the other residents, with murders reported and bodies found in ditches.

15:39You can't find a woman with a normal scarf. All of them cover their face. Those women who remove their veil, hijab, it would be very dangerous for them. There are women who have publicly renounced IS and they have expressed their regret of having joined. Some women have talked about being minors or teenagers when they joined IS, when they had this mistaken view about IS that they got from social media or from propaganda. Many foreigners said we're not radical. We were deceived. We were trapped. We don't want to be part of this anymore. So they would remove them from those camps and take them to a liberal and safer camp.

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18:15And unparalleled collections of Jane Austen, Agatha Christie and more. It's time to see it differently with BritBox. Watch with a free trial now at BritBox.com. You are listening to the documentary from the BBC World Service. So how did this diverse group of people end up in the camps? Here's Barry Marston from our jihadist media team with a breakdown of the nationalities. The vast majority are Syrians and Iraqis, but also a very substantial number, what are called third country nationals, Asians, Europeans, Africans, very substantial number from Central Asia, highly significant numbers from Europe, from the Middle East.

19:01They talk about 60 nations having presence in these camps. It's clear that not everyone in there was subscribing to jihadist ideology. Some had no links to the Islamic State group whatsoever. But distinguishing between them is far from straightforward. Woods. It's actually quite difficult to really tell who is genuinely committed to IS's ideology and who's just simply caught up in the whole ordeal. Children are generally treated as victims and there is this ongoing debate about whether many of these women are victims or whether they're perpetrators. Sometimes it's a bit of both and that's where the kind of complexities lie.

19:41Women from Iraq and Syria, they simply found themselves under IS rule without having chosen to be part of IS. IS simply took their areas. There were women whose husbands joined IS and they were coerced into following their husbands. Some reports say that the foreigners tend to be still more committed because a lot of these foreign women had voluntarily travelled and joined IS, whereas some women from Iraq and Syria, again, found themselves there. Many women ended up in the so-called caliphate because their home areas were overrun or their husbands forced them to go. As for the foreign women who travelled to join, ideology, often shaped through remote online grooming, was one factor.

20:28But there might have been other motivations too. I would not overlook the romantic and even sexual allure. You were looking at young women, some of them from conservative Muslim families, and the pressure in some cases of an arranged marriage. And then all of a sudden you have this adventure of traveling to a foreign country and choosing to marry not just any Muslim, but a warrior, as Ayas presented this on social media, with their weapons, their beards. In her first BBC interview in 2019, the British teenager Shamima Begum spoke about what drew her in. Shamima, you say that one of the reasons that you joined the Islamic State was because you watched some beheading videos.

21:18Is that right? I mean, not just the beheading videos. You know, the videos, they show, like, families and stuff in the park, you know, the good life that they can provide for you. And not just the fighting videos, actually. But yeah, the fighting videos. Oh, I guess. I remember there was a very strong debate at the time between IS supporters and other hardline Islamists who were anti-IS, whether a woman or a young girl is allowed without the permission of her parents to travel to IS territory. And these hardline Islamists were saying it is not allowed. IS was saying there is a caliphate and it's declared you are allowed to travel without your guardian's consent.

21:59There was also the pull of the image of the empowered woman the Islamic State group crafted in 2014 to entice potential female recruits. Even though Ayas wasn't promoting this officially in its official narratives, there were active female recruiters talking about how great life was under Ayas. Now on her Tumblr blog, Mahmoud lashes out at the West and gives girls advice on joining ISIS. How they were taking part in the Hizba police, which is a religious police, the female wing of that. There were images of women brandishing and holding weapons. So it was a different kind of image of the empowered jihadist woman, not the one who's meek and sitting behind closed doors.

22:42What the Hizba police actually did had nothing to do with empowering women. It was about keeping them in line on behalf of the group. They would monitor the behaviour of other women, how they dressed, how they behaved, but also it was more of an intelligence service to make sure that women towed the line, but also no one tried to escape. The role of women in the atrocities committed by IS is far from clear-cut. For all the propaganda promising empowerment, women were confined to behind-the-scenes support roles. But desperate times call for desperate measures. and in 2017 there was a new directive.

23:24When IS was about to lose its de facto capital of the caliphate Raqqa in Syria, IS really made a U-turn and they said when Islam is under existential threat then it is permissible for women to take part in the fighting and we saw an official IS propaganda video. We saw women in niqabs in Syria on the front lines alongside the men fighting. One traumatic episode that shocked the world raised further questions about women's involvement in IS crimes. In August 2014, thousands of Yazidis were massacred at Mount Sinjar in Iraq. Many women and girls, some as young as eight, were abducted and turned into sex slaves.

24:15What you're hearing is that harrowing recording of IS commanders selling and buying Yazidi girls. The UN defines the Islamic State Group's treatment of the Yazidis as genocidal. Women taking part in some of the atrocities had to do with them being complicit in the enslavement of the Yazidis. whether it's turning a blind eye to that or actively taking part in enslaving the Yazidi women. That atrocity continues to cast a long shadow to this day. Some of the victims having to live in the camps alongside their captors. The SDF were able to identify some of these women who said that we're not part of the ISIS network, we are enslaved Yazidi women.