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.
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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. “Every cry for help results in another wave of aggression,” one mother said.
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.
Who really controls the camp?
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.
“While individuals’ [affiliations] may have changed,” one woman told Al Jazeera, “the people themselves remain the same”.
No legal basis for detention
Children from more than 50 countries remain stranded in Syria.
None has been given an individual legal process to determine why they are held, or for how long.
Fionnuala Ni Aolain, who served as UN special rapporteur on counter-terrorism and human rights from 2017 to 2023 and now sits on its inquiry commission, visited the camp in 2023.
Upwards of 70,000 people were once detained in al-Hol, another larger camp in the northeast holding the families of alleged ISIL fighters. In 2023, more than 52,000 people – mostly Syrians and Iraqis – were held in al-Hol and Roj, including an estimated 12,000 foreign nationals.
She found that conditions met “the threshold for torture under international law”. The violence women and children face now, she told Al Jazeera, is worse.
“It is utterly unacceptable that women and children who have never been convicted of any crimes, who have never been subject to any legal process, are being detained in this way,” she said.
There is no legal basis for their arbitrary detention, she said, adding that the remedy is release.
In January, order at al-Hol collapsed in chaos. The fate of thousands who had been held there remains unknown.
Beatrice Eriksson, a spokesperson for the Swedish branch of the rights organisation Repatriate the Children, which has been in contact with hundreds of mothers in the camps since 2019, told Al Jazeera that boys have been taken from their mothers as young as 12 or 13 and initially held in so-called rehabilitation centres.
Some have since been transferred to Iraq, she said, where they were detained in a makeshift prison for adult alleged ISIL fighters. The whereabouts of others remain unknown.
Eriksson argues that integrating former SDF-controlled forces and administrative structures into the Syrian government could provide an opportunity for change.
She said responsibility for the families has shifted from a non-state group to an internationally recognised government with which most of their home countries have diplomatic relations.
However, some detainees told Al Jazeera that they feel trapped. Governments tell them to reach out to an embassy, but their detention makes that impossible.
Ni Aolain said the responsibility does not just lie with the Syrian government, which is “doing its best to manage the massive post-conflict needs of the population as a whole”.
Instead, she said part of the blame clearly lies with foreign governments, “who have remained persistently stony-faced and unwilling to accept responsibility for their nationals”.
“It is not consistent with solidarity and support for a transitional state, and it’s an abdication of both their human rights and their security responsibilities to Syria”, she said.
For the women and children in Roj camp, the current situation is not sustainable.
“We want the next steps to begin where we’ll see an end to the suffering of our children,” one woman told Al Jazeera, “even if that means going to prison back home.”
At the time of publication, Syria’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Expatriates had not responded to Al Jazeera’s request for comment on the reports of violence at Roj as well as the government’s plans for the camp and its detainees.
The camp administration also did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.
