BEIRUT (Dispatches) – U.S.-backed Kurdish militants in northern Syria transferred to the Iraqi government more than 600 people related to Daesh terrorist group members who were detained at the al-Hol camp, a monitor says.
It is the fourth operation of its kind this year from the camp, which lies less than 10 kilometers from the Iraqi border.
In the latest transfer, around “620 people, relatives of Daesh members, left al-Hol,” coordinated between the camp administration and the Iraqi government, the so-called Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said in a statement.
The men, women and children belonged to 150 families and left the camp on Thursday, an official in the Kurdish administration told AFP.
Thousands of foreign extremists joined Daesh as militants, often bringing their wives and children to live in the “caliphate” declared by the group across swathes of Iraq and Syria in 2014.
The camp is located on the southern outskirts of the town of al-Hol in Syria’s energy-rich Hasakah province, where U.S. occupation forces and its allied militants are actively present. Besides the internally displaced, families of Daesh terrorists also reside there.
It houses around 55,000 people, the United Nations reported in June.
According to the official Iraqi News Agency, Iraq should repatriate 500 families in total from al-Hol camp this year.
The first repatriation of Iraqi Daesh families from the camp, involving around 300 people, took place in May last year.
In early June, Iraq repatriated another 50 Iraqi Daesh terrorists.
Iraq declared victory over Daesh in December 2017 after a three-year counter-terrorism military campaign, which also had the support of neighboring Iran.
The terror outfit’s remnants, though, keep staging sporadic attacks across Iraq, attempting to regroup and unleash fresh violence.
Daesh has intensified its terrorist attacks in Iraq since January 2020, when the United States assassinated top Iranian anti-terror commander General Qassem Soleimani and deputy commander of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) or Hashd al-Sha’abi, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, near Baghdad International Airport.
Iraqi anti-terror resistance groups have repeatedly warned Baghdad that the remnants of Daesh active in Syria’s U.S.-occupied east may find unhindered access to the Iraqi border and infiltrate into its western Anbar Province.
This is while the positions of the PMU and its affiliated resistance groups operating against Daesh in the border regions have repeatedly come under attack by the U.S. military over the past years.