The chaos unfolding this week in the camps and prisons of Northeast Syria has been predictable for years. It was simply never sustainable for a non-State armed group (the Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF) to conduct mass arbitrary detention with the sustaining support of Western and other States that have an overt interest in avoiding the repatriation from those camps of their own nationals accused of association with ISIS/Daesh. More than that, as we have consistently opined (here and here), this mass arbitrary detention was fundamentally and always inconsistent with international law. Moreover, this systematic unrestrained detention in appalling conditions has enabled other serious breaches such as systematic torture, disappearances, and the forcible separation of children. The major camps such as al Hawl, al Roj, and the prison systems connected to them represented an indefensible black legal hole. No meaningful global action on the camps and prisons was sought in recent years, despite warnings (including from us, in our prior respective capacities as the U.N. Special Rapporteur on counter-terrorism and human rights and the legal advisor to the Special Rapporteur) about the illegality and unsustainability of the status quo. Renewed conflict in the region by the military forces of the new Syrian government has changed that equation with a take-over of SDF-held territory in Northeast Syria in late January.
But rather than a humane and human-rights compliant solution to the glaring problems presented by this mass arbitrary detention, we are seeing early indications that even worse may be coming. A hasty, ill-planned transfer of control of Al-Hawl from SDF to Syrian government control has led to the cessation of humanitarian support, leaving detainees (including thousands of children) without food and basic medical supplies. Unsurprisingly, those within have sought to escape. Many of them are Syrians who have not seen their communities and family for years; others may wish to escape for other, less commendable reasons (including a return to ISIS-supporters). Security for a detainee community of this scale will be gruelling.
It is naïve at best to assume that newly minted Syrian security forces with little to no experience in managing a population of this kind will be up to the task of managing this complex humanitarian and security task. United Nations administrative responsibilities for the camp, which were agreed in December 2025 but only enacted on January 22, leaves the U.N. in a precarious situation of responsibility for a detainee population that has been denied any semblance of legal process throughout the duration of their detention. It is also entirely unclear what the day-to-day relationship between the U.N. and the new camp administration will be, and more particularly what role the U.N, may have in the decisions being made about the fate of thousands of men, women, and children detained. For now, we know that UNHCR has some humanitarian access to both al Hawl and al Roj, but not much more than that is clear, especially U.N. influence on transfers out of the camps and prisons.
The new owners of Al Hawl inherit a closed detention camp where the conditions are so dire that they amount to torture and ill-treatment as a matter of international law, where insecurity is prevalent, and access for essential humanitarian needs has been consistently insufficient. Practices by the detaining authority in the Kurds have also been found by the former U.N. Special Rapporteur on counter-terrorism and human rights (author Ní Aolain) to implicate core crimes as a matter of international law. These inhumane conditions must end so that no child in Al Hawl continues to experience the exceptional harm that has defined their lives since 2017.
The prison situation for men and boys is even more concerning. News emerging in recent days that CENTCOM and other States of the coalition against Daesh have agreed (and started) to transfer potentially thousands of detainees from Syria to Iraq. This raises profound human rights concerns. The language used by CENTCOM and other States to describe detainees (”ISIS terrorists”) has been dehumanizing and carries a presumption of guilt. This risks erasure of the rights of individual detainees in the high-security prisons, as not one of these detainees has had any legal process to determine their status or to review the legality of their detention, and bar legally unrecognized SDF processes none have actually been tried and convicted on terrorism charges during their long period of detention at the camp.
Moreover, the scale of these numbers makes it likely that a massive number of children and women will be included in the transfer. The obvious point is that mass transfers from one inhumane detention situation without legal process, to a prison system in Iraq that has been the subject of sustained concerns by the U.N. and others on due process and torture grounds is a clear non-refoulement problem. As a corollary of the absolute prohibition of torture, States are forbidden under binding international human rights law, including article 3 of the Convention Against Torture and article 7 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, from transferring individuals from their jurisdiction, effective control, or authority when there are substantial grounds for believing that the person would be at risk of irreparable harm upon return or transfer, including persecution, torture, ill-treatment, enforced disappearance, or other serious human right violations. The apparent acquiescence of States to the transfer of their nationals to Iraq, or the fact that it is carried out by the international coalition, does not solve this human rights problem. Terrorism trials in Iraq are notoriously problematic. Iraq’s counter-terrorism law has been rightly criticized as opaque and lacking precision. In multiple cases, criminal charges based on the mere fact of association or membership with a terrorist group has been upheld on grounds that would simply not hold water in systems that require rigor in determining association in criminal activities. Individuals that are transferred from prisons and camps in Syria are almost certainly headed to terrorism trials that have been roundly castigated as short, manifestly unfair, and lacking even the most minimal protection for individual rights. Worryingly, the transfers that have been enacted so far appear to have made no distinction for now-adult men who were initially detained as children or adolescents. At this point, no information is forthcoming on who precisely has been transferred and what nationalities are in the hands of the Iraqi government.
And for former detainees transferred to Iraq whose countries of origin have no problem with or maintain the death penalty, we can envisage widespread use of the mandatory death penalty for persons who do end up with convictions of terrorism. There is a certain irony in widespread concern by States in the widespread use of the death penalty in Iran and no scruples at all in sending their own nationals to the same fate in Iraq. Further, we have not heard, so far, from States that have abolished the death penalty asking the Iraqi government to refrain from using it against their own nationals. All of this, which essentially might be described as legalized mass rendition, has eery reminders of post-9/11 transfers across borders, also justified in the name of counterterrorism. The result of that post 9/11 misadventure has been well-documented, including the long-term mobilization it spurred among radicalized groups. Moreover, it functions to prove the point that for many States (including democracies) the language of human rights is “pick and choose,” a kind of à la carte menu that can be discarded upon designating individuals, including women and children, as a terrorist (with or without evidence).
So, what next? Urgently, the mass transfers that involve systematic non-refoulement practices must cease. The new Syrian government must expediently provide security and safety to the detainee population in the camps, including the provision of basic humanitarian assistance. In particular, the government must ensure access to electricity and heat in the freezing cold of winter as an absolute necessity for their incarcerated population. Inheriting scalar human rights violations does not permit the continuance or sustainment of those violations. In short, the new Syrian government must conduct lawful status determinations for the women, men, and children in Al Hawl and Al Roj, and it must do so expediently to ensure a lawful, human rights-complaint way forward. This requires bringing legal process to bear on detention and seeking the cooperation and technical support of supportive States (and, as appropriate, the U.N.) to marshal legitimate, rule-based processes of determination requiring individual-assessment of each person detained. More urgently, States must repatriate their own nationals and start the necessary process of reintegration. There is some hope to be found on that front. Countries who have brought back their nationals are generally doing so effectively; lives are being rebuilt, children are being educated and supported, and those who should be prosecuted are indeed being brought to justice in national courts. It is not too late to get this right, and to mitigate the harm of acquiescence to mass, arbitrary detention in Syria. The legacies of arbitrary detention in Syria are immense; fair process in Northeast Syria could be the start to undoing them. This would be a singularly impactful step towards undo the grim legacy of detention in the region since 2017.
Author’s note: This article was written in the authors’ personal capacities, and all views expressed here are their own.
