Jump to We Are Mothers in Syria’s Roj Camp. Help Us Bring Our Children Home, an open letter from 11 Mothers in Roj Camp, Northeast Syria.
Jump to Camp Detentions in Northeast Syria Lack Any Legal Basis and Must End by Fionnuala Ní Aoláin.
Introduction
By Beatrice Eriksson
Seven years ago, I aided one of the very first repatriations of children from al-Hol Camp in northeast Syria. Seven orphaned siblings were brought to Sweden, their country of origin. Their parents had left Sweden in 2014 to join the so-called Islamic State and were killed around the time of its territorial defeat in early 2019. The children, then between 1 and 8 years old, were swept up into the camp along with more than 70,000 people ultimately held there on suspicion (often with little evidence) of links to the Islamic State. Unlike too many others, these children were given a new chance in life when they were allowed to leave shortly thereafter.
I still meet these children regularly, and it is incredible to follow their development and see the lives they have built. They are a testimony to what is possible and what other families still being held dream of, as expressed so urgently in the open letter below from 11 mothers still being held in another smaller, but similar camp, Roj.
Instead of growing up in an environment shaped by violent extremism, the children in Sweden are safe, going to school, making friends and engaging in hobbies. Two years after we arrived in Sweden with the seven siblings, Sweden repatriated most of the remaining Swedish children, together with their mothers, from al-Hol and Roj camps. These children, too, have integrated successfully into Swedish society. Their mothers have been investigated by law enforcement. Those found guilty of crimes have faced the justice system, while others have disengaged from the violent extremist environment and built new lives, studying at university or working full-time to support themselves and their children.
If I was able to show these families to the world today, no one would ever guess that they were once referred to as “ISIS families.” Now the world would see that they are simply ”families.”
But others are still, seven years later, stranded in the same hopeless situation of arbitrary detention and forced displacement in Syria. More than 2,400 children and mothers are still held against their will in Roj Camp and other detention facilities, while others previously held in al-Hol Camp have been dispersed across different parts of Syria after the camp collapsed under uncontrolled circumstances earlier this year. The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces — which had controlled northeast Syria, including the camps — agreed with the government of Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa in January to integrate into the Syrian army, but continued to control Roj and some other detention facilities until last month, when the SDF announced its dissolution as part of the integration process.
A new chance in life should be available to all these families: repatriation, reintegration and rehabilitation in their countries of origin, alongside investigation and prosecution of adults where applicable. This would not only uphold the rights of the individuals affected, but also to ease the burden on Syria as the country attempts to rebuild after years of war, terrorism, and destruction.
There must be justice and redress for the victims of the Islamic State, and we also must – and can –prevent another generation of children from growing up in environments where they are exposed to violence, exploitation, recruitment, and radicalization. Children of more than 50 nationalities remain stranded in Syria. States should enable them to return to their countries of origin, or find safe alternatives for those who cannot return without facing serious risks.
Recent political developments in Syria have also changed the circumstances surrounding these families. Responsibility for Roj Camp and the foreign families stranded in Syria has shifted from a non-state Kurdish-led organization to the Syrian government, an internationally recognized State with which many of the families’ countries of origin have diplomatic relations. This creates new possibilities for a resolution through international cooperation and controlled, safe, and dignified repatriations.
Over these seven years, my children’s rights organization, Repatriate the Children (RTC Sweden), and colleagues in our sister organization RTC Denmark, have been in contact with hundreds of mothers in Roj Camp, and previously in al-Hol Camp. The families have often been depicted and discussed by others. Their own voices, however, have rarely been heard.
Governments should listen to what the families themselves are asking for.
***
We Are Mothers in Syria’s Roj Camp. Help Us Bring Our Children Home
By 11 Mothers in Roj Camp, Northeast Syria
We are women and children who have been held in Roj camp for years, stranded in Syria against our will since the fall of the so-called Islamic State caliphate. Some of our children were babies when they arrived here. Others were born here. For many of them, detention in Syria is the only life they have ever known.
In late July, we held peaceful demonstrations. We are writing because we want people outside Roj to understand what we are asking for, and why.
Our first demand is simple: we want to leave.
For years, we have been held here without trials, without access to legal representation and without any individual legal process to determine why we are being detained or for how long. Our children are growing up in what has become indefinite and arbitrary detention.
Ten years is enough. We have been held here for between 7 and 10 years. For the children, this is not just a long time. It is their childhood.
Children have grown up here without a normal education, a normal home or any certainty about what their future will be. They have lived behind fences and under restrictions for things they did not choose and for which they are not responsible.
Now, as the situation in northeast Syria changes, we keep asking the same question: what will happen to us? Will Roj remain as it is? Will we be transferred somewhere else? Will our children simply spend more years in another camp? Is that freedom, or just another form of arbitrary detention?
We don’t want our children growing up at risk of radicalization, recruitment by terrorist groups, or other forms of exploitation.
Let us return to our countries
Many women want to return to their countries with their children to start over in life. But even when families want to return, there is often no clear way to do it. Some countries refuse to come to the camp to collect their citizens. But we cannot simply leave Roj and travel to an embassy ourselves. This leaves us trapped in a circle: our countries may ask us to reach an embassy, while our detention prevents us from reaching one.
We have seen that another way is possible. Families who managed to leave another camp nearby, al-Hol, and reach embassies have been able to return to their countries — Morocco and Algeria, for example. Can similar solutions be found for families who remain here?
And what happens to those of us whose countries refuse to take us at all or where we would be at risk if we were to return?
If children cannot return to their parents’ countries, then there must be another answer. Children need somewhere they can live with legal status, protection, education and safety. They cannot simply be left without a future.
These children are not a security file
Whatever their nationality, they need the same things children everywhere need: a family, a school, healthcare, safety, and some idea of what tomorrow will look like.
They should not grow up indefinitely in arbitrary detention because governments cannot agree what to do with their parents.
They should not lose their mothers because states find family separation easier than finding a solution.
We also want to be clear about the future we want for our children. We reject violent extremist ideology and violence. We want our children to grow up in democratic societies, free from violence and destructive environments, and to have the chance to build a different life.
As mothers, we are ready to cooperate with the authorities, social services, and child protection services in our countries.
If any of us is suspected of a crime, investigate us through a proper legal process. If any of us has been a victim of human trafficking, help us escape that exploitation and recover. Give us the possibility to rebuild our lives, care for our children, and contribute positively to our home countries.
Most of all, we want our children to stop paying the price for decisions they never made.
Children should not be separated from their caregivers
Our children have already lived through years of instability, detention and uncertainty. If they are finally able to return to their countries, what they need is safety, stability and the chance to recover — not another separation from the person who has cared for them throughout these years.
We understand that when children return, child protection services will need to assess their situation and determine what support they need. We are ready to cooperate, participate in assessments, accept support and do what is needed to help our children recover and adjust to a new life.
We as their mothers and caregivers have been the one constant in their lives throughout years of displacement and detention. Separating them after return should never be automatic. Under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, any decision about separation must be based on an individual assessment of what is genuinely in that child’s best interests.
Where are our boys?
Perhaps the most painful question concerns the boys who were separated from their mothers. Some were taken when they were only 12 or 13 years old. They were removed from their families based on suspicions, and many spent years in other detention sites and so-called rehabilitation centers.
Now some boys who had been held either in the camps or the detention centers or other locations have been transferred to Iraq. Mothers have lost contact with them. One of the few messages reaching a mother might be simply a “safe and well” message via the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Imagine that this is all you know about your child.
Other mothers have heard nothing at all.
Mothers now hear that their children are in prisons in Iraq or in northeast Syria and ask a question nobody has answered: if these boys were held in rehabilitation centers because they were children who supposedly needed rehabilitation, why are they now being sent to prison? How long can a child disappear into detention while governments discuss who is responsible for him?
Our children need healthcare, education, and safety
Life inside Roj is very hard. Medical care is limited, including for chronic illnesses, and security is a growing fear.
Our homes are tents made of cloth. There are children inside them. There has been shooting into tents and gunfire close to places where families sleep. This happened under the previous Kurdish-led authorities, before their recent integration into Syrian state structures. Many of the same guards, however, remain in place. When bullets are fired between tents, there is no safe room where we can take our children.
We do not want more violence. We want protection.
We ask the Syrian authorities and the international community to treat us as individual human beings and individual cases, rather than as one complicated file.
Thousands of different lives have been treated as one problem.
We are asking what we have been asking for years:
What will happen to our children?
***
Camp Detentions in Northeast Syria Lack Any Legal Basis and Must End
By Fionnuala Ní Aoláin
As United Nations Special Rapporteur on Counter-Terrorism and Human Rights between 2017 and 2023, my team and I worked intensively on the situation of mass arbitrary detention in northeast Syria. In 2023, I undertook a visit to the region, where I had access to al-Hol and Roj detention facilities and other places of detention. It was the culmination of several years of negotiation with the Assad regime, as well as with other States having a territorial presence and with non-state actors controlling territory.
At the time of the visit, I estimated that approximately 70,000 people were detained in multiple camps and places of detention across the territory, including more than 52,000 in the two camps. Conditions in both camps were dire. Thousands of women and children were arbitrarily detained without a modicum of legal process or justification, merely a rhetoric of association with Da’esh/ISIS. The majority were from Iraq or Syria, but more than 12,000 were from other countries. Many countries simply refused to repatriate their nationals and found multiple legal and policy excuses to avoid responsibility for the violence and harm their own citizens were suffering. At the time, I noted in my End of Mission statement (in third-person, per protocol):
“… conditions of life, including housing, access to water, limitations on food, education and health are harsh. She has profound concerns about the quality of access to and health infrastructure in this facility … [S]he observes the basic medical facility to be of a primary care nature, and entirely inadequate to the complex needs of the population, particularly children.”
Conditions in 2023 were sufficiently reprehensible that I determined that serious breaches of international law were occurring, including mass indefinite arbitrary detention of men, women, and children; torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and punishment; sexual and gender-based violence and coercion; practices of trafficking and sexual exploitation; mass forced transfer and abduction of boys and hostage-taking; deliberate denial of access for humanitarian relief; and deprivation of access to essential medical treatment to an extent that can endanger the right to life.
In January 2026, al-Hol camp chaotically disintegrated, and the fate and whereabouts of the thousands held there remains unknown. Roj camp remains a place of arbitrary detention to this day.
On Sept. 8, the U.N. Independent Commission of Inquiry (on which I serve now) reported to the U.N. Human Rights Council that:
“In addition, more than 2,000 family members, largely women and children allegedly related to Da’esh members — some of whom have been detained without any legal process since 2017 — are detained in Roj camp, at the time under the control of the SDF. The closure of this facility, which constitutes the largest mass arbitrary detention site for women and children on security grounds in the world at this time, is long-overdue. Conditions in the camp have worsened in the past year, with regular night raids, extortion and violence directed by camp security. The Commission has previously found that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the form, severity, duration and intensity of the physical and mental suffering inflicted may amount to the war crime of committing outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment, in relation to each interned individual.
“Further, children have been systematically denied their fundamental rights including the right to education. The camp’s continued operation is in clear breach of numerous international standards and states of nationality must live up to their international law obligations and support repatriation and rehabilitation without any further delay. The long-standing breaches of multiple humanitarian law and human rights norm in these detention facilities remain under investigation.”
There is no legal basis to hold women and children in abject conditions of arbitrary detention without legal process. The remedy for arbitrary detention is release. The time to close Roj detention facility has long passed.
