As of 2026-02. Al-Hol was emptied and formally closed on 22 February 2026 after the Syrian government took control of the site in January; about 8,500 people remained in the camp system at that point, including some 2,300 foreign women and children still held at Roj.
After the territorial defeat of the Islamic State group in 2019, tens of thousands of people who had left the group's last enclaves were held in fenced camps in north-east Syria run by the Kurdish-led authorities, principally al-Hol and the smaller Roj, which housed foreign nationals from more than sixty countries. Residents, the overwhelming majority of them women and children and almost none of them charged with any offence, could not leave; conditions were life-threatening, with killings inside al-Hol, inadequate water and medical care, and children making up around two-thirds of the population. The Kurdish-led administration described the camps as a security necessity and repeatedly asked states to repatriate their nationals, which many did slowly or not at all, citing security and evidentiary difficulties; Iraq began organised returns of its citizens to a transit facility from 2021. Following a military offensive in the north-east that forced the Syrian Democratic Forces to withdraw, Syrian government security forces took control of al-Hol on 20-21 January 2026 and announced its full evacuation by 22 February; departures were largely unplanned, with residents leaving by bus, on foot and with smugglers, and by mid-February the population had fallen to the low thousands. Human Rights Watch, which had described the detention as arbitrary and unlawful, warned that the chaotic manner of the closure exposed people to trafficking, exploitation and armed-group recruitment, and that thousands were unaccounted for. Roj remained under SDF control in early 2026 and was expected to close.
Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces and their civil administration holding families associated with the Islamic State group, mostly women and children, without charge or judicial review; the Syrian government took over al-Hol in January 2026
No meaningful denominator exists: the camps held family members of Islamic State fighters and people displaced from the group's last territory, drawn from more than 60 nationalities, so the detained population is not a share of any defined base population. The affected figure is the camps' own peak population, about 73,000 in al-Hol in 2019, of whom roughly half were Iraqis and about a fifth third-country nationals.
There is no comprehensive cumulative death toll for the camps. The UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria reported in September 2019 that at least 390 children had died at al-Hol from malnutrition and untreated wounds amid 'hundreds of preventable deaths', and the Kurdish Red Crescent, cited by Human Rights Watch, documented at least 371 child deaths in al-Hol in 2019 alone; the UN separately recorded 90 murders inside al-Hol in 2021 and 42 between January and mid-November 2022. The upper figure reflects the accumulation of these documented categories rather than a single source's total.
Human Rights Watch (2023) documented detention without charge or judicial review of nearly 37,000 foreign nationals, over 60% of them children, calling it arbitrary and unlawful collective punishment; the UN recorded murders and Human Rights Watch documented sexual violence inside al-Hol; and the UN Commission of Inquiry flagged statelessness risks compounded by states' refusal to repatriate and, in some cases, revocation of detainees' citizenship.
Syria