About 20,000 people have escaped from Syria’s Al-Hol camp, according to US intelligence agencies.
The camp was once home to thousands of Islamic State families. Security broke down after Syrian government forces took control, The Wall Street Journal reports.
The Al-Hol facility in Syria’s eastern desert housed over 70,000 people after the fall of the Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliphate in 2019. That is according to the Wall Street Journal. It held around 23,000 residents at the end of 2025, according to a report from the Pentagon’s Inspector General. Security at the camp collapsed in recent weeks after Syria’s government defeated the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). They had guarded Al-Hol for years.
The Kurdish‑led SDF said they were “compelled” to withdraw from Al‑Hol due to international indifference and redeployment needs. They left the camp vulnerable to escapes, as per CN News.
Security experts have long warned that the wives of Islamic State fighters were effectively raising the next generation of militants at Al-Hol.
This isn’t just a breach.
The Investigative Project on Terrorism describes the possible unraveling of one of the most consequential counterterrorism containment systems built after the fall of the Islamic State’s territorial caliphate in 2019.
Al-Hol concentrated a dangerous ecosystem—families, facilitators, recruiters, and children raised inside extremist ideology—into one place that could be monitored. The camp was volatile and often inhumane, but containment prevented dispersion into fragile terrain where ISIS cells still operate, reports the Project.
According to the Project, several sources described the same unsettling dynamic: nothing looked like a single dramatic breach. There was erosion—smaller guard details, longer blind spots, routines that stopped being routine. And the new “guards”—i.e., the jihadists in Syria’s new army? Some of them were observed yelling encouragement to the “escaped” detainees, even giving out candies to the children of ISIS wives.
Syrian officials recently asked Germany to keep their dangerous Syrian criminals and terrorists a while longer for humanitarian reasons. Germany has refused, and it looks like it was for a lot more than humanitarian reasons. The Syrian officials also said it could upset the fragile peace in Syria.
ISIS has control over a portion of Syria, and the president has led ISIS militants/terrorists in the past. He says he is reformed.
The Investigative Project states that European security services face renewed radicalization risk among adolescents raised inside ISIS family networks. The United States must assume heightened force-protection burdens and renewed external plotting risk. With Mamdani, a radical himself, in charge and firing police, will New York City be properly protected?
