Awaiting the caliphate’s return: ISIS women threaten Kurds in detention camps

Ahmed Sultan

“When the caliphate comes back, I will cut off your head and hang it on one of these iron bars,” one female ISIS prisoner shouted in the face of the Kurdish guard assigned to protect the detention camp in the Syrian city of Ain Issa.

About a year before the incident, US President Donald Trump declared victory over ISIS, but the group’s detained women still believe that the caliphate will return and that they will retaliate against the Kurdish fighters holding them in detention camps.

Women ISIS prisoners are threatening Kurdish fighters with revenge and publicly threatening Kurdish forces, according to a number of reports published by the Kurdish Rovaga Foundation and the International Center for Combating Violent Extremism.

Women detainees still adhere to the dress code that ISIS imposed on women while in control of Syrian cities and villages from 2014 to March 2019.

A female detainee in the Kurdish camps said that their husbands had told them to leave through the corridors opened by Kurdish forces, surrender themselves and stay in the detention camps until ISIS fighters return to liberate them.

A group of women prisoners assaulted the female head of security at the Ain Issa camp during a routine visit, pulling her by her hair until a group of prison guards came to rescue her.

She said that, during the assault, the ISIS women were saying, “We are no less than Kurdish women, and we will fight like your women fought in the city of Al-Bab.”

Meanwhile, in al-Hawl, Syria’s largest detention camp, an ISIS woman assaulted a female guard and wounded her arm.

When the camp guards fired in the air to disperse the women, the ISIS women replied that they did not hide from bullets and that they could also use weapons.

From the perspective of female ISIS captives, the terrorist organization has not been defeated but has entered a period of truce or a temporary break to rebuild its power and then take back territory again.

The ISIS prisoners’ threats were not confined to the Kurdish forces, but also to the women who were previously in the organization and then rejected the ideas inside the detention camps.

During their stay in detention camps, some European and Syrian women revealed their faces, abandoning the veil that ISIS had imposed on women in its “caliphate.” But women who still cling to the ISIS thought have threatened and attacked the women giving up the niqab, even setting fire to their tents.

According to an official from the International Center for Combating Extremism, who spoke on condition of anonymity, the Ain Issa camp has 265 women and about 1,000 children.

The official said that nine women of one nationality were leading the women in the detention camp, clashing with Kurdish intelligence officers and making it difficult to separate them from each other.

Fears of an ISIS return

Repatriated Uzbek women have warned that detention camps may give ISIS a golden opportunity to recruit new fighters and supporters and use them to re-establish its caliphate.

The International Center to Combat Extremism likened the detention camps to poor, cramped slums that are difficult to control.

There are ISIS networks operating inside the detention camps, the center said, pointing out that ISIS prisoners at Derik Central Prison tried to escape a while ago, but Kurdish forces thwarted the attempt.

Since the defeat of ISIS and the fall of its territorial caliphate in March 2019, ISIS cells remain active in Kurdish-controlled areas.

ISIS cells have launched a series of attacks against Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and have also burned the headquarters and agricultural lands of SDF officials as part of what the organization calls the “battle of attrition.”