Opinion | ‘I’m Going to Be Honest, This Baby Is Going to Die’

The afternoon I visited, I heard a keening cry from a side ally near the foreigner annex. A small girl of perhaps 7 or 8 was sitting atop a pile of humanitarian food aid boxes, clad in the black abaya and jilbab of a grown woman, but in miniature, trying to fend off a bunch of boys trying to steal a box of aid couscous. She wept as she tried to repel them.

A few yards away, some younger children were playing shootout games with guns they had fashioned out of inflated purple medical gloves. Occasionally, a woman walked past carrying a lifeless baby or toddler, getting bottled water from the market or attempting to access a clinic. It is unnerving how malnourished babies begin to look like birds, so much skin draped against bones arranged at pointy angles.

This summer, the idea that Al Hol is not just a humanitarian blight, but also a flashpoint for ISIS resurgence, has been gaining ground. An August report by the Department of Defense warned that ISIS is likely to seek to recruit there, and that residents of the camp are potentially susceptible to its “messaging, coercion and enticement.” Some of this signaling may emanate from a push in Washington, repeated by President Trump now twice, to get European governments to repatriate their ISIS fighters, as well as women and children.

Today, the place feels very much a continuation of the ISIS caliphate. Every woman living in the foreigner annex wears a full-length black abaya, the robes that the militants required in their territory; some still wear black gloves and niqabs or even full face veils, obscuring the eyes.

I found it difficult to assess whether violent, dangerous women were a small but frightening majority, as some women suggested, or a more sizable number; many of those working in the camp are sworn enemies of the Islamic State, and would view any angry, conservative Arab woman who had landed herself there as an ISIS loyalist.

What many residents of the camp told me is that everything changed with the mass arrivals of women from Baghouz. Older residents of the camp who had started relaxing their covering, forgoing the face veil or wearing lighter colors, quickly reverted to all-shrouding black. The arrival of the Baghouziat, as they are called in Arabic, transformed life in the camp for its existing inhabitants, who had rejected and fled ISIS months or even years earlier.