The Times | By Anthony Loyd | October 24 2019

Most guards have been called away in the face of Turkey’s invasion, writes Anthony Loyd

In the six months that Aylul Rizgar has worked in Syria’s most infamous Islamic State internment camp she has been stoned, spat at, bitten, drenched in fuel during an immolation attempt and repeatedly threatened with decapitation.

“I have lost count of the number of times the women here have told me that when Islamic State returns they’ll cut my head off and put it on a pole,” the 30-year-old senior camp administrator said in her office in al-Hawl. “Or put me in a cage and sell me as a sex slave.”

The future of al-Hawl, where more than 68,000 Islamic State (Isis) family members have been held since they fled the jihadists’ last stand at Baghuz in the spring, is more uncertain than ever after Russia and Turkey agreed on Tuesday to jointly enforce the removal of Kurdish fighters from the 20-mile- deep “safe zone” laid out by President Erdogan. The camp lies several miles to the south of the zone and the status of the Kurdish administration, which has been policing the camp — and for whom Ms Rizgar works — is unclear.

Equally uncertain is the fate of the camp’s inmates, among them' 10,100 foreign citizens from 53 countries, including 18 British women and their children. The camp simmers on the edge of perpetual violence and the risk of a mass breakout is high.

“I don’t know what will happen to al-Hawl,” Ms Rizgar said, as two gunshots rang out from the camp’s perimeter. “It is not my job to decide who controls it next, merely to administrate it until that decision is made. Whoever gets it, they will find it a violent challenge. Since we were forced to send most of our guards to fight the Turkish attack we have lost control of most of the camp except for the perimeter.”

Al-Hawl’s fast decline from a disorganised but relatively stable internment camp to a violent ghetto with multiple murders, riots and no-go areas began in the summer, when female members of al-Hisbah, Islamic State’s morality police, began enforcing the terrorist group’s radical edicts upon the- camp’s population.

“The international community’s refusal to repatriate its own women from the camp meant that we were left with a hard core of foreign muhajirat from Baghuz, who began to impose their authority on everyone else,” said Ms Rizgar, an Arab who served with a fighting unit of the Kurds’ all-female YPJ militia until she was posted to al-Hawl in March.

Attacks against guards increased under al-Hisbah’s orders, and stoning of security patrols inside the camp became a daily occurrence. Anyone deemed to have broken Islamic State’s rules had their tent burnt down; 128 were razed in the first three weeks of September.

Ms Rizgar herself was attacked in her office yard by three Tunisian women: a 45-year-old mother and her two teenage daughters, who had been found in a section of the camp reserved for Iraqi families. “I didn’t have time to ask them anything before one girl leapt upon me and sunk her teeth into my arm,” Ms Rizgar said. “As I fell to the ground wrestling with her and her mother the younger daughter, 14 years old, grabbed a can of fuel and poured it all over me. They wanted to set me on fire.”

Some of the killings have been especially gruesome: three weeks ago the dismembered body of a woman was found stuffed in a cesspit, the skull smashed. “We think she was an Uzbek woman who went missing a month earlier,” Ms Rizgar told me. “She had been kidnapped by al-Hisbah and was seen tied to a tent pole, and then disappeared. We are sure she is dead as someone sent her ten-year-old son to the orphanage section.” The next day al-Hisbah set up an Islamic court in a tent to put a 24-year-old Tajik woman on trial for having an affair with a 15-year-old male. Her sister was also put on trial, accused of guilt by association. Guards trying to halt the proceedings were met with gunfire. “Al-Hisbah have smuggled many weapons into the camp. At first it was knives, now pistols.”

Four women were wounded and two died in the ensuing shootout with Kurdish security troops. The 15-year- old boy was never found.

“He disappeared after being kidnapped by al-Hisbah,” Ms Rizgar said. “We are sure he has been killed and his body hidden somewhere in the camp.”

On the same night, al-Hisbah drove charity organisations out of the camp by pouring petrol on their tents. Later a 27-year-old Iraqi man was stabbed to death. “Two women killed him, but before we could arrest them they had escaped from the camp.”

Security in the camp began to fall apart the moment the Turkish army launched its attack into northern Syria a fortnight ago. The inmates, hearing of the operation on their smuggled mobile phones, began pelting guard posts with rocks. Four days ago an Iraqi woman was bludgeoned to death. Laterthe body of a baby, beaten to death, was discovered in a rucksack by the camp’s mosque.

“It was a boy, about a year old,” Ms Rizgar said, her eyes betraying her exhaustion. “Don’t ask me why he was killed. You won’t find a reason in Islam.”

As the Turkish invaders pressed ahead into areas held by the Kurdish administration, using Syrian jihadist militias, more than half of al-Hawl’s 400 guards were redeployed to the front. Escape attempts by Isis women immediately skyrocketed. Ms Rizgar said 94 escapees had been recaptured in the first five days of the Turkish assault, but admitted that she could not know how many had succeeded in getting away. “Those we caught told us they had an interest in fleeing to Iraq, but instead wanted to join the jihadist groups working with the Turks on the battlefield and attack us,” she said.

The Isis flag has been raised above the camp twice in recent weeks. Security around the camp has also worsened: a homemade roadside bomb was found on the main approach road, and two couriers carrying $80,000 in cash were arrested trying to get money to women inside the camp. “Islamic State are trying to refinance themselves using the camp as a base. It’s a mini-caliphate in there. It’s chaos.”

The near future for al-Hawl is unknown, but for Ms Rizgar, at least, the nightmare maybe about to end. She has applied for a new posting, back with a YPJ fighting unit, in anticipation of further clashes with Turkey. “I have asked to leave this job and go to the front lines after my two friends were killed,” she said, an edge of desperation in her voice. “At least there I would know that my enemy was to the front, not behind me and all around me as it is here.”

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Trump hails ceasefire as he lifts sanctions on Ankara

The Times | By Hannah Lucinda Smith Istanbul, David Charter Washington | October 24, 2019

President Trump lifted all US sanctions imposed on Turkey for its invasion of northern Syria and hailed a “permanent ceasefire... created by America”.

The move came as Russian troops moved in to patrol along Nato’s southern border.

Mr Trump said that the ceasefire along the 20-mile safe zone was “a major breakthrough towards achieving a better future in Syria and for the Middle East”, which “validates our course of action with Turkey”.

President Putin and President Erdogan devised the safe-zone deal to replace the “pause” in fighting agreed by Turkey with Mike Pence, the US vice- president, in Ankara last week. The Turkish incursion began after Mr Trump told Mr Erdogan on October 13 that he was pulling US troops out of northern Syria, abandoning America’s military alliance with the Kurds.

Mr Trump’s announcement yesterday followed a tweet in which he declared: “Big success on the Turkey/Syr- ia Border. Safe Zone created!”

He said: “This was an outcome created by us, the United States, and nobody else. Now people are saying ‘wow, what a great outcome, congratulations’. It’s too early for me to be congratulated but we’ve done a good job, we’ve saved a lot of lives.”

The president failed to mention Russia and refused to take questions.

The first movement of Russian troops was disclosed early yesterday as they crossed the Euphrates river and moved towards the town of Kobani. The Russian defence ministry reported that a column of military police had arrived in the town.

In his first comments, Mr Erdogan said that Mr Putin assured him that Kurdish militias would not remain on the border “in regime clothes”.

There were growing fears of a refugee crisis and human rights abuses if the safe zone were administered by Turkey, Russia and Syria alone.

Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, the German defence minister, prepared to seek UN security council approval for a military mission to create a security zone, Reuters reported. Other Natd members gave her tentative backing.

Members of the European parliament prepared EU sanctions against Turkey. A resolution to be adopted today, with the backing of all political groups, will call for the freezing of preferential treatment for Turkey’s agricultural exports and as a last resort the suspension of the customs union. The parliament could also block any further refugee funding to Turkey.

Mohammed, a resident of Manbij, one of the towns to be cleared of Kurdish fighters, said that there was a growing fear of “massacres, mass arrests and displacement”.

“I am wanted by the military and air force intelligence services,” he said by telephone. “The only thing I can do when the regime is allowed to enter is to escape, even though I don’t know where or how. I will never reconcile, the regime is not trustworthy.”

A fighter for the Syrian rebels aligned with Turkey said that he was “not happy” with the terms of the deal. “I know deep inside that we won’t come back soon,” he said. “Even the deal with the US wasn’t a victory for Turkey.”

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Behind the story

Scores of Islamic State fighters have escaped from jail in the chaos that followed the Trump administration’s withdrawal of forces from Syria and the Turkish invasion, US officials said (Richard Spencer writes).

Widely varying estimates of the number of Isis men, women and children on the run have been given. However, James Jeffrey, the administration’s spokesman on Syria, told two congressional hearings that he believed “over 100” fighters had escaped from prison since Turkey’s incursion. It is also known that about 900 women and children, some of them wives and children of Isis fighters, escaped from a displacement camp where they were being held in the Syrian town of Ain Issa.

Mr Jeffrey said Isis continued to pose a threat in three areas: in Iraq, where more than 5,000 US troops are continuing to help the Iraqi government combat it; in previously US-backed eastern Syria; and in areas under regime control.

“In Assad-controlled areas Isis is running amok,” he said. In northeast Syria, the US would now have to rely on Turkey and the Syrian Democratic Forces, the Kurdish-led army backed by the US, to stop fighting each other and target Isis instead. “Both Turkey and the SDF have fought against Isis,” he said. “If they are not forced to face off against each other, we can rely on both of them against Isis.”

The Pentagon estimates there are 10,000-14,000 Isis fighters either active or available in Iraq and Syria, and they continue to stage attacks in both. In the immediate wake of the Turkish incursion, there was a suicide attack on the SDF in Raqqa, the group’s former capital.

Isis also used a car bomb to kill two security officials guarding the Allas oilfield, 20 miles south of Hawija in northern Iraq, on Monday.

The main fear arising out of the loosening of SDF control in eastern Syria is of the same sort of organised mass breakout that Isis’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, coordinated to replenish the group’s ranks after the US pulled out of Iraq in 2011.