(17 Apr 2025)
SYRIA AL-HOL CAMP
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
RESTRICTION SUMMARY:
LENGTH: 2:26
Al-Hol Camp, Hasaka, Syria – 15 April 2025
1. People gathering inside shelter at al-Hol Camp, getting ready to leave
2. Various of people packing and preparing for departure
3. Various of people waiting to leave camp
4. SOUNDBITE (Arabic) Hanin al-Jassim, 33, Iraqi woman who has been living in al-Hol Camp:
"It has been seven years for us here and we are fed up, I swear. No family, nothing. I don’t even have a husband. We want to go back to Iraq. It’s been seven years here and we are fed up. Our children don’t go to school and there is nothing here. We’ve ruined our future, but do the children also have to have their future ruined? We would like to go back to Iraq and live there an even better life than the one we lived before."
5. People passing through departure gate
6. Kurdish security forces organizing departure
7. Buses arriving to camp
8. Child waving from bus before it departs
9. SOUNDBITE (Arabic) Salih Ahmad, 60, Iraqi who has been living in al-Hol Camp:
"I feel very good because I’m getting out of here and going back to my country after seven years of suffering. It’s a struggle here in the camp, and outside it too, in Syria, with the Islamic State group and others. The tragedy has been big."
10. Various of people heading toward buses
11. Woman waiting under the rain
12. People carrying their belongings and leaving
13. SOUNDBITE (Arabic) Shukri al-Haji, head of departure office at al-Hol camp:
"Since the beginning of 2025, approved Iraqis have been leaving al-Hol Camp. This is the ninth journey of Iraqis returning. The number of people leaving this time around is estimated at 241 families, or 865 people expected to leave. Efforts are ongoing to get the rest of the Iraqi families out of the camp and back to Iraq, in coordination between the (Syrian Kurdish) self-administration and the Iraqi government."
14. People with their belongings, buses in background
15. Bus leaving
16. Girl carrying flowers and waving to the people leaving
17. Bus driving away
STORYLINE:
Iraq has repatriated hundreds more of its citizens linked to the Islamic State group from a sprawling camp in northeastern Syria.
Over 240 families packed their belongings and boarded buses on Tuesday at the overcrowded al-Hol Camp in Hasaka province, heading to Iraq.
"It has been seven years for us here and we are fed up, I swear. No family, nothing. I don’t even have a husband. We want to go back to Iraq," said Hanin al-Jassim, an Iraqi woman who has been living in al-Hol Camp.
A total of 865 people, mostly women and children, left al-Hol on Tuesday, said Shukri al-Haji, an official at the camp.
The main part of al-Hol houses some 16,000 Iraqis and 15,000 Syrians.
In a separate, heavily guarded section known as the Annex are another 6,300 people from 42 countries, the vast majority of them wives, widows and children who are considered the most die-hard IS supporters.
Tuesday’s repatriation marked the ninth trip organized to return Iraqi nationals from the camp since the beginning of the year.
Thousands of Iraqis returned last year as well in similar repatriations.
Groups repatriated from al-Hol in the past were taken to another camp near the northern Iraqi city of Mosul.
There, they underwent a rehabilitation program with the help of international agencies in an effort to distance them from extremist ideology.
And from the second camp, Jadaa, they would return to their home towns once a tribal leader or a town’s headman agrees to vouch for them.
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