By Sumayya
DAMASCUS: Kurdish forces still hold near 2,200 outside relatives of suspected Daesh group fighters in a northeast Syria camp, an official there told AFP, despite a mixing deal between the Kurds and Damascus.
Two state officials also told AFP that passing the management of the Roj camp to the Damascus authorities would take duration and stood among topics in the mixing deal that remain still being worked on.
In the Roj camp, placed in Syria’s Hasakah province, AFP writers observed women wearing the niqab and children including teenagers, some of whom asked not to be filmed.
Kurdish safety forces tightly guard the facility.
Camp official Hakmieh Ibrahim told AFP on Monday that “the Roj camp keeps 729 families from the Daesh group, or more than 2,200 populations”.
“There has been no shift in the (camp’s) management until now,” she supplemented, despite the mixing deal.
She expressed the camp keeps populations of more than 50 lands, with Russians making up the biggest group, alongside citizens from France, Turkiye, Germany, Tunisia, Morocco and elsewhere.
Residents also hold Shamima Begum, who stood stripped of her British citizenship after leaving the land for Syria as a teenager to marry a Daesh fighter.
The Kurds and Damascus in January reached a deal on mixing Kurdish forces and bodies into the state, after a state military push that saw the Kurds give up land they had taken while fighting Daesh during Syria’s civil war.
In August, Mazloum Abdi, who led the Syrian Democratic Forces, declared the closing of his Kurdish-led fighting force and stood picked as an adviser to Syrian President Ahmed Al-Sharaa.
Damascus has been step by step taking over duty for past Kurdish-managed bodies and topics.
A Syrian state official told AFP on condition of hiding that “the mixing of the Roj camp, like alternate bodies, remains underway”.
“The transfer of its management will take duration,” the official expressed, noting its complex “humanitarian and political sides, as well as its link to outside sides”, referring to lands that have until now refused to take back their citizens.
A Syrian interior ministry official who also asked for hiding told AFP that Roj camp “is part of a general file being worked on”.
Roj remains the last camp under Kurdish control, after its forces pulled back from the Al-Hol camp during the state’s military escalation this year.
Most of Al-Hol’s residents including outsiders later left the camp and Syrian authorities later closed it.
In February, the United States passed over 5,700 Daesh prisoners from more than 60 lands to Iraq after years kept in Syrian-Kurdish managed prisons.
