The first thing Layla did when she left al-Roj camp was stick her head out the car window. The six-year-old gulped in the “sweet, sweet air” and clutched her cousins close as they saw the outside world for the first time in their lives.
Layla saw “a drink shop, a donkey, a baby horse” as she feasted on candy brought by her relatives from Australia. She peppered her mother and aunts with questions about what Australia was like – “do we have to live in a tent there too?” – as the camp disappeared behind them.
Then a phone rang and the car turned around. They were brought back to the camp and the outside world was once again hidden behind barbed-wire topped walls. Layla watched as her aunt Zahraa fell to the ground and began to scream, and suddenly she felt ill, vomiting up all of the candy she had eaten in the car.
Sign up: AU Breaking News emailFor an hour last week, the 23 Australian children held in al-Roj detention camp in Syria were free. They are the children of 11 Australian women who travelled to Syria during the height of the Islamic State’s so-called caliphate. Most of them have spent their entire lives in detention camps in the remote deserts of Syria where the families of suspected members of IS are held.
Now back in the camp, the kids sit together on the rocky ground outside their tents, waiting.
“When we came back, I was so sad and upset. It was terrible. Why do I have to be in here? I don’t want to be in a tent. I don’t want to be in a camp. I don’t want to be in a prison … I just want to go and be free,” 11-year-old Baidaa says through tears. “Living in tents, it’s just so hard. It’s cold. It’s dirty and it’s disgusting and I don’t like it.”
Her siblings and cousin gather around her as she speaks. Layla buries her face in her mother’s shirt when the return to the camp is brought up. “I don’t want to cry,” she whispers to her mother.
‘I’m a normal person, but just in the wrong country’
Mohammed, the 14-year-old son of Zahra Ahmad who was brought to Syria as a two-year-old, stares down at his hands, which he says he could not feel for two days after he returned to the camp.
“People should come to the camp and see how I feel. They’d realise how hard my life was and that they should appreciate their life in Australia,” Mohammed says. “I’m a normal person, but just in the wrong country. It’s not [my fault].”
He explains that his father came to help people in Syria but then was killed, “and then we got stuck”. His brother, 12-year-old Omar, says his mother told them they went to Syria on what was supposed to be a vacation, but which turned into a nightmare. None of the children say they know anything about IS.
Zahra has previously told media that she went to Syria to perform humanitarian aid, but got stuck in territory under IS control and could not escape. Other women in the cohort claim they were coerced, or tricked into going to IS-controlled areas.
After the territorial defeat of IS in March 2019, tens of thousands of families of IS fighters were placed in detention camps in north-east Syria. The Kurdish authorities who controlled the region, and led the fight against IS, guarded these camps, but did not have the capacity to deal with their occupants.
Al-Roj is the only remaining major detention camp in Syria for IS-linked women and children, housing about 2,200 individuals from dozens of countries. The squalid conditions at the camp have been described as “life threatening”.
The mothers say that they try to shield their children from Australian politics. The children have no idea they are the subject of a fierce debate back home and that they are being described as “security threats” on the evening news. They have not heard the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, say that those who “make their bed” must “lie in it”.
Still, they know they are different from children back home.
“I know different things from them. I know how it feels not to have everything. I can’t do a lot of stuff here … I just want people to appreciate what they have for me,” Mohammed says.
Mohammed is one of the oldest of the children and has only a vague idea of what Australia is. Among the children, the word “Australia” seems to have attained a mythical status, a place that has everything that does not exist in the camp.
“There’s an ice-cream shop. Bluey and Bingo live there,” Layla says. “My grandpa has a farm there and he has a garden and I want to swim in my grandma’s pool,” nine-year-old Assiyah says. “There’s fun times,” Omar says.
They all have plans for what they want to do when they return. Assiyah wants to compete on Australia’s Got Talent, hoping that her many hours rehearsing songs from Frozen in her tent will pay off and fetch her the golden buzzer. Omar dreams of being a doctor and having a phone, where he can play “games and movies” – he has not yet heard of Instagram. Mohammed dreams of riding his bike as far as he can, tired of the same loop he does in the camp.
‘Eventually you need to go home’
While the children dream, their mothers fear that time is running out to get them home.
Since the Syrian government wrested al-Hawl camp from the Kurdish forces last month, all 6,000 foreign women and children have been smuggled out of the camp. Rumours reach the mothers of what happened after the collapse of al-Hawl – daughters being married off and sons being recruited back into IS – and fear the same could happen in al-Roj. Conditions in the camp have deteriorated, with security forces increasingly carrying out night raids, waking the children up with the sound of shooting.
The children feel the fear, too. Omar’s fingers are scarred from his habitual finger biting and, despite being 12, he has begun wetting the bed at night. Mohammed shakes as he speaks, and says he is scared that if he stays too long in the camp and becomes an adult that he will be taken from his family.
His voice steadies though, when he talks about going home.
“I’ll be patient as long as I know I’m not going to stay here,” Mohammed says. “Because eventually you need to go home.”
– Ben Doherty contributed reporting
