SULAIMANI (ESTA) — The United Nations said it had received reports of 12 Syrian and Iraqi nationals being murdered in the first half of January at the Kurdish-run al-Hol camp in northeast Syria, which holds internal refugees and families of Islamic State (ISIS) fighters.
“We are calling on those authorities who control the security in the camp to ensure the safety of residents but also the humanitarian workers,” Jens Laerke, spokesman for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, said on Friday, according to Reuters.
“All of that delivery is being thrown into jeopardy when the level of security rises to what we see now,” Laerke told a U.N. briefing in Geneva.
The camp, controlled by U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), holds 62,000 people from many countries, he said.
Kurdish fighters have seized much of northern and eastern Syria from ISIS with U.S. backing. They have since held thousands of militants in prisons, while their wives and children – numbering tens of thousands, many of them foreigners – are living in camps.
Kurdish leaders have repeatedly warned that the Islamic State fighters and their families pose a security threat and that they cannot detain the foreigners indefinitely, but foreign governments have hesitated to repatriate their citizens.
