ISIL-linked detainees report night raids, extortion, violence at Roj camp

Over 2,300 women and children are still held in what UN experts and human rights groups describe as open-ended detention Over 2,300 women and children are still held in what UN experts and human rights groups describe as open-ended detention. When the shooting starts, Sara tells her children to lie flat on the ground; the bullets, she said, can go straight through her family’s tent. Sara, who asked that her real name not be used, has been arbitrarily detained for nearly a decade in Roj camp in Syria’s far northeast, which holds more than 2,300 children and mothers, many of whom are held on the basis of alleged family or other associations with ISIL.

Her children have grown up behind guarded fences topped with barbed wire and tangled with rubbish that often blocks the view of the barren, windswept landscape beyond. United Nations experts and human rights groups describe open-ended detention in camps such as Roj as a breach of international law. In recent months, women in the camp told Al Jazeera that the situation has steadily escalated: gunfire at night, stones thrown by guards and a boy left with a serious head injury. Complaints to the administration, they say, bring promises but little else. “Every cry for help results in another wave of aggression,” one mother said. Al Jazeera