BALADI NEWS
The black flag of Isis has been hoisted in a Syrian camp holding tens of thousands of the terror group’s family members, nearly four months after the caliphate was officially declared defeated.
In a video posted online, women and children can be seen cheering while the homemade flag flutters from a pole. The crowd are heard shouting “baqiya” – the Arabic word for “remaining” – a reference to the Isis slogan “remaining and expanding”.
The video first appeared on Monday, according to Jihadoscope, a monitoring group focused on the spread of terror propaganda across the web and social media, but it is not the first such incident at the sprawling al-Hol camp in northeast Syria. It comes amid warnings of growing radicalisation at the facility.
Earlier this month, a video purportedly filmed at the camp showed women re-pledging their allegiance to Isis leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and calling on him to “liberate” them. Several guards have been attacked by residents.
Despite rising tensions at camps like al-Hol, the international community is still at odds over what to do with the inhabitants, including more than a dozen British women and their children, including Shamima Begum.
Tens of thousands of women and children fled the last sliver of the self-proclaimed caliphate, in the eastern Syrian village of Baghouz, before its complete recapture earlier this year.
Many of them were local residents who became trapped within Isis areas by the battle, but the majority were the wives and family members of fighters who showed little sign of abandoning the group.
Most are now being held in detention camps controlled by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). Al-Hol, the largest of those camps, has a population of more than 70,000 people – mostly women and children from Syria and Iraq – together with around 9,000 foreign citizens.
Source: The Independent.