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It should not require a seminar in international law to grasp a basic truth: you do not entrust tens of thousands of Daesh suspects and family members to a non-state militia and call that a strategy. Yet that is exactly what the United States and parts of Europe have done in northeast Syria—outsourcing detention, camp management, and “rehabilitation” to the SDF. The result is predictable and indefensible: radicalization incubators, chronic insecurity, corruption that punches holes in the perimeter, and recurring jailbreaks that restock Daesh ranks. This must end. Damascus and regional states should assume responsibility for the prisons and camps—under robust international monitoring and with targeted American financial support—because the SDF has demonstrably failed at the job.
Start with scale and risk. Roughly 50,000 Daesh veterans and family members remain held across 27 SDF-run prisons and detention sites and the al-Hol and Roj camps. These sites have been prime objectives for Daesh, which has repeatedly attempted—and sometimes succeeded—in breaking comrades free. Calling this a “powder keg” is not hyperbole; it’s the sober judgment of analysts who track the numbers and the operations.
Conditions in the camps are not just grim; they’re radicalizing. The International Committee of the Red Cross described suffering in al-Hol as “existential,” and the United Nations and UNICEF have repeatedly flagged open sewers, routine violence, and the fact that a decisive majority of detainees are children. You cannot deradicalize kids in a cesspit without due process, schooling, or safety. You manufacture the next problem.
Security is porous—by design and by graft. Well-documented smuggling networks bribe camp guards to move women and children affiliated with Daesh out of al-Hol; this is not a rumor but an acknowledged pattern in U.N. reporting and field investigations. Corruption corrodes any detention regime, but it is fatal when the detainees are part of an insurgent movement. The SDF has been unable—or unwilling—to stamp it out.
The catastrophic 2022 al-Sina’a (Ghweran) prison assault in Hassakeh laid bare the structural flaw of using a militia as a carceral authority. The siege took days, killed hundreds, and allowed an unknown number to slip away. Human Rights Watch documented boys—detained children—caught in the fighting and raised urgent questions about the SDF’s compliance with the laws of war and its opaque casualty accounting. That is not a system. It’s a liability.
Worse, the SDF has pursued measures that are both abusive and counterproductive. To “guard against recruitment,” SDF and Asayish units have separated adolescent boys from their mothers and held them incommunicado in prisons or “centers.” That tears families apart, generates trauma, and, unsurprisingly, does little to curb extremist influence inside the camps. It does, however, guarantee that boys experience detention as their formative political education. If you wanted to harden a teenage cohort, you would do exactly this.
Overlay this with policy whiplash out of Washington. The Trump administration’s cuts—including a reported $117 million hit to Syria camp and detention support—have triggered cascading service gaps, from basic WASH and clinic operations to data and security systems. Aid suspensions don’t suddenly make the SDF professional; they make a brittle architecture crack. Even U.S. officials and mainstream think tanks now warn that defunding and drawdowns amplify the odds of prison riots, breakouts, and transnational blowback.
If the SDF’s record on strict security is checkered, its record on “rehabilitation” is worse. Al-Hol and Roj are not deradicalization programs; they are holding pens where Daesh enforcers still intimidate, recruit, and kill. U.S. military reporting has called the SDF-held detainee mass “an Daesh army in waiting.” That is not progress—it is an alarm bell.
There is also the matter of leverage politics. For years, the Autonomous Administration and SDF have used the detainee file to wring recognition, resources, or political concessions from foreign governments—threatening local trials, staging amnesties, and advertising their “indispensability” as wardens. Prisoner releases under AANES, including “amnesties” in 2024, and talk of trying thousands in ad hoc courts, were not steps toward rule of law; they were bargaining chips that signaled a willingness to instrumentalize the file. That is exactly why non-state custody is so dangerous: the incentive structure is political, not legal.
Meanwhile, governments that have taken responsibility see results. Iraq has repatriated roughly 25,000 of its citizens from al-Hol and Roj—about 80% of the Iraqi caseload—reducing the headcount in the worst camp and shrinking DAESH's recruiting pool. Whatever one thinks of Baghdad’s subsequent processes, that is what state capacity looks like: intake, screening, prosecution where appropriate, and reintegration. Others should follow—and Washington should support that with targeted funding tied to measurable outcomes.
So what’s the alternative to the status quo? Stop pretending a militia can serve as a long-term custodian for a transnational terrorist problem. The only sustainable answer is to transfer legal and operational responsibility for these camps and prisons to the Syrian state—through a phased, monitored handover that includes:
1. Custody and jurisdiction moving to Damascus and an agreed set of regional partners (Iraq, and where relevant, Turkey and Jordan) with clear lines of authority.
2. International monitoring and technical assistance by the ICRC and U.N. agencies on detention standards, child protection, and case management, so this is not a blank check for abuse but a supervised transition.
3. A prosecutorial track for adults—Syrians and Iraqis in national courts; third-country nationals repatriated and tried at home; and a residual third-country caseload handled via negotiated transfers—ending the unlawful indefinite detention flagged by rights groups.
4. A child-focused track prioritizing reunification, schooling, psychosocial care, and monitored reintegration—because almost two-thirds of al-Hol/Roj are children, and every month of limbo worsens outcomes.
5. Time-bound U.S. and European financial support—not to the SDF, but to U.N. implementers and Syrian state service providers—earmarked for prisons hardening, case processing, and child services, with disbursements conditioned on access and benchmarks. That is a smarter use of leverage than underwriting a militia bureaucracy.
Critics will say Damascus cannot be trusted. That is precisely why monitoring and conditionality matter. But the alternative—leaving a Daesh problem set in the hands of a militia that cannot secure perimeters, cannot lawfully process cases, separates boys from mothers, and has seen its guards bribed by smuggling rings—is strategically incoherent. It is also morally untenable: indefinite, lawless detention for children in camps policed by non-state actors is a generator of grievances that Daesh knows how to exploit.
Washington’s role should be pragmatic: stop paying the SDF to fail at a state function; pay for the shortest path to closing the camps and locking up the truly dangerous under national authority. Keep the pressure on Daesh with intelligence and strikes, yes—but stop treating camp custody as a counterterrorism plan. Outsourcing detention to a militia was a wartime expedient. In 2025, it is strategic malpractice. Transfer the file. Fund the transition. Close the camps. End the charade.
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