Aleppo, Syria – Nearly six months after a deal was struck to allow thousands of Syrians to leave the notorious al-Hol detention camp in a Kurdish-run zone and return to homes in government-controlled territory, only a few hundred have done so.

At its height in 2019, towards the end of the fight against the so-called Islamic State, al-Hol held nearly 74,000 people, including both supporters and victims of the group.

Kurdish authorities, who control a large swathe of northeastern Syria, including al-Hol, have been allowing people to return to their territory since late 2020, subject to various security clearances, and around 12,000 people have gone back.

A new deal announced in late May between Syria’s transitional government and the Kurdish authorities introduced a “joint mechanism” to allow more Syrian families to leave the camp for the majority of the country they now control, since the December 2024 ouster of President Bashar al-Assad.

Now home to around 26,000 people, the detention camp as well as a nearby location called al-Roj, with some 2,400 people, has long been a conundrum for the regional and international community, with some countries reluctant to take their citizens back. 

The camps are known for violence, grim humanitarian conditions, and fears that they remain hotbeds of extremism. This is particularly true for a heavily-guarded section of al-Hol known as “The Annex” where the Kurdish-run administration keeps women and children who are neither Iraqi nor Syrian, and are considered devoted to extremist IS ideology.

But despite what seems like increasing momentum – including a September conference on repatriation from al-Hol and other similar camps at the UN’s General Assembly in September – only around 360 people have been able to go home to parts of Syria that had been run by al-Assad.

Meanwhile, aid groups say they have few resources to support and help reintegrate even the limited number of returnees. And they are still waiting for progress that will allow thousands more to follow.

“Repatriation is the priority,” Jihan Hanan, co-head of al-Hol for the Kurdish administration (its military wing is the US-backed, Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces), told The New Humanitarian. “We are aiming to return people to their countries, not just in al-Hol, but for all the camps inside northeast Syria. Everyone should go back home.”

According to September figures provided by Hanan, the majority of people in al-Hol are now Syrian (15,181 people), followed by Iraqis (4,868), and the rest (6,280) are from roughly 60 other countries.