One hundred and eleven Iraqi families, or 403 people linked to the Islamic State militant group, have been evacuated from the al-Hol camp in Syria to the al-Jadaa camp, south of the Iraqi city of Mosul, Iraqi officials said today.
As of May 2021, 339 families linked to Islamic State jihadists have been sent to the al-Jadaa al-Hol camp, home to nearly 62,000 people, half of them Iraqis. Among these 62,000, there are 10,000 families of foreign IK fighters.
The Al-Jadaa camp in Iraq is home to thousands of families, mostly from the governments of Salahuddin, Nineveh and Ramadi.
However, their return to Iraq has sparked controversy among a population that has witnessed for three years the brutality of the Islamic State, a radical group that has taken over a third of Iraqi territory from 2014 to 2017.
“The 111 families of the IK fighters arrived in Al-Jadaa on Saturday,” a local official told AFP on condition of anonymity.
In early December, Iraqi authorities announced their intention to close the al-Jadaa refugee camp, the last to house displaced people in Iraq outside the 26-strong autonomous region of Kurdistan.
Since then, however, the issue has made no progress. The return of the displaced to their areas of origin requires a long and complicated process which is often influenced by rejection by the local population.
According to the International Organization for Migration, the conflict with the Islamic State has caused the displacement of six million Iraqis. Four years after the Iraqi state declared its “victory” over the jihadists, 1.2 million Iraqis have not yet returned home.
According to the IOM, 103,000 people live in “informal spaces”, except in camps or structures integrated in their immediate environment.
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