Two boys have come forward to claim they were victims in a twisted plot run by ISIS women that forced at least 10 young teenagers to try to impregnate dozens of women held in a detention center.
“We are being forced to have sex with the ISIS women, to impregnate them,” Ahmet, 13, and Hamid, 14, told a guard at Camp al Hol in northeast Syria, according to Syrian Defense Force officials. “Can you get us out of here?”
Camp al Hol is one of the detention centers housing approximately 8,000 foreign ISIS-affiliated women and children who surrendered or were captured as a result of the 2019 territorial defeat of the so-called Islamic State.
While some of these women are being held against their will by ISIS, others are fiercely dedicated to the Caliphate and are indeed a mainstay of the propagation of ISIS’s distorted Islamic dictates, themselves meting out punishment to women who renounce ISIS—and working hard to indoctrinate children.
Ahmet and Hamid told the staff at the newly opened Orkesh rehab center where they are being held that they were subject to sexual exploitation by a group of ISIS women. Center staff told The Daily Beast that one of the boys said he was forced to have sex with eight ISIS women in just a few days.
Officials said the ISIS women in Camp al Hol told the teens they wanted to get pregnant to increase the population of the Islamic State, which they believe is going to be reinstated when fighters come and break them out of the camps. A camp guard said at least 10 boys at al Hol were involved, some only located and rescued when the SDF went into the camp and found them hidden by the women in underground tunnels.
No one knows the exact number of pregnancies in the camps but the SDF intelligence who monitor the camps say there are many. These should not be possible given that the ISIS men are held separately. Some pregnancies may have been the result of illicit relationships with guards, despite safeguards in place to make sure that doesn’t happen, but officials say the boys are clearly being exploited by ISIS women.
Some of the ISIS women in Camp al Hol hide this practice by giving birth without the help of the camp’s official doctors, aided by detainees who are also doctors and nurses.
Security forces and camp authorities in al Roj camp also confirmed to The Daily Beast that the same issue has occurred in their camp, although fewer pregnancies resulted there. One boy in Camp al Roj subjected to such exploitation ended up in the hospital collapsing after being given a Viagra-like substance to make him perform. Some mothers in the Roj camp, wanting to protect their sons from these women, begged the camp authorities to take their sons to rehabilitation centers.
