In ‘Europe’s Guantanamo’, YPG maims and kills women and children

A large number of women and children have been captured by the YPG terror group and subjected to harsh treatment in squalid camps meant for the families of suspected Daesh terrorists in northern Syria. 

A shocking report by London-based charity, Rights and Security International (RSI), has revealed that YPG terrorists have been systematically torturing their captives, most of them from European countries, without any charge.

The camps run by the YPG have now been dubbed “Europe’s Guantanamo”,  where thousands of women and children have been held because they are suspected of being the kin of dead, captured or active Daesh fighters. 

Regional experts worry that the inhumane conditions created by the YPG in these camps has put dozens of children at the risk of radicalisation. They fear, too, that it may even become a breeding ground for future terrorists.

According to the report, an average of 25 detainees have died every month between 2019 and 2020 in the Al Hol camp alone.

There are several camps in the area and deaths are occurring because of various reasons such as war wounds, malnutrition, severe dehydration, respiratory illness, hypothermia, and carbon monoxide poisoning from tent heaters, or from tent fires caused by unsafe heating devices.

A European woman in the camps has been quoted in the report as saying: “Last winter three young children burned alive. We saw the bodies of the babies.”

At least nine European children below the age of three have died in YPG-run camps in early 2020, said the report, adding that by 10 August 2020, “the death rate of all children in al Hol camp had tripled, with eight children under five dying in five days between 6 and 10 August 2020.”

RSI also documented severe abuse and violence in the detention camps - from opening fire on women, to removing male children at night.

It said that children are exposed to abduction and sexual abuse at the hands of YPG terrorists.

“A boy sexually assaulted my son last year. It happened outside during the day. He was approximately 12 years old. My son pointed him [out] to me,” a European woman told RSI.

RSI recorded “at least ten cases of Belgian, French, and German women being confined within the al Hol Annex, and in six instances children were detained alongside their mothers.” 

A French woman also said “‘a Belgian woman was in solitary confinement for a month with her five-year-old daughter. They were in a room of the same size as toilets, in the dark.”

One European woman described the trauma exhibited by a three-year-old whose mother had died, saying: “He doesn’t make eye contact. He sits in a corner with his back towards us. In the night I sometimes wake up and he is awake, sitting and biting his hands and knuckles until bleeding. He beats and bites himself. He wakes up at night screaming. He takes faeces from his diaper – he still uses a diaper at three years of age and puts it on the walls.”

European countries refuse to bring hundreds of citizens home, the women who were married to Daesh fighters, and have instead sought to have them tried in northeastern Syria.

Some European states explicitly withdrew the citizenship of several women detained by the YPG to escape any possible repatriation, and placed them “outside the protection of the law.”