AL-HOL, Syria — A humanitarian crisis is erupting in northeastern Syria as tens of thousands of people who fled intense fighting in last month’s decisive battle against the Islamic State are flooding into a desperately overcrowded tent camp atop a rocky hill here.More than 73,000 people, mostly women and children, are now packed into the sprawling al-Hol camp, under the control of U.S.-backed Kurdish forces.
The camp, which opened in 1991 to host Iraqi refugees from the Persian Gulf War, was originally designed to hold barely half that number.Amid a sea of white tents, thousands sleep in communal spaces, and children defecate outside. The war wounded are often left untreated. Thousands more are malnourished. There are just three mobile clinics at the camp, and local hospitals are swollen with patients critically wounded in the war. Those with non-life-threatening injuries often are given painkillers or antibiotics and sent on their way.
Last week, 31 people died on the way to the camp or shortly after arriving because of traumatic injuries and malnutrition, according to the International Rescue Committee, bringing the total number of such deaths to 217.
Along the camp’s dirt roads, recently muddied by a downpour, amputees struggle without wheelchairs or crutches. Children, who make up 65 percent of the camp’s residents, haul injured or elderly relatives in makeshift carts fashioned from tarp.The massive and rapid influx of civilians — including Syrians, Iraqis and thousands of other foreigners who flocked to the Islamic State’s so-called caliphate — caught aid agencies and local authorities off guard. Now, they say, they are scrambling to respond.“It’s an emergency, an acute crisis. There are a lot of people arriving at the same time, lots of people we didn’t anticipate, and we’re needing to rapidly scale up,” said a senior aid official coordinating international assistance who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive nature of operations at the camp.
Kurdish-led fighters — known as the Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF — declared military victory over the Islamic State last month, following a brutal offensive to capture the militant group’s last foothold in the eastern Syrian village of Baghouz. While that village was just a small sliver of the once vast “caliphate,” there were an estimated 66,000 people still under the militants’ control there.During the military operation in Baghouz, the SDF set up screening centers to separate the men, including suspected Islamic State militants, and sent them to detention centers in cities in northeast Syria. Women and children were transported to al-Hol.
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