'We Pray For The Caliphate To Return': ISIS Families Crowd Into Syrian Camps

[Valin]

NPR

Jane Arraf

Apr. 19 2019

The women huddle for shelter from the rain under a corrugated iron roof, their long black cloaks dragging in the mud as they wait in line for food and pray for the return of the ISIS caliphate.

The squalid al-Hol camp, in the Kurdish-majority region of Syria known as Rojava, is filled with more than 72,000 people — most of them women and children who came out of the last piece of ISIS-held territory in Baghouz.

They include thousands of Iraqis and Syrians who believe they will usher in a new caliphate. And they pose a risk to the Iraqi government, seeking to repatriate the Iraqis, and to Syrian Kurdish authorities, having nowhere to send the Syrians.

"This is injustice — we pray for the caliphate to return," says one of the women, who says this is the third day they have been turned away from promised cartons of food. Everything is in short supply here.

"If it weren't for the airstrikes on our tents and camps killing our children," she says, "we would not have left the caliphate." All refuse to give their names.

All of the women are completely covered in long black cloaks, with only a slit for their eyes. A few have covered even their eyes.

"Convert, convert!" a group of women and girls shout at me, urging me to recite the shahada, the Muslim profession of faith: "There is no god but God, and Muhammad is his messenger."

"If you became Muslim and cover like us and became a member of our religion, you would not be killed" in the ISIS caliphate, one woman tells me.

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H/T Hot Air

 

Here's today's Hint: If you want my help and sympathy, it pays not to threaten me....just saying.

(Snip)