ERBIL, Kurdistan Region of Iraq - The Iraqi government has repatriated around 9,000 women and children, linked to the Islamic State (ISIS), from the notorious al-Hol camp in northeast Syria, accounting to almost 45 percent of all Iraqis held at the camp, an Iraqi government official has said. 

“Of 20,000 women and children associated with ISIS members, so far 9,000 of them have been repatriated to Iraq,” Iraq’s state-run INA quoted Saeed al-Jibashi, strategic affairs advisor at the Iraqi National Security Council, as saying. 

Jibashi added that the bulk of the returnees have been placed at rehabilitation centers before they are allowed to return to their home communities.

The official went on to say that the 9,000 individuals number 2,448 families.

A total of 1, 940 families have been rehabilitated and allowed to reintegrate with their communities at their hometowns.

He added that 11,000 Iraqis are still at the al-Hol camp and they too will be returned to Iraq as part of a joint UN-Iraqi government program which will take three more years. 

The majority of the returnees are resettled at the al-Jada camp in Nineveh province, where they are put through the rehabilitation programs.

Iraq and the UN have an agreement to return Iraqi nationals from Syria’s al-Hol camp by 2027.

Iraqis and Syrians constitute the bulk of some 40,000 ISIS-linked people who have been held at the al-Hol camp since the defeat of ISIS in 2019, with the local Kurdish authorities repeatedly calling on the international community to repatriate their nationals from the camp, but to no avail.