The freezing of the financing of President Trump has confused the future of a Syrian desert field that holds thousands of members of the Islamic State and their families, the director of the field and the people who are familiar, describe as a potential threat to safety in the region.
The field, at the Hol, which hosts about 39,000 people, was short of a detention for the programs financed by the United States and then reprints and is still fighting to understand its status. Although some fundamental programs to guarantee the field have received temporary extensions, another essential organization for the management of the field has declared that it may have to stop its work there as soon as Monday.
The confusion derives from the executive order of Mr. Trump last month who frozen the foreign aid and announcement of the Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Monday who was bending the United States Agency for international development in the State Department. Elon Musk, who manages a task force in the administration, said that the goal was to close Usaid, who supports operations in the field.
Al Hol, as well as a smaller field, Roj, is seen as a central one to relieve the fears of a return by the Islamic State, or ISIS, at a time when the expulsion of Bashar al-Assad from the presidency in Syria threw the country into the flow and added to instability in the region.
An American contractor, Vicimiety International, almost interrupted the operations after Rubio issued a stop-work order last week for all foreign aid programs. Proximity International manages a program that trains and equips local security forces in the North -Eastern Syria and to Al Hol.
Blumont, a group of humanitarian aid that has been contracted to support the fields since 2016, evaluated that it could stop working as just on Monday, according to an organization’s official. It uses hundreds of Syrian workers to provide food, water, toilet -health services, fuel and curtains in the fields and also uses safety guards in the field warehouses to protect supplies.
A non -profit based on Virginia, Blumont has obtained a 15 -day renunciation of freezing. International proximity was granted a renunciation of a month last Friday, hours before his contract should expire, according to two people who are familiar with the program that asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the issue and Jihan Hanan, director of To Hol and an official with the regional Kurdish authorities.
But it is not clear what will happen when the exemptions run away. Both organizations are trying to clarify with the US officials what will come later.
The Trump administration claimed that the freezing of the loan, set over 90 days, is necessary to examine whether the US funds are wasted. “Every dollar we spend, every program we finance and every policy we pursue must be justified with the answer to three simple questions,” said Rubio in a note last month. “Does it make America safer? Does it make America stronger? Does it make America more prosperous? “
The people involved in the management of the fields claim that work makes America safer, retaining the members of ISIS and that host other displaced people from the war. The Hol is seen as a key goal for the recruitment and operations of ISIS and the maintenance of safety is considered important to keep the jihadist group at bay.
Blumont’s exemption will expire on Monday. It has not been said if a renunciation will have continued and has not been paid since the Trump administration has started its revision of the help programs. A Blumont official said on Thursday that the group had exhausted the money and could no longer afford to work in the fields if the State Department or Usaid did not show it for the services he had already provided.
The last payment that Blumont received from both agencies was January 21 – the day the Trump administration ordered the freezing of the loan, according to the official, who was not authorized to be identified by name and spoke to condition of anonymity. The official said Blumont expired half of his staff based in the United States to try to reserve funding for field work.
Mrs. Hanan, director of Al Hol, said that, although it was raised, the Trump administration seemed to understand the meaning of maintaining the safety program in the field, the chaos that surrounded the status of other programs meant that safety problems remained a long term.
About 22,000 of the residents of the field are under the age of 18, said Mrs. Hanan, and grew up in families who were once faithful to ISIS, and perhaps they are still. The extinction programs are essential to ensure that they do not embrace extremism, he added.
“The arrest of aid will have an impact on children whose background makes them a threat to the world, their communities and their own families,” he said in an interview. “We want to rehabilitate these children by improving their living conditions and, instead, we were shocked to discover that it is going in the opposite direction.”
Schools are already closed in the field, he said, and some services for women also seem to be at risk. “Many organizations are telling us: at any time, we could get an order to stop,” he said.
The American connections with Al Hol and North-eastern Syria date back to the Coalition led by the United States formed in 2014 to fight ISIS, which had seized the control of large parts of Syria and Iraq. The coalition in the end defeated the group.
US troops maintain a presence in north-eastern Syria, in support of a local ally, the Syrian democratic forces led by Curi, to protect themselves from a return of ISIS. The SDF controls most of the north -eastern Syria and a constellation of prisons and refugee camps that hold ISIS fighters and their families.
The confusion around Al Hol comes while the Department of Defense is developing plans to collect all the US troops from Syria, although it is not clear whether these plans would be a hypothetical exercise or something more serious.
Any sign of a shot from the United States from its commitment to ensure that the territory will certainly not derive the SDF, which has undergone a growing attack by the groups supported by nearby Turkey.
In an interview, the SDF leader warned last year that his forces would abandon their roles by ensuring ISIS prisons if they needed to deviate forces to fight Turkey.