High court rules Cairo University can restrict use of full veils

Salwa Samir February 10, 2020

REUTERS/Amr Abdallah Dalsh
A woman wearing a niqab stands near a hieroglyphic mural in el-Dokki 

district of greater Giza, south of Cairo, Dec. 22, 2012.

After five years of public debate, Egypt's top court has settled the issue: Cairo University, one of Egypt's oldest higher education institutions, can ban its professors from wearing full-face veils, or niqabs, inside lecture halls. The ban does not apply to the rest of the campus.

The High Administrative Court ruled Jan. 27 that, while a person's choice of attire is among the personal freedoms guaranteed by the constitution, this freedom is not limitless and should not contradict public morals. The court noted that the Regulation of Universities Law doesn’t require staff members to don uniforms, but does demand that they abide by university traditions. With its ruling, the court rejected the appeal by some 80 of the schools' teachers who challenged the ban.

The next day, Cairo University media adviser Mahmoud Alam Eddin told CBC News that the niqab ban in lecture halls would be implemented by Feb. 8, the start of the second semester. Professors who don't comply won't be allowed to teach, he added.

Ain Shams University quickly followed suit, with President Mahmoud al-Metiny announcing Feb. 4 that his school would implement a ban immediately.

The controversy arose five years ago when Gaber Nassar, former president of Cairo University, called for the prohibition. Nassar said back then that the veil hinders clear communication with students, especially during academic lectures.

Egyptian parliament members have attempted numerous times to prohibit niqabs.

In 2018, legislator Ghada Ajami proposed a draft law that called for banning all women from wearing the niqab in public places such as restaurants, universities and parks and called for violators to be fined 1,000 Egyptian pounds ($63) or more.

Ajami described the niqab as a source of sedition in society, as it reflects the extremist ideology of ultraconservative movements. She said the ban would help combat terrorism. But after backlash over the proposal, Ajami gave up the effort, acknowledging a ban might cause divisions in the country.

That same year, Mohamed Abu Hamed, another lawmaker, called on the prime minister to ban the full-face veil in state and educational institutions, similar to action taken in Algeria. But many parliamentarians rejected his call, saying it would restrict personal freedom.

Cairo University is not the first institution to succeed in barring its staff from wearing the niqab. Al-Azhar, Egypt's top religious authority, made the call in 2009.

The former grand imam of Al-Azhar, Sheikh Mohammed Sayyid Tantawi, issued a decision to ban female staff and students from donning the niqab at the university, even in dormitories. Tantawi said the full-face veil is a sign of radicalism and has nothing to do with Islam.

There are supporters and opponents of the ban at Cairo University and in the general public. The Revolutionary Socialists, a movement established in 2011 after the January 25 Revolution, rejected the court's decision.

It said in a statement on Facebook, "We must defend women's right to choose their clothing." The university should pay attention to "factors that actually affect the educational process and the ability of a faculty member to deliver knowledge, not her appearance."

Lawmaker Dalia Youssef hailed the recent ruling and called for extending the ban to include students as well, to help shape Egyptian society’s way of thinking.

“I asked the minister of higher education [and the Ministry of Health] to issue a decision that applies to all universities," she said by phone on an al-Haya TV talk show Jan. 28. "The matter doesn’t require a draft law, as there is already a court ruling.”

Shaimaa Mousa, an assistant lecturer in Greek and Latin studies at Cairo University's School of Arts, told Al-Monitor she totally agrees with the ban.

“Actually, I am against the niqab, whether in or outside the university. How can I communicate with a person who is fully veiled except for her eyes?” Mousa said. “The face and body language are among the most important tools of communication."

However, Mousa noted that niqab wearers may find ways to circumvent the ban, as one ultraconservative Muslim recently suggested. Sameh Abdel Hamid, former leader of the Salafist Nour party, said Jan. 28 on Facebook that niqab-wearing staff at Cairo University should instead wear medical masks in lecture halls. He claimed the masks have many benefits, like avoiding the coronavirus. “The law will not prevent the use of masks,” Abdel Hamid said.

Salwa Samir, an Egyptian journalist, has been writing about human rights, social problems, immigration and children's and women's issues since 2005.




Read more: https://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2020/02/egypt-cairo-university-ban-niqab-religion-freedom.html#ixzz6EqPoGmlE

The dispute over the Islamic veil in Russia

by Vladimir Rozanskij

Moscow is debating the possible ban on wearing the Niqab proposed by deputies and opinion makers who insist on the need to curb extremist tendencies, recalling how in several Central Asian countries this measure has existed for some time. Mufti are divided among themselves, while some members of United Russia are also against it, fearing repercussions in relations with the Islamic world.

Moscow (AsiaNews) - Discussions have been going on for weeks in Russia over the possible ban on wearing the Niqab, the Islamic veil that covers the entire face leaving only a slit for the eyes, often associated with the fundamentalist current of Wahabism. It was the president of the Human Rights Council, Valerij Fadeev, who once again proposed the ban, supported by various deputies and opinion leaders who insist on the need to curb extremist tendencies among Muslims throughout the country, even though the Ministry of the Interior has not provided any statistics to support these fears.

The issue of the Niqab, moreover, also divides the Muslim community in Russia, and religious leaders simply rule out restrictions on the Hijab, the bare-face veil. The Kprf communists have announced that the draft law on the ban, which envisages at least a 15 thousand rouble (150 euro) fine for any form of face covering, has already been sent to the government for official consideration. Fadeev said he was 'disturbed that so far the Niqab has not been banned in Russia', whereas in several Central Asian countries such a restriction has been in place for some time. The politicians intend to discuss the issue directly with the leaders of traditional Islam and regional authorities.

The Grand Mufti of Moscow, Ildar Aljautdinov, warns that a ban that is too direct could lead to tensions in society: "These attempts may appear to be a violation of the secular norms of law and the constitution, which guarantee all citizens of Russia the freedom to profess their religion, and to observe its canons". United Russia deputy in the Moscow Duma Ildar Gilmutdinov, head of the Federal National and Cultural Autonomy of the Tatars, spoke in favour of the Niqab, warning in turn that a ban could make Russia's relations with the entire Islamic world more difficult.

A member of the Human Rights Council, Kirill Kabanov, a long-standing supporter of the strict line on migrant issues, reacted to these statements by claiming that 'for traditional Russian Islam, this type of clothing is not at all natural', and that its recent spread is nothing more than 'a provocation by radicals, who have a hostile attitude towards us and our country, and are alien to our traditions and our world'. He, too, recalled that in Central Asia the Niqab and even the Paranja, the veil that completely covers women's bodies, is not allowed, and Kprf deputy Mikhail Matveev believes that 'first of all we need an official pronouncement from religious leaders on what clothes are appropriate for Muslims in Russia'.

Some recalled a speech by President Vladimir Putin in 2012, in which he argued that "the Hijab is not part of our culture, part of our traditional Islam, why should we take on traditions that are foreign to us?" Aljautdinov replied that 'if the decision of the ban really helps to protect the lives of our citizens, curbing the growth of Islamic extremism, then we will all support it, but this argument must be supported by real data'. It was the deputy interior minister, Andrej Khrapov, who responded to these appeals by noting that 'there are no clear signs of a radicalising trend in Islam in Russia'.

Other religious leaders, such as Kamil Samigullin of the Islamic administration of Tatarstan, also affirm that 'the ban is an attack on Muslims', while the Mufti of Volgograd, Kifakh Mokhamad, supports the proposal, recalling the recent attack on Krokus City Hall, pointing out that 'the Niqab is not a religious attribute, but only a habit of some Muslim societies, which has no reference to Sharia law'. Some propose to leave the decision 'in the hands of the governors, depending on regional traditions', and from many quarters it is reiterated that the key issue is not the (unproven) danger of radicalism, but rather to 'avoid the growth of Islamophobia' in Russia, which often becomes a form of repression of migrants.

Swiss ‘Burqa Ban’: Why Face Covering Is Prohibited In Switzerland Beginning January 1

The ban came about after a referendum held in 2021, in which Swiss citizens narrowly voted in favor of prohibiting face coverings in public, including the burqa and niqab worn by some Muslim women. The final tally was 51.2 percent in favor versus 48.8 percent opposed.

Outlook Web Desk
Updated on: 1 January 2025

Representative image

In Switzerland, the law prohibiting facial coverings has officially come into effect beginning January 1, 2025. The law known as the “burqa ban,” restricts face covering in public – including wearing the burqa or niqab which is commonly worn by Muslim women. Those who violate this law will be charged with fines of up to 1,000 Swiss francs (Rs 94,651.06).

What is exactly banned under this new law?

The new law specifically bans the covering of the nose, mouth, and eyes in both public spaces and private buildings accessible to the public. However, there are some exceptions – the ban does not apply to facial coverings worn for health reasons, such as medical masks or during cold weather; and coverings are permitted in places of worship, for artistic performances, or in advertising.

The ban also makes room for personal protection in cases where face covering is necessary for freedom of expression or assembly, as long as public order is maintained, and the responsible authorities approve such instances.

The facial coverings, notably, are still allowed on planes and in diplomatic or consular premises, as well as in certain sacred sites.

ALSO READ| The Shadow of Burqas

Why did Switzerland ban face coverings?

The ban came about after a referendum held in 2021, in which Swiss citizens narrowly voted in favor of prohibiting face coverings in public, including the burqa and niqab worn by some Muslim women. The final tally was 51.2 percent in favor versus 48.8 percent opposed.

The proposal was proposed by the right-wing Swiss People’s Party (SVP), which campaigned with slogans such as “Stop extremism.” Although the proposal did not explicitly target Islam, it has been widely perceived as a response to Islamic face coverings.

The Swiss government itself opposed the ban, arguing that it was not the role of the state to dictate what individuals, especially women, wear.

The ban's primary objective is to address what proponents argue is a symbol of extremism and a potential security risk.

Controversy over the ban proposal

Human rights groups, including Amnesty International, have sharply criticized the measure. Amnesty called the ban “a dangerous policy that violates women’s rights, including their right to freedom of expression and religion.” Critics argue that the ban disproportionately affects Muslim women, many of whom choose to wear the niqab or burqa as an expression of faith or personal conviction.

ALSO READ| If You Want To Ban Burqa Then 'Ghunghat' Should Go Too: Javed Akhtar

Research from the University of Lucerne revealed that the actual number of women in Switzerland who wear the burqa is negligible, with around 30 women reported to wear the niqab. Muslims make up about 5 percent of Switzerland’s population of 8.6 million, with the majority of Muslim residents hailing from countries like Turkey, Bosnia, and Kosovo.

Despite the relatively low number of people directly affected, the law's passage has ignited a broader debate about religious freedom, the rights of women, and cultural integration in the country.

KENNEY LIES

Alberta premier denies supporting niqab ban despite past public statements

© Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press Alberta Premier Jason Kenney is denying he ever supported a ban on niqab or face veils worn by some Muslim women.

Alberta Premier Jason Kenney is denying he supported a ban on niqabs even though he issued a directive in 2011 banning women from wearing them during citizenship ceremonies when he was the federal minister of citizenship and immigration.

Kenney made the remarks during a news conference following the virtual Western Premiers Conference on Tuesday.

"I've never supported a proposed ban," Kenney said.

"To the contrary, I've always said that Canada is a country that protects and respects religious freedom and pluralism, and the government has no business regulating what people wear unlike in certain European and Middle Eastern countries that do have bans on face coverings," he added.

"That has never been proposed. I've always opposed that."

Kenney is facing new questions about his record in light of recent comments by Tim Uppal, the Conservative MP for Edmonton-Mill Woods.

Uppal, who became the spokesperson for the niqab ban as the minister of state of multiculturalism in the Harper cabinet, apologized in a Facebook post Sunday for not pushing back harder against the policies of his former government which he said "alienated Muslim Canadians and contributed to the growing problem of Islamaphobia in Canada."

Uppal said he decided to publicly account for his past actions after four members of a Muslim family were struck and killed by a man driving a truck in London, Ont.

The accused is now facing terrorism charges in addition to four charges of first-degree murder and one charge of attempted murder. One family member, a nine-year-old boy, survived the attack.

Uppal's caucus colleague, Calgary-Nose Hill MP Michelle Rempel Garner, also apologized for her inaction.

Despite his denial on Tuesday, Kenney continued to take responsibility for and defend the policy as recently as 2015, when the ban was struck down in court.

Kenney was also a member of cabinet when the Conservative government led by former prime minister Stephen Harper proposed a hotline during an election campaign to report so-called "barbaric cultural practices."

© CBC Edmonton-Mill Woods MP Tim Uppal, seen here in 2015 when he was minister of state for multiculturalism, became the spokesperson for legislation to ban face-coverings at citizenship ceremonies.

Uppal, who appeared on CBC Radio's Edmonton AM Tuesday, deflected questions about whether he felt Kenney should apologize as he was accounting for his own actions as the minister of state for multiculturalism.

"[Kenney] has a very good relationship with a lot of people in the Muslim community," Uppal said. "This is something that I have seen myself first-hand."

Kenney left federal politics in 2016 to run for the leadership of the Progressive Conservative Party of Alberta, the first step in his successful drive to unite the PCs with the Wildrose Party.

Jasvir Deol, the NDP MLA for Edmonton-Meadows, called for Kenney to apologize. The premier was not in Tuesday's question period to take Opposition questions on the issue.

IN THE CLOSET CONSERVATIVES

Burqa isn’t choice

Ayesha Ijaz Khan

Published September 26, 2021 - 

The writer is a lawyer based in London.


SEVERAL years ago, when I started working as a lawyer in Karachi, as I was walking to my office inside a large building, which housed several offices, a man from an adjacent office, who looked like he could be my father’s age, stopped me and said, “Beta, dupatta kidhar hai?”

“It’s none of your business whether I wear a dupatta or not,” I retorted, and he backed down apologising. However, the incident stuck with me. The idea that a complete stranger could tell me what to wear wasn’t alien to me. I had grown up in Saudi Arabia, where an entire brigade of men called the mutawa, were tasked with going around town to check how many strands of hair were showing from women’s hijabs and admonish them and their next-of-kin males accordingly.

However, when I am told that women choose to wear a hijab, niqab or burqa, I find the notion completely fanciful. Some may certainly be choosing it, but a large number are not. Particularly those who live in Muslim-majority countries, where free choice has never been part of our ethos.

In Pakistan, for instance, isn’t it quite common for parents to decide who their children should marry or which profession they should pursue?

Free choice has never been part of our ethos.

One hundred per cent free choice doesn’t exist anywhere in the world, as there are always some norms and bounds that society dictates. For instance, nudity isn’t considered acceptable in public places and a University of California, Berkeley, student who attempted it back in 1992 was promptly arrested. Nevertheless, the amount of leeway one is given in choosing one’s life path, activities, and indeed dress is far more restrictive in our societies than it is in Western ones.

A cousin who moved from the US to UAE once told me that she had more freedom organising and attending Islamic religious lectures (dars) in the US than she did in the UAE, where the subject was strictly regulated by the state.

One only has to compare university campuses in Western countries with those in Pakistan to find how much freedom young adults have in terms of how freely they can come and go from campus or organise for a political cause. Many girls will tell you their dads do not allow them to wear sleeveless shirts or dance at functions where both men and women are present, while boys may be told that they need to marry off their sisters before they can think of marrying themselves.

So free choice plays very little role in our culture and society. This then brings us to the question — why do women wear the hijab, niqab or burqa? Primarily, it is because they are told that this is what their religion requires of them. But also, some young girls have told me that wearing a hijab leads to less familial constraint on their comings and goings, as male family members feel they have become religious and hence doubt them less. Others feel the extra clothing may fend off unwanted stares and advances.

One girl I recently spoke to told me that she wore a burqa when she went to study in China, thinking that it will make her safer as this is what she had been conditioned to believe in Pakistan. However, after a while she realised that the burqa was attracting undue attention in China and yet not serving the purpose it was supposed to. She said she soon realised that women in China were generally safe without wearing the burqa so she too took it off.

So the crux of the matter is making women feel safe in a public space. The questions to ask are: in societies where a large number of women are veiling, are women safe to walk on the streets alone? Are they safe at bus stops or driving cars alone or are they participating fully in public life? Or are they holding back, still fearful of unwanted advances from men, and yet not realising their potential?

I must add here that the hijab, a head covering alone, does not constrain women from doing most things that women without a hijab can do, but a niqab and burqa certainly do. They make public interface much more difficult. How many of us would be comfortable with a doctor or a nurse or a lawyer who veils her face? The idea of the face veil is to relegate women to a position where they have minimal public space.

This is not only detrimental for women but society at large. Emphasis on veiling often leads to calls for segregation of the sexes, which simply isn’t feasible in most real-life work situations. Saudi Arabia has learned this as it tries to diversify its economy and has reversed stricter veiling policies it promoted earlier.

As the Taliban take hold of Afghanistan and impose harsh conditions on women, it is more important than ever for other Muslim countries to speak out against such regressive interpretations of our religion, which are incompatible with modernity.

The writer is a lawyer based in London.
Twitter: @ayeshaijazkhan
Published in Dawn, September 26th, 2021

ANOTHER INTERNECINE LEADERSHIP RACE

Poilievre pitches to new immigrants, as Brown attacks him over 2015 niqab ban bill

OTTAWA — Brampton Mayor Patrick Brown and high-profile Conservative Pierre Poilievre spent Monday battling over a seven-year-old election promise to prohibit face coverings during citizenship ceremonies — a sign of what could be the makings of a tense rivalry between candidates in the Tory leadership race.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

Brown, who launched his bid on Sunday, blasted longtime Ottawa-area MP Poilievre over his actions back in 2015 when the party promised to create a "barbaric cultural practices" tip line and require people's faces to be visible during citizenship oaths.

The attack came as Poilievre spent the past few days meeting with cultural community leaders in the Greater Toronto Area and promising to cut red tape for immigrants wanting to access the necessary licences they need to work in regulated industries. Among those he met with were members of the Armenian, Muslim and Pakistani communities as well some of the party's candidates from the area.

Regardless of who is chosen as leader Sept. 10, Conservatives know they must make inroads with immigrants and racialized Canadians if theyhope to pick up seats in the region as well as other major cities and suburbs, considered key to defeating three-term Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Poilievre pledged Monday to revive similar programs that were in place under the last Conservative leader who did well in communities of visible minorities: former prime minister Stephen Harper, at least prior to 2015.

He promised toincentivize provinces to require occupational licensing bodies to decide on an immigrant's application within 60 days of receiving their paperwork, rather than forcing them to wait for months.

As well, Poilievre pitched offering small loans to immigrants who might need to take extra courses to gain a professional or trade licence to work in their respective field.

As Poilievre made these pledges, Brown, who is positioning himself as the candidate who stands for religious freedoms, released a statement saying the MP lacks credibility on any policy that impacts minority communities given his role in the Conservatives' 2015 election campaign.

It was during that race when the party, then led by Harper, promised to create a tip line for so-called "barbaric cultural practices." Conservatives at the time said it was meant to report things like forced marriage.

During that election, Poilievre was running for re-election as a candidate. He was also a member of Harper's government when it introduced a bill banning people from wearing face coverings during citizenship ceremonies. That was ultimately struck down in court. The promise was also included in the party's election campaign, when Harper also mused about possibly extending it to federal public servants.

Brown said Monday that Poilievre has never spoken out against these measures. The MP also has Jenni Byrne on his team, who was the party's national campaign manager in 2015.

"This is the same campaign which platformed those two abhorrent policies, and lost the Conservatives the 2015 general election," Brown's statement read.

"Even if he attempts to distance himself from his silence today, it would be a hollow gesture in an insincere bid to gain votes."

Poilievre responded Monday by calling Brown a "liar," accusing him of mischaracterizing what Harper was doing.

"There was no niqab ban," he said in a statement released on social media.

"I would never support that, nor did Mr. Harper. What Mr. Harper proposed was that a person's face be visible while giving oaths at citizenship ceremonies."

Poilievre, whose statement didn't address the past proposal of a "barbaric cultural practices" tip line, added he would continue to support immigration and equality.

In response, National Council of Canadians CEO Mustafa Farooq tweeted that "leadership requires accountability" and pointed out some of Poilievre's fellow MPs have apologized for what happened in 2015.

Among those is Edmonton MP Tim Uppal, a co-chair on Poilievre's campaign, who has apologized for his role as a minister in promoting the ban on niqabs during citizenship ceremonies.Before the leadership race, Uppal said the party was still dealing with the fallout from racialized communities because of the 2015 campaign.

A post-mortem from the Conservatives' 2021 election loss submitted in January came to a similar finding, according to three sources who spoke to The Canadian Press on the condition of anonymity.

Melissa Lantsman, a newly elected Ontario MP who is also supporting Poilievre in the race, shared on social media last fall that while she was stood in favour of banning the niqab during citizenship ceremonies in 2015, her "view has since evolved."

Michael Diamond, a campaign strategist who, among other campaigns, worked on Peter MacKay's 2020 Conservative leadership bid, said Brown's attack over the issue and targeting of Byrne is a "proxy" attack on Harper, who is highly respected among the membership.

"It seems like folly to me to attack the last campaign of the man who remains the most popular figure in this party."

He added it's still early days in the race and cautioned that the debates playing out between the campaigns and on social media were occurring in an "echo chamber."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 14, 2022.

Stephanie Taylor, The Canadian Press

HINDUTVA INJUSTICE IS SYSTEMIC
India court upholds ban on hijab in schools and colleges

By SHEIKH SAALIQ

1 of 11

Indian students in uniform clothing walk inside the campus of a government-run junior college in Udupi, Karnataka state, India, Feb. 24, 2022. Muslim students in this southern Indian state have found themselves at the center of a debate over hijab bans in schools. The furor began in January when staffers at the college began refusing admission to girls who showed up in a hijab, saying they were violating the uniform code. (AP Photo/Aijaz Rahi)


NEW DELHI (AP) — An Indian court Tuesday upheld a ban on wearing hijab in class in the southern state of Karnataka, saying the Muslim headscarf is not an essential religious practice of Islam in a ruling that is likely to further deepen religious tensions in the country.

The high court in Karnataka state delivered the verdict after considering petitions filed by Muslim students challenging a government ban on hijabs that some schools and colleges have implemented in the last two months. The ban does not extend to other Indian states, but the court ruling could set a precedent for the rest of the country.

The dispute began in January when a government-run school in Karnataka’s Udupi district barred students wearing hijabs from entering classrooms, triggering protests by Muslims who said they were being deprived of their fundamental rights to education and religion. That led to counterprotests by Hindu students wearing saffron shawls, a color closely associated with that religion and favored by Hindu nationalists.

More schools in the state followed with similar bans and the state’s top court disallowed students from wearing hijab and any religious clothing pending a verdict.

The court in its ruling said the state government had the power to prescribe uniform guidelines for students as a “reasonable restriction on fundamental rights.”

The ruling came at a time when violence and hate speech against Muslims have increased under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s governing Hindu nationalist party, which also governs Karnataka state. Over the last few weeks, the issue has become a flashpoint for the battle over the rights of Muslims, who fear they are being shunted aside as a minority in India and see hijab bans as a worrying escalation of Hindu nationalism under Modi’s government.

Some rights activists have voiced concerns that the ban could increase Islamophobia.

“No one can understand our anxiousness about what is to follow,” Afreen Fatima, a New Delhi-based student activist, wrote on Twitter. “The court’s Hijab ban is a great injustice and a very worrying precedence. The scale of its repercussion is going to be brutal and inhuman.”

Karnataka’s education minister B. C. Nagesh told reporters that female Muslim students who were protesting against the ban must respect the court’s verdict and return to classes. He said his government will try to win the hearts of “misguided” students and “bring them in mainstream of education.”

Some Muslim politicians called the verdict disappointing.

“I hope this judgement will not be used to legitimize harassment of hijab-wearing women,” said Asaduddin Owaisi, a member of the Indian parliament.

Ahead of the verdict, the Karnataka government banned large gatherings for a week in state capital Bengaluru “to maintain public peace and order” and declared a holiday Tuesday in schools and colleges in Udupi.

The hijab is worn by many Muslim women to maintain modesty or as a religious symbol, often seen as not just a bit of clothing but something mandated by their faith.

Hijab restrictions have surfaced elsewhere, including France, which in 2004 banned them in schools. But in India, where Muslims make up 14% of the country’s 1.4 billion people, the hijab has historically been neither prohibited nor limited in public spheres. Women donning the headscarf is common across the country, which has religious freedom enshrined in its national charter with the secular state as a cornerstone.

Hijab bans deepen Hindu-Muslim fault lines in Indian state


By SHEIKH SAALIQ


UDUPI, India (AP) — When Aliya Assadi was 12, she wore a hijab while representing her southern Indian state of Karnataka at a karate competition. She won gold.

Five years later she tried to wear one to her junior college, the equivalent of a U.S. high school. She never made it past the campus gate, turned away under a new policy barring the religious headgear.

“It’s not just a piece of cloth,” Assadi said while visiting a friend’s house. She wore a niqab, an even more concealing garment that veils nearly the entire face with just a slit for the eyes, which she dons when away from home. “Hijab is my identity. And right now what they’re doing is taking away my identity from me.”

She’s one of countless Muslim students in Karnataka who have found themselves thrust into the center of a stormy debate about banning the hijab in schools and the Islamic head coverings’ place in this Hindu-majority but constitutionally secular nation.

Indian Muslim student Aliya Assadi dons a niqab, a concealing garment that veils nearly the entire face with just a slit for the eyes, as she arrives at her friend's house in Udupi, Karnataka state, India. (AP Photo/Aijaz Rahi)

The issue has become a flashpoint for the battle over the rights of Muslims, who fear they are being shunted aside as a minority in India and see hijab restrictions as a worrying escalation of Hindu nationalism under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government.

On Tuesday, an Indian court upheld the ban, saying the Muslim headscarf is not an essential religious practice of Islam.

The hijab is worn by many Muslim women to maintain modesty or as a religious symbol, often seen as not just a bit of clothing but something mandated by their faith. Opponents consider it a symbol of oppression, imposed on women. Hijab supporters deny that and say it has different meanings depending on the individual, including as a proud expression of Muslim identity.

A veiled Indian Muslim student, her hands decorated with henna, talks to her friend as they gather to meet student activists in Kundapur in district Udupi, Karnataka state, India. (AP Photo/Aijaz Rahi)

The furor began in January in India, where Muslims make up just 14% of the country’s 1.4 billion people but are still numerous enough to make it the second-largest Muslim population of any nation, after Indonesia.

Staffers at a government-run junior college in Udupi, a coastal city in Karnataka, began refusing admission to girls who showed up in a hijab, saying they were violating the uniform code.

The students protested by camping outside and holding their lessons there, arguing that Muslim students had long been allowed to wear headscarves at school. More schools in the state soon imposed similar bans, prompting demonstrations by hundreds of Muslim women.

That led to counterprotests by Hindu students wearing saffron shawls, a color closely associated with that religion and favored by Hindu nationalists. They shouted slogans like “Hail Lord Ram,” a phrase that traditionally was used to celebrate the Hindu deity but has been co-opted by nationalists.

At one campus a boy climbed a flagpole and hoisted a saffron flag to cheers from friends. At another a girl in a hijab was met by shouted Hindu slogans from a group of boys; she raised her fist and cried, “Allahu akbar!” — “God is great,” in Arabic.

India's Hindu right wing Bajrang Dal activists donning saffron scarves and waving saffron flags demand a probe in the recent killing of one of their associates in Karnataka's Shivamogga district, during a protest rally in Udupi, Karnataka, India. (AP Photo/Aijaz Rahi)

To quell tensions the state, governed by Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, shut schools and colleges for three days. It then slapped a statewide ban on the hijab in classes, saying “religious clothing” in government-run schools “disturbs equality, integrity and public law and order.”

Some students gave in and attended with their heads uncovered. Others refused and have been barred from school for nearly two months — students like Ayesha Anwar, an 18-year-old in Udupi who has missed exams and is falling behind her peers.

“I feel like we are being let down by everyone,” Anwar said while surrounded by friends in a dimly lit cafe, her voice barely a whisper from behind her cloth veil.

Muslim student Ayesha Anwar, 18, chats with her friends at a cafe in Udupi, Karnataka state, India. Anwar has missed exams and is falling behind her peers, after wearing of the hijab was banned in schools. (AP Photo/Aijaz Rahi)

Six students sued to overturn the state’s ban, now upheld by the court, arguing it violates their rights to education and religious freedom. One of the plaintiffs to the challenge was Aliya Assadi.

“I’m an Indian and a Muslim,” she said. “When I see this with the point of view of a Muslim, I see my hijab is at a stake, and as an Indian, I see my constitutional values have been violated.”

There’s a cost to her activism: Hindu nationalists doxxed her personal details on social media, unleashing a flood of online abuse and harassment. She lost friends who depicted her actions as Muslim fundamentalism.

But she’s steadfast about wearing the hijab. She first did so as a child, imitating her mother, carefully arranging the headscarf in front of the mirror each morning. Today she enjoys the privacy it affords and the sense of religious pride it conveys: “It makes me confident.”

Indian Muslim student Aliya Assadi, left, holds her mobile phone as she interacts with a friend in Udupi, Karnataka state, India. (AP Photo/Aijaz Rahi)

Ayesha Imtiaz, another student barred from school, said she wears it as a token of devotion to Islam but acknowledged that opinions vary even among Muslim women.

“There are so many of my friends who do not wear hijab inside the classroom,” said Imtiaz, 20. “They feel empowered in their own way, and I feel empowered in my own way.”

In her eyes, the bans segregate women according to faith and contravene core Indian values on diversity.

“It’s Islamophobia,” Imtiaz said.

Hijab restrictions have surfaced elsewhere, including France, which in 2004 banned them in schools. Other European countries have enacted regulations for public spaces, usually aimed at the more concealing garments such as niqabs and burqas. Usage of head coverings has divided even some Muslim communities.

In India, the hijab has historically been neither prohibited nor limited in public spheres. Women donning the headscarf is common across the country, which has religious freedom enshrined in its national charter with the secular state as a cornerstone.

An Indian Muslim girl wearing a hijab runs past others wearing burqas during an evening at a beach in Udupi, Karnataka state, India. (AP Photo/Aijaz Rahi)

But critics of Modi say India has steadily drifted from that commitment to secularism and today is deeply fractured along religious lines. The prime minister and top Cabinet officials often perform Hindu rituals and prayers on television, blurring the lines between religion and the state.

Since coming into office in 2014, Modi’s government has passed a raft of laws that opponents call anti-Muslim, though his party rejects accusations of being discriminatory.

Meanwhile calls for violence against Muslims have moved from society’s fringes toward the mainstream. Watchdog groups such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have warned that attacks could escalate against Muslims, who are disproportionately represented in India’s most impoverished neighborhoods and in prisons.

Some of the anti-Islam sentiment has specifically targeted women — recently many in the country were outraged by a website that was set up offering a fake “auction” of more than 100 prominent Indian Muslim women, including journalists, activists, artists and movie stars.

People hold placards and candles in Bengaluru, India, during a protest against banning Muslim girls from wearing the hijab in educational institutions in southern Karnataka state. (AP Photo/Aijaz Rahi)

Muslim students allege that behind the counterprotests in Karnataka was Hindu Jagran Vedike, a nationalist group associated with Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a far-right Hindu organization ideologically linked to Modi’s political party.

Mahesh Bailur, a senior member of Hindu Jagran Vedike, denied that his group organized demonstrations and said it only offered “moral support” to the saffron shawls and their cause.

“Today these girls are demanding hijab in colleges. Tomorrow they will want to pray there. Finally, they’ll want separate classrooms for themselves,” he said. “This is unacceptable.”

Bailur, 36, is a proponent of a discredited conspiracy theory that holds Muslims are plotting to convert India’s Hindu population and eventually remake it as an Islamic nation. Demands to wear the hijab in classes, he argued, are part of that.

Manavi Atri, a human rights lawyer based in Bengaluru, the capital of Karnataka, said the hijab ban is among many assaults on expressions of Muslim identity in India today, violates principles of state neutrality on religious matters, and inflates an “us-versus-them philosophy” in a country already riven by sectarian divisions. Most troubling, she said, is the pressure it puts on girls and young women in their formative years.

“This choice (between education and faith) that people are being forced to make is not a choice one has to be exercising at that age,” she said.

A girl in uniform walks into the government-run junior college with a Muslim student wearing burqa in Udupi, Karnataka state, India. (AP Photo/Aijaz Rahi)

In the court case, lawyers for Karnataka state argued that the Quran does not clearly establish wearing the hijab as an essential spiritual practice, so banning it does not violate religious freedom.

Many Muslims reject that interpretation.

On a recent Friday, Rasheed Ahmad, the head imam of Udupi’s grand mosque, delivered a sermon before hundreds of worshippers. His voice thundering through loudspeakers mounted on the minarets, he railed against the bans as an attack on Islam.

“Hijab is not just our right,” he said later in an interview, “but an order from God.”

Assadi said she and the others are determined to prevail.

“We are brave Muslim women,” she said, “and we know how to fight for our rights.”

Indian Muslim students spend time at a cafe after they were denied entry into their college for wearing the hijab in Udupi, Karnataka state, India. (AP Photo/Aijaz Rahi)

Police officers stand guard at a gate of the Mahatma Gandhi Memorial college after hijab wearing Muslim girl students were denied entry into the campus in Udupi, Karnataka state, India. (AP Photo/Aijaz Rahi)
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Indian students in uniform clothing walk inside the campus of a government-run junior college in Udupi, Karnataka state, India. (AP Photo/Aijaz Rahi)

A Muslim girl wearing a hijab checks photographs taken on her mobile phone at a beach in Udupi, Karnataka state. (AP Photo/Aijaz Rahi)

Rasheed Ahmad, the head imam of Udupi's grand mosque, teaches the Quran to children in Udupi, Karnataka state, India. (AP Photo/Aijaz Rahi)

Indian Muslim students wearing burqas leave Mahatma Gandhi Memorial college after they were denied entry into the campus in Udupi, Karnataka state, India, Feb. 24, 2022. (AP Photo/Aijaz Rahi)

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Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

SEE LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for HINDUISM IS FASCISM 

Documentary 'Sabaya' shows rescue of 'IS' sex slaves

Hogir Hirori's award-winning documentary portrays the struggles of activists determined to save Yazidi girls and women who were captured by the "Islamic State."



The niqab makes it difficult to identify Yazidis living in the camp

Right at the beginning of the film Sabaya, the defeat of the "Islamic State" (IS) terror group in Syria is announced on the radio.

But the news doesn't have much impact on the task undertaken by Mahmud and Ziyad, volunteers of the Yazidi Home Center. They are on their way to the notoriously dangerous internment camp al-Hol, where an estimated 73,000 individuals from 58 countries — most of them suspected supporters and families of IS militants — are living in tents.

Hidden among them are Yazidi girls and women who were kidnapped by IS to serve as sex slaves, called "sabaya."

The abductions took place five years earlier, when IS captured the province of Sinjar in Iraq. The 2014 massacre against the Yazidis in the region marked the beginning of the genocide of the ancient religious minority.

Watch video 12:03 Aftermath of a genocide: Yazidis of Sinjar Immersive cinema

Mahmud, Ziyad and the small team of the Yazidi Home Center work to locate and save the captive Yazidi — and filmmaker Hogir Hirori joined them to document their dangerous rescue missions.

As one expedition leads to a car chase and a shoot-out on a bumpy road, Hirori's camera stays still, not missing a second of the action. "But I didn't expect to survive that," the filmmaker told DW through an interpreter at the German premiere of his film.

Sabaya opened the Human Rights Film Festival Berlin, held as a hybrid online and on-site event from September 16-25. Even though the Berlin event was the first the director could personally attend due to COVID, Sabaya has already been shown at 30 international festivals, winning the 2021 World Documentary Directing Award at Sundance among other prizes.

Documentary filmmaker Hogir Hirori

The director, who has been living living in Sweden since 1999, was born in Kurdistan, not too far from Sinjar. Sabaya is his third film in a trilogy on the impact of war in the region, following The Girl Who Saved My Life (2014) and The Deminer (2017).

Through his immersive filmmaking style, Hirori offers the audience rare access to the al-Hol camp. Even though many of the detainees have since been relocated, it is estimated that there are still more than 60,000 refugees in the overcrowded camp controlled by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a Kurdish-led military alliance that served as a partner of the US in the war on IS in Syria.

To gain the trust of the Yazidi Home Center team and the people they rescue, the documentary filmmaker spent a long period with them: "When they accepted to let me film, they expected me to stay a day or two, or maybe a week, but I was with them for a year and a half," Hogir said.

Children sold from one violent man to the other

What makes the documentary particularly poignant is the stories shared by the women and girls following their rescue from al-Hol.

Some of them were only 12 when they were abducted, right after they had to witness the killing of their entire family.

One survivor recounts how she was sold to 15 different men, who beat her up so badly she ended up with a hole in her head and missing teeth.

Another rescued Yazidi child shown in the film was taken as a 1-year-old baby.
Mothers separated from their rape-born children

Before they return to Sinjar, the rescued women and children are temporarily taken care of by Mahmud's family. His mother cooks for them and his young son plays with them, offering a calming refuge from years of atrocities, but the survivors are caught between dealing with their past trauma and facing bleak perspectives for the future. Not only their family has been decimated, they fear being stigmatized as a former sabaya.

The situation is particularly wrenching for women with children born from IS fathers, since they cannot return to their community with the kids; the Supreme Yazidi Spiritual Council has determined they could not accept children born from rape.

Yazidi women cannot return to their community with a rape-born child

Complicating matters, as Hirori points out, according to Iraqi laws, those children are automatically born as Muslims and must therefore be raised as Muslims. For now, the filmmaker says, the only available solution is to relocate the Yazidi mothers and their children to another country.

Risking his life to make this film even though he also has young children, one of Hirori's main motivations was to reactivate the calls for action from the international community: "I wanted to make this documentary so no one could say I didn't know or never heard of it," he said at the film festival in Berlin.

Also risking their life are the volunteers of the Yazidi Home Center, which includes former sabaya agreeing to work as infiltrators in the al-Hol camp to track down Yazidi detainees amid the mass of IS women who are instrumental in keeping them captive.

Adding to the challenge of identifying the captive Yazidi, the women are to wear a niqab, the dress ultra-conservative female Muslims wear to cover the faces.

Activists collect photos of the missing Yazidi in their efforts to rescue them

In the film, Mahmud and Ziyad are in constant communication with the infiltrators, spending their days and nights preparing the next rescue mission, comparing pictures of the captive Yazidis, equipped only with a cell phone with a bad internet connection.
Still thousands missing

The Yazidi Home Center managed to save 206 people. Of the estimated 7,000 Yazidi girls and women who have been enslaved by IS since 2014, there are between 2,000 - 2,800 still missing, according to various estimates.

Since the completion of the film, Ziyad, the director of the Yazidi Home Center had to flee Syria due to increased IS attacks, but he keeps on working on reuniting Yazidi mothers with their children from abroad. Mahmud's home is also a target and can no longer serve as a shelter for the girls.

Hirori hopes that larger government bodies will get involved to save these women who have been largely forgotten by the international community amid other crises: "If individual activists, only equipped with a mobile phone with a poor connection and a small gun can achieve so much, then a major organization can do much more."

THE PLIGHT OF THE YAZIDI MINORITY IN IRAQ

The Yazidis: A history of persecution

For hundreds of years, the Yazidi community has been persecuted for its religious views, an amalgamation of Zoroastrianism, Christianity and Islam. Throughout their history, they have been killed, forced to convert to other religions and even taken as slaves. While the Kurdish-speaking minority community in northern Iraq had been attacked before, 2014 marked a tragic turning point in history.

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 Opinion

Sinead O’Connor was a rock star and a Muslim. Why did obituaries miss this?

Obscuring O’Connor’s faith is a missed chance to fight Islamophobia.

Irish musician Sinead O’Connor appears on “The Late Late Show” in Ireland in 2019. Video screen grab

August 8, 2023

By 

Anna Piela

(RNS) — Sinead O’Connor, the Irish singing star whose funeral was held Tuesday (Aug. 8) near Dublin, will always be connected with Roman Catholicism after she ripped a photo of Pope John Paul II in two on “Saturday Night Live” in 1992 to protest the church’s handling of sexual abuse by priests. The backlash dampened her success, and though she said she didn’t regret the moment, it defined her public image for the rest of her 56 years.

But the rites for her burial Tuesday were not Catholic but Muslim, and Sheikh Umar Al-Qadri, an Islamic scholar and the chief imam at the Islamic Center of Ireland, eulogized her as Shuhada Sadaqat, the name she took after converting to Islam. It’s not something the news media have reported much about, part of a seemingly willful ignorance that was more interested in her reputation as a rebellious and even sacrilegious celebrity.

For a long time, O’Connor’s relationship with religion was complicated. Many recent retrospectives, such as here and here, published after her death, comment on her spirituality. She was indeed repelled by much about religion, particularly inflexible religious labels. Yet she was constantly attracted to spirituality, and it powered her creative work. Her album “Theology” contains Hebrew Bible texts that she rearranged and set to music. In 2007, she declared that she had become a Rastafarian.

And she kept up her sometimes contentious conversation with Catholics. Tapping into the debate about women’s priesthood, she caused controversy in April 1999 when she announced she had become ordained as the first-ever priestess in the Latin Tridentine Church, a dissident Catholic group in her native Ireland. In 2019, she reflected on Catholic-dominated Ireland in an interview on “The Late Late Show”: “It was a very oppressed country, religiously speaking.”

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RELATED: Why some Muslim women feel empowered wearing hijab, a headscarf

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But O’Connor’s seeking phase ended when in 2018 she embraced Islam. What she told of that process was evocative of a statement I heard dozens of times from converts to Islam I interviewed for my book, “Wearing the Niqab: Muslim Women in the UK and the US.” In her interview on “The Late Late Show,” she said: “I had been a Muslim all my life and didn’t realize it. … I am home.”

This fact, that it was Islam that finally brought her peace, has been neglected entirely or treated as a footnote.

Her obituary in Vogue does not mention her Muslim faith at the time of her death but makes an obligatory note of the photo-tearing incident. The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Chicago Sun-Times all made only brief asides saying that she had converted and changed her name. (In its story today, The New York Times included more about her Muslim funeral.)

Her obituary in The Guardian, a British daily that usually aspires to be diversity-affirming, was puzzlingly insensitive when it came to noting her faith: “On her final concert tour, in 2019, she wore a hijab and abaya, but nothing else had changed — her voice still raised the hair on the back of the neck.”

Why would her voice or her talent change after conversion? Does the author imply that a Muslim woman would have less power as a performer? This statement feeds into prevalent stereotypes of Muslim women as silent and oppressed.

On its X (formerly Twitter) account, the Council on American-Islamic Relations argued that photos used in her obituaries — many of them pre-conversions photographs of O’Connor with bare arms and her head uncovered — would be counter to O’Connor’s adoption of a hijab and abaya.

Another CAIR post said, “We also urge the media to respect her acceptance of Islam by acknowledging the name she chose for herself, Shuhada’ Sadaqat, & using recent photos that depict how she chose to present herself.”

This sentiment was echoed by Khaled Beydoun, a prominent scholar of Islam: “Many Mainstream media outlets are overlooking or erasing Sinead — or Shahuda’s — Muslim identity.” (Another scholar of Islam, Amanullah De Sondy, points out that O’Connor’s gender-fluid identity is similarly being erased by the very same media outlets.)

O’Connor often used her birth name as a stage name, so using it for clarity is understandable. But to focus completely on her conflicted relationship with Catholicism oddly fails to explore what came after her entanglement with the religion of her homeland, and the religion that eventually brought her peace after a tumultuous faith journey.

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RELATED: Women seek diverse paths to leadership in Islamic spaces

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The obscuring of O’Connor’s Muslim faith by the mainstream media suggests that the Islamic faith is still seen as somehow incompatible with show business. Few Muslim female singers reach global fame on this scale, so it is disappointing that so few in the media saw O’Connor’s brilliant life as a chance to challenge Islamophobia. But more disappointing is that in remembering her, something so important as her religious agency — her religious choice, belief, practice and identity — was seen as an afterthought.

(Anna Piela, a visiting scholar in religious studies and gender at Northwestern University, is the author of “Wearing the Niqab: Muslim Women in the UK and the US.” She is also the senior writer at American Baptist Home Mission Societies and an ordained American Baptist Churches USA minister. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)

PHOTO ESSAY

 Syria's Al-Hol camp: child inmates and false identities

Paris (AFP) – The al-Hol camp is the largest of two in northeastern Syria holding the families of Islamic State fighters.

LONG READ

Issued on: 18/03/2024

A girl walks through the al-Hol Islamic State camp in northeastern Syria 

© Delil SOULEIMAN / AFP


Run by US-backed Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), its population spiked at more than 70,000 as the coalition began tightening its grip on the last IS holdout in Baghouz late in 2018.

Iraqis have always been "the dominant nationality" in the camp, with their numbers at one time reaching 30,000, according to Doctors Without Borders.

At its height, 11,000 "foreign" women and children -- that is non-Syrian or Iraqi -- were held there.

After the defeat of the "caliphate" in March 2019, countries across the world slowly began repatriating their nationals. Many Europeans were transferred to Roj, a smaller and better-kept camp close to the Turkish border that today holds 2,500 people, more than 2,140 of them foreign.

The sprawling 320-hectare al-Hol holds more than 43,000 people from 47 countries including France, Sweden, the Netherlands, Russia, Turkey and Tunisia -- 21,500 of them children, according to the latest figures.

Iraqis are the biggest group (20,144), followed by Syrians (16,710). Two thirds of the 6,612 "foreigners" are children under 17, according to the camp administration.
13-year-old brides

Kurdish security forces and the SDF guard the camp, with a Kurdish civil administration overseeing the camp. Dozens of United Nations agencies and international and local NGOs provide health, water, sanitation, education and protection services.

Women walk past a dress shop in the Iraqi and Syrian sector of the al-Hol camp © Delil SOULEIMAN / AFP

But the camp's overall management is handled by the US group Blumont paid for by the US State Department, with France also funding some humanitarian assistance and improvements to the infrastructure.

The camp is divided into two parts. Syrians and Iraqis live in the main camp, with "foreigners" held in the high-security "annex" that is cut off from the main camp.

Camp officials say many of the foreigners have not revealed their nationalities or given false ones.

Many marriages in the main camp -- where some 3,000 men live -- are to minors, including girls as young as 13, according to humanitarian workers.

Since the Kurdish-led administration does not recognise child marriage, they are not registered, nor are their children.
Two girls point to the sky -- a gesture often used by Islamic State -- in the al-Hol camp in Syria where the families of IS fighters are held © Delil SOULEIMAN / AFP

Many men take second wives. These marriages are also not recognised. As a result, the camp "bursts with unregistered children", a humanitarian worker said.

© 2024 AFP

Sins of the fathers: Children of IS left to rot in Syria camp

Al-Hol Camp (Syria) (AFP) – Ali is 12 and has survived things no child should see, spending half his life in what amounts to a prison camp for jihadist families in an arid corner of northeastern Syria.


Issued on: 18/03/2024 - 

Child of the caliphate: A girl in the vast al-Hol Islamic State camp in northeastern Syria 

© Delil SOULEIMAN / AFP
ADVERTISING


He knows not to dream of freedom. Instead he fantasises about having a football. "Can you get me one?" he said, as if he was asking for the Moon.

Five years after the fall of the Islamic State group's brutal "caliphate", tens of thousands of women and children linked to the jihadists are still being held by the US-backed Kurdish forces in camps rife with violence and abuse, with seemingly no clear plan of what to do with them.

More than 40,000 inmates -- half of them children -- are cooped up behind the barbed wire fences and watchtowers of the windswept al-Hol camp run by Washington's Kurdish allies.

The children of the jihadists' failed project live out a grim existence in tattered, tightly packed together tents with little water and limited access to sanitation. Few go to school.

Many have never seen a television or tasted ice cream.

Some boys are taken from their mothers by the guards once they reach 11 in violation of international law, a UN expert found, with the Kurdish authorities claiming it is to stop them being radicalised.

They admit the jihadists still exercise control in parts of the camp through fear, punishments and even murder.

One former inmate told AFP that IS paid pensions to some widows.

Even Ali is old enough to be terrified of them. "They enter tents at night and kill people," he said.

"It's not a life for children... they are paying the price for something they didn't do," an aid worker told AFP.

The al-Hol camp ballooned as the coalition and its allies in the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) closed in on IS's last bastion in eastern Syria, putting an end to their five-year reign of terror marked by beheadings, rapes, massacres and enslavement.

Women in niqabs walk past a fence at the al-Hol camp in Syria where thousands of families of Islamic State fighters are still held 

© Delil SOULEIMAN / AFP

When the extremists were finally defeated in March 2019, families of suspected jihadists were trucked north to al-Hol from the last holdout in Baghouz.

Five years on, dozens of countries are still refusing to take back their nationals with SDF leader Mazloum Abdi -- whose soldiers guard the Western-funded camp -- calling it "a ticking time bomb".

– 'Acute deprivation' -

AFP interviewed IS widows, aid workers, security forces and administration employees in the difficult to access camp, including inside the high-security "annex", the camp within a camp where "foreign" and more radical women and their children from 45 countries are held apart from the "local" Syrians and Iraqis.

Some asked not to be named for fear of what might happen to them.

To complicate matters, some 3,000 men are held with the women and children in the Syrian and Iraqi sector of the camp. Some are ordinary refugees, but suspicion lingers over others detained by Kurdish fighters as the caliphate collapsed.

Not even the guards venture into the rows of tents at night unless they are carrying out a raid.

The huge dusty camp -- first built for refugees fleeing the wars in Iraq and Syria -- dwarfs the nearby town of al-Hol, with its small houses and narrow streets.

The vast Al-Hol camp in Syria holds more than 40,000 people -- all but 3,000 women and children © Delil SOULEIMAN / AFP

Its thousands of white tents are crammed so closely together that it is almost impossible to walk between them without bumping into something.

Privacy is nonexistent, with the communal kitchens and toilets squalid and insufficient, say humanitarian workers who provide some basic services on top of the food aid on which the inmates survive.

Behind the camp's high fences, kids roam dirt roads, bored and frustrated, some throwing stones at visitors. A blond boy blinked at the camera and then drew his finger across his throat to mimic a beheading.

Most children do not go to the makeshift schools. Instead they try to earn a little by carrying water, cleaning or fixing tents for those whose families wire them money.

Others work in the camp's market, or trade their food aid.

"Al-Hol is a suffocating place for children to live and grow-up," said Kathryn Achilles from Save the Children.

They "have endured acute deprivation, bombardment and have now been in the camp for almost five years. They need more," she said.
'We'll be left here'

"How can our children dream if they've never seen the outside world?" a mother of five held in the high-security annex reserved for foreign women and their children told AFP.

A girl walks behind her mother through the vast al-Hol camp in northeastern

 Syria © Delil SOULEIMAN / AFP

Two thirds of the annex's 6,612 inmates are children, according to the camp's administrators.

The 39-year-old gave birth to her youngest child in al-Hol after fleeing Baghouz in 2019 after her husband -- an IS fighter -- was killed there.

Like all of the women in the camp, she was covered head-to-toe in a niqab and black gloves, a thin slit in the face covering showing her wide, dark eyes.

Although the niqab is banned in the smaller Roj camp holding IS members' families close to the Turkish border, women in al-Hol told AFP they would not dare to take it off, fearing punishment from hardliners.

"It is a bitter life, and what's worse, they say we'll be left here," the mother lamented, with the authorities starting to build new sections where each tent will have its own toilet and kitchen.

Jihan Hanan, the head of the camp's civil administration, confirmed that the work was being done "because the camp may be in place for the long term".

She admitted life was "difficult for residents, but it's also difficult for us given the security situation."

Murder and sexual abuse

But it is what is happening to the children that most worries humanitarian organisations.

In 2022, two Egyptian girls, aged 12 and 15, were murdered in the annex, their throats cut and their bodies dumped in an open septic tank.

Rana, a Syrian girl, was shot in the face and shoulder in 2022 by armed men who accused her of having a child out of wedlock when she was 18.

"They kidnapped me for 11 days and hit me with chains," she told AFP.

Other children are being sexually abused and harassed, a health worker told AFP. In three months in 2021, she treated 11 cases of child sexual abuse.

A girl hugs her mother at the al-Hol camp in Syria where the families of IS fighters are held 

© Delil SOULEIMAN / AFP

Some cases were children abusing other children. "They may not know they are hurting each other," she said, adding that a child who abuses is likely to have been a either a victim of sexual assault or witness to it.

Children in al-Hol have seen or heard murders as well as "shootings, stabbings and strangulations on their way to buy food from the marketplace or while on their way to school," Save the Children said in a 2022 report on the camp.

The trauma triggers sleeping disorders, bed-wetting and aggressive behaviour, it said.

"I try not to let my kids socialise to keep them out of harm, but it is almost impossible because the camp is packed," said Shatha, an Iraqi mother-of-five.

"Every time my kids go out, they come back beaten."

Yet keeping children confined to their tents was tantamount to holding them "in a prison inside a prison", a social worker told AFP.
'Coming for my son'

Every mother AFP spoke to in al-Hol -- particularly those in the annex -- were terrified about their boys being taken from them and sent to "rehabilitation centres" by the guards.

The high-security camp within a camp contains women from 45 countries including France, the Netherlands and Sweden, with large numbers from Turkey, Tunisia, Russia, the Caucasus and the Central Asian republics.

Security forces regularly take boys over 11 from the annex in night raids or sweeps of the marketplace, a policy a UN expert condemned as "forced arbitrary separation".

Boys in the 'foreign' section of the camp are removed from their mothers aged 11 

© Delil SOULEIMAN / AFP

Zeinab, an Egyptian mother, said her 13-year-old son was taken away from her a year ago. Now she worries it will soon be her 11-year-old's turn.

"I can't sleep at night. When I hear sounds outside, I fear they are coming for my son," she said.

Some mothers hide their boys from the guards in holes and trenches or prevent them from going outside.

"Some boys may have turned 20, but we don't know where they are hiding," a member of the security forces admitted.

Authorities say they take the boys to protect them from "sexual abuse" and a "radicalised" environment.

The Pentagon told AFP that it was aware that some youths were removed "to both youth centres and detention facilities" but said "we keep the well-being of children at the centre of our policies and encourage local authorities to ensure their actions consider the best interests of children."

IS cells

Kurdish forces have long warned about IS cells in the camp, with a spike in murders, arson and escape attempts in 2019. Rifles, ammunition and tunnels have also been found in regular security sweeps.

A Syrian woman who fled the camp in mid-2019 recalled how an IS member known as Abu Mohamed would visit widows monthly and pay them $300 to $500.

Diehard: A woman in the Al-Hol camp points to the sky -- a gesture long associated with the Islamic State

 © Delil SOULEIMAN / AFP

"He used to come in a security forces uniform and promise that the group will return," she said.

In the annex's squalid marketplace, women pore over the few available pieces of meat through the slits in their niqabs, while others haul away bottles of water and rugs in three-wheeled carts or on makeshift sleds made from cardboard attached to a rope.

Seeing journalists, some raised a gloved index finger to the sky, a gesture frequently used by IS signifying the "oneness of God".

While many women are repentant, others don't hide their continued allegiance to IS.

IS "are still here, and they have a stronger presence in certain sectors of the camp," according to Abou Khodor, a 26-year-old Iraqi man who has been in the camp for seven years.

He complained that diehards from IS's last bastion in Baghouz had "ruined" the camp. But one of the women captured there said it was more complex.
'Death does not scare us'

"There are supporters of IS, and those who have become even worse," she said. Others, however, "don't want anything to do with it anymore."

Women stand next to a fence at the al-Hol camp in Syria where Islamic State fighters' families are held 

© Delil SOULEIMAN / AFP

At a protest over searches in the camp earlier this year, one woman was filmed shouting at the guards, "We are here now but one day it will be you!

"The Islamic State is not going away, even if you kill and beat us... Death does not scare us."

But an Egyptian woman was seen urging calm, saying, "We don't want problems."

Such is the mistrust that some women resist being treated with what they call "Western medicine" leading to outbreaks of disease, most recently of measles.

Women and children in the annex also have to get permission to go to the health centres outside the camp, and it sometimes takes "days, weeks or even months" for less critical cases, according to Liz Harding, head of Doctors Without Borders mission in northeastern Syria.

"Fear, movement restrictions, insecurity and lack of emergency services at night" was cutting them off from care, she added.

Some smuggle in medication and at least one woman performs clandestine dental procedures, which has led to cases of sepsis.

"She doesn't have the tools, but there is no other dental care," a Russian woman complained.

- Huge burden for Kurds -

The grim desperation of the situation weighs heavy on the Syrian Kurds running the camp. Many lost comrades to IS militants whose family members they now have to guard.

A Kurdish security forces member patrols the al-Hol camp in Syria where the families of IS fighters are held 

© Delil SOULEIMAN / AFP

"It's a major problem... a burden both financially, politically and morally as well," the head of the Syrian Democratic Forces Mazloum Abdi told AFP.

Humanitarian groups in the camp said children should not have to live in such conditions and insist they should not be defined by their parents' actions.

"Mothers want their children to go to school, to grow up healthily and hope they won't be discriminated against because of all they have experienced," said Save The Children's Achilles.

Kurdish authorities have repeatedly urged countries to repatriate their citizens, but hold out little hope of it happening anytime soon. Hanan, the camp's civilian chief, said many "nationalities have no one asking about them".

Asked by AFP what it plans to do with the women and children, the Pentagon said "the only long-term, durable solution for the residents... is the return or repatriation of displaced persons to their areas or countries of origin."

While Iraq has started slow but successful repatriations, thousands of Syrians are stuck in al-Hol awaiting tribal sponsorship to return to areas under Kurdish control. For now, a return for those from Syrian government-held areas looks impossible.

"We wish everyone could go home," Hanan said. "We don't intend to lock anyone up and leave them."

Behind the wire: A boy plays with a mesh bag over his head in the al-Hol camp holding the families of IS fighters in Syria 

© Delil SOULEIMAN / AFP

But it was little comfort to a Russian mother of two who told AFP she felt the world had abandoned her and her children.

"There is no place to go. There is no solution," she said.

© 2024 AFP