A time bomb in the Syrian desert: Donald Trump turns off the money tap for the IS camp al-Hol

It has been six years since Hani fled from his Iraqi hometown of Ramadi to the Syrian no-man's land across the border. He and his two children are now vegetating in the al-Hol camp. The huge tent camp in the far east of Syria with almost forty thousand inmates is a refuge for the lost and displaced from the entire region.

Syrians from Aleppo are stranded here, as are Iraqis from Anbar, where Shiite militias once spread fear and terror as they advanced against the Islamic State. "Since then, we've been sitting here with nothing to do," says Hani, who is standing with other men in a kind of alley between two rows of tents. Behind him, children are playing in the dust. "The only thing that keeps us alive is aid deliveries."

Image left: The Kurdish woman Jihan Hanan is responsible for the administration of al-Hol. Image right: A child in the al-Hol camp. Up to 40,000 people live in the tent city in eastern Syria.

But these could now be stopped. Since Donald Trump turned off the funding to the American aid organization USAID, there is a risk that nothing will arrive in al-Hol. This is because the USAID partner Blumont - an organization based in America - is responsible for supplies here. "Without Blumont, we are lost," says Jihan Hanan, the director of the camp. The organization supplies things like bread, water and gas for cooking.

The worst has been averted for the time being: American Secretary of State Marco Rubio granted the aid workers at al-Hol a 90-day grace period. If this period expires, however, the vital aid deliveries will once again be cut off. "In the worst case scenario, we are threatened with chaos and uprisings," says Hanan in her office container on the edge of the camp.

Al-Hol - which was built in 2003 after the American invasion of Iraq - is no ordinary camp. In addition to ordinary refugees, the makeshift desert town is also home to thousands of relatives of fighters from the Islamic State (IS), which established a reign of terror in parts of Syria and Iraq years ago. Only after bloody battles were they defeated by the Kurdish-led militias of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which still control northeastern Syria today.

After their triumph, the Kurds inherited not only the devastation that IS had caused in eastern Syria, but also its fighters and their families. The SDF military locked up the fanatical warriors in high-security prisons. Their women and children, however, ended up in semi-open camps like al-Hol.

Since then, the dreary tent city has been considered a ticking time bomb. Although almost exclusively female IS members are imprisoned here, that does not make the situation any easier. "The women smuggle weapons, build bombs and indoctrinate their children," says Hanan. The camp management's hands are tied. Because al-Hol is not a prison in the true sense of the word, but rather a kind of self-governing organism with a fence all around.

Committees have the say in the camp. In those sections where the veiled terrorist brides of IS fighters live, customs prevail like those of the caliphate. Anyone who approaches this zone, which is mostly forbidden to visitors, is pelted with stones by children. "Eleven-year-olds can take apart a Kalashnikov in seconds," says a soldier on duty, looking out over the sea of ​​tents from a hill.

The Kurdish security forces try to maintain order as best as possible with regular raids. In addition, the children of foreign IS women are separated from their mothers as soon as they reach the age of twelve in order to deradicalize them. "Despite this, some of the women are still pregnant," says Hanan. Some even hide their children.

The camp is hardly secure. The fence that surrounds it does have a barbed wire top, but in some places it has been torn down. Even though 600 armed guards watch over the surrounding area, they can hardly control who or what gets into the camp. "We simply don't have the means to take action against smuggling. We can only carry out random checks," says one of the soldiers on duty.

The Kurds have repeatedly warned that the conditions in the camp are untenable - and that the huge tent city has now degenerated into a kind of IS recruitment base. But their warnings have fallen on deaf ears abroad. Western states hardly care about their citizens who once voluntarily joined IS. They leave the problem to the Kurds.

Now the camp administration fears that the situation could get completely out of control. It is not just Trump's campaign against USAID that is threatening stability. The new conditions in Syria are also causing unrest. The Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which overthrew Bashar al-Assad's regime in Damascus in December, is demanding control of the camp. For the Kurds, this is anathema. "If the Islamists around HTS leader Ahmed al-Sharaa get the keys to al-Hol, they will release the IS members," says Hanan.

The fact that HTS and IS have long been sworn enemies apparently plays no role for the Kurds, who founded a de facto state in eastern Syria after their victory over IS. For them, Islamists are Islamists. A change in the status quo could lead to a renaissance of IS, something they keep warning about. "It's only a matter of time before IS attacks al-Hol," Hanan believes.

But is IS really that strong? So far, the scattered terrorist militia has not been able to take advantage of the chaos following Assad's fall. SDF military commanders repeatedly claim that the Islamists have recently become more active. But there is hardly any news of major operations. Of course, there are sleeper cells everywhere, explains a Sunni sheikh in the former IS metropolis of Raqqa. "But the great era of IS is over, I think. It is unlikely to come back."

However, the Kurds, who are under severe pressure, have an interest in warning against a resurgence of IS. After all, the terrorist militia was the main reason why the Kurdish-dominated separatist state in eastern Syria was tolerated for so long. After the fall of Assad, the autonomy project is in danger of losing its right to exist from an international perspective.

However, fear of IS has fallen on fertile ground among the Christian minority in the Kurdish region. "We are afraid of the Islamists," says Levon Yeghiaian, the Armenian bishop of the eastern Syrian town of Kamishli, who is standing in the shell of his new church. "Al-Hol is a powder keg. We don't want the people who are inside to be able to walk around freely." People remember well how badly the fanatics once raged.

In the camp itself, the inmates do not want to talk about IS. In any case, visitors can only enter the Iraqi and Syrian areas of al-Hol. "We have nothing to do with IS," say a few young Syrians from Aleppo at the improvised market in the center of the tent city. The camp director Hanan also admits that they do not know which inmates once belonged to IS and which did not.

Nevertheless, there is good news for Hanan and her team: at least the Syrian and Iraqi inmates should soon be able to leave the camp. Several hundred Iraqis are already allowed to go home. The government in Baghdad has subjected them to a security check and wants to bring them home through a repatriation program. Hani, the refugee from Ramadi, is also on the list. He is happy, he says. "It's not like life here."