By Jared Malsin

The Syrian government is moving to close a detention camp that held tens of thousands of people including family members of suspected Islamic State fighters, after unrest threatened its grip on the facility just weeks after taking it over.

Responsibility for the al-Hol detention camp changed hands in January, when the Syrian government launched an offensive that routed the U.S.-backed, Kurdish-led militia that had controlled it along with much of northeastern Syria.

The government blamed the disorder on a ragged retreat by the Syrian Democratic Forces that left the camp unguarded for hours and made it difficult to re-establish security. Damascus-based diplomats said thousands of people in recent weeks had fled the camp while under government control. Recent protests and rioting by detainees deepened the disorder.

"The government basically just lost control. They continued to secure the perimeter, but smuggling increased. Holes in the fences continued to be broken open," said Charles Lister, director of the Syria Program at the Middle East Institute in Washington. "From that point on, it was just chaos."

The Syrian government said Tuesday that it was taking steps to contain the situation and closely monitor any Islamic State suspects who had left the camp while working to reintegrate former detainees into society.

The government has been letting displaced civilians in the camp go home or relocate elsewhere in Syria, a U.S. defense official said. It is now in the process of moving many of the rest to a new camp near Aleppo, where the government has a more established presence and better infrastructure.

Al-Hol is part of a network of camps and prisons holding people who were detained after U.S.-backed forces eliminated Islamic State's last remaining foothold of territory in 2019. Another large camp called al-Roj, which held more than 2,000 people as of last year, remains functional.

Worried that extremists could be freed by the instability, the U.S. military moved quickly to relocate about 5,700 adult male Islamic State fighters from that network of Syrian prisons to Iraq in an operation it wrapped up Friday. Most of the extremists it feared could break out have been secured, a U.S. defense official said.

The emptying of al-Hol ends a military and diplomatic impasse that long frustrated the U.S. and other world powers. The facility became too crowded and inhumane to hold people indefinitely, but many of the displaced couldn't be returned to their homes in Syria because of the long civil war, and other countries balked at repatriating citizens linked to Islamic State.

The closing of the camp will test whether Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa, a former jihadist who cut ties with Al-Qaeda a decade ago and who visited the White House last year, can make good on his pledge to secure northeast Syria and keep Islamic State from re-emerging.

The U.S. had relied for decades on the Kurdish-led SDF to maintain the network of camps. Now that they have been overrun as Sharaa consolidates control of the country, the U.S. is shifting to Syria's government as its main partner in the fight against extremism.

The U.S. is rapidly winding down its own military presence in the country, vacating the strategic Al Tanf base last week and handing it over to the government.

Sharaa's resume includes years of fighting against Islamic State before his rebel group brought down the Assad regime in late 2024. But his hard-line Islamist background means he and his troops have more common ground with the remnants and families of Islamic State than did the Kurdish-led forces they are replacing.

"I think that the new authorities are reliably opposed to ISIS," said Sam Heller, a Beirut-based analyst with policy institute Century International, using an acronym for Islamic State. "I don't think they are reliably opposed to some things that are ISIS-like."

Al-Hol was originally set up in 1991 to take in Iraqi refugees fleeing the Gulf War. It reopened years later to house people displaced by Islamic State's sweep through a swath of Syria and Iraq that began in 2014.

At its height a decade ago, Islamic State's self-declared religious caliphate ruled over millions of people and served as a launchpad for a global campaign of terror. The U.S. destroyed the group's hold on territory with a military campaign including thousands of airstrikes and ground troops who backed Iraqi and Syrian forces.

After the caliphate fell, al-Hol swelled to the size of a city holding more than 70,000 people in mid-2019, according to the Department of Defense. Security analysts and Western counterterrorism officials were concerned that women in the camp were helping keep the Islamic State cause alive by raising funds, smuggling weapons and even killing other camp residents they saw as refusing to obey.

Officials also worried about the humanitarian plight of the people stuck inside. Children were sometimes separated from their families, and few received much education. Services such as electricity were unreliable. A United Nations report found pervasive insecurity that included killings, intimidation and sexual assaults.

"It's a yearslong, collective policy failure among the governments involved," said Noah Bonsey, a senior adviser on Syria at International Crisis Group. "Caught between competing security, legal and political pressures, they were unable to define a viable solution, let alone plausible plans to get there."

The collapse of the Assad regime eased some of the pressure on al-Hol. About 10,000 people left between the fall of the regime in December 2024 and mid-2025, many of them Syrians who returned home. There were more than 20,000 people still held there when the ground shifted last month.

Deteriorating conditions culminated in a riot last week in which detainees demanded to leave the camp, attacked humanitarian facilities and injured an aid worker, people familiar with the situation said.

Syria's government told the U.N. refugee agency that it plans to relocate the remaining families in al-Hol to another camp in Syria's Aleppo province, Gonzalo Vargas Llosa, chief of the agency in Syria, said on social media Sunday. Those relocations were expected to begin in the coming days, people familiar with the situation said.

Sharaa's background as an Islamist who fought Islamic State could give his government an advantage in policing the group's remnants. Syria's government said that it would use its intelligence networks to keep a close eye on suspected jihadists, as Sharaa's rebel group did in the area it controlled before the fall of the Assad regime.

"Damascus does have some other assets and advantages," said Heller, the security analyst in Beirut. "They're able to potentially penetrate some of these communities and social networks from which these extremists originate."

Still, the abrupt exodus has heightened concerns among some Western officials and analysts. Two Damascus-based diplomats said thousands had left al-Hol in recent weeks, raising alarm that people with extremist leanings could be moving around Syria or trying to leave the country.

"How long did you intend to keep all these women and children in arbitrary detention? This has already gone on way too long," Heller said. "Ideally, this would have happened in a way that is more intentional and coordinated."

Write to Jared Malsin at jared.malsin@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

February 17, 2026 23:00 ET (04:00 GMT)

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