
Teenagers aged 13 or 14 have claimed they were forced to have sex with the wives of ISIS fighters in al-Hol and al-Roj camps in Syria.
Two minors have told the Daily Beast that they were forced to have sex with the aim of increasing the population of the Caliphate by at least 10 women.
"We are forced to have sex with the women in the camp to increase the population," Ahmet, 13, and Hamid, 14, told Syrian Forces officials, who later told The Daily Beast.
They have confessed that there is a high number of pregnant women in the camp even though their husbands are kept in separate camps as prisoners. Staff at the center told the Daily Beast that one of the boys said he was forced to have sex with eight ISIS women in just a few days.
No one knows the exact number of pregnancies in the camps, but SDF intelligence monitoring the camps says there are many. Some pregnancies may have been the result of relationships with guards, despite safeguards to ensure this did not happen, but officials say the boys are clearly being exploited by ISIS women.
Ahmet and Hamid, along with eight other young men, have already been taken out of the al-Hol camp and taken to a rehabilitation center in the town of Qamashli, in northeastern Syria. A camp guard said Syrian forces found the teenagers hidden by camp women in underground tunnels.
These camps were originally used to house the families of ISIS fighters in late 2018, as US-backed Kurdish forces retook territory in eastern Syria. In March 2019, they regained control of the last villages occupied by ISIS, ending the "Caliphate" that the group declared over large areas of Iraq and Syria in 2014. / Daily Beast