30. While women are often confined with their children, they are also on occasion separated. RSI was told of very young children being left without supervision or protection in the main camps while their mothers were placed in internal confinement. RSI received reports of children left alone in this way up to as recently as August 2020. In one case, a mother was separated from her baby she was still breastfeeding. 31. The women and children now detained in the al Hol and Roj camps by the SDF were captured and transported during the course of the SDF conflict against ISIL. During a NIAC such as that conflict, the legal position is that non-State actors such as the SDF are recognized as legitimate belligerents under the law of war, and are bound by the rules of international humanitarian law in how they treat enemy combatants and civilians. That said, non-State actors are not in precisely the same situation as State forces under the law of war, and there is considerable disagreement among international lawyers and military authorities as to whether non-State forces are entitled, within the context of a NIAC, to detain civilians at all.9 3 2. There is certainly no express basis in international humanitarian law for such detention by non-State actors, and, as was observed by senior British judges in the Serdar Mohammed case,10 a reading of international humanitarian law as implying a power for nonState actors to detain civilians simply because they are under obligations of humane treatment towards those persons detained is a non sequitur.11 Nor is there any domestic legal entitlement for the SDF to detain civilians in Syria – the AANES is, after all, not a recognized sovereign entity. And even if it were to be accepted that the SDF were in the abstract entitled to detain civilians during wartime, it is realistic that such a legal basis no longer persists if the conflict has ceased. 33. But the question of legal basis – if it could exist in theory – is rendered moot by the SDF’s own position. The SDF has never provided a legal basis for its ongoing detention of the women and children held, and does not seek to argue that it is entitled to continue to hold them. On the contrary, the SDF no longer wishes to have any responsibility for these detainees, and wishes to wind down the camps’ operation. Whether or not international humanitarian law applies, all forms of international law stipulate that persons cannot be detained arbitrarily and indefinitely without proper legal charge, or due process of law whereby they can challenge their detention. 34. Whether or not international humanitarian law applies, all forms of international law stipulate that persons cannot be detained arbitrarily12 and indefinitely without proper legal charge, or due process of law whereby they can challenge their detention. Even those who maintain that non-State forces are entitled to detain civilians under international humanitarian law insist that that detention must be necessary for ‘imperative reasons of security.’13 That is a high threshold,14 and would require a case-by-case assessment of the risks posed by each individual detained,15 with the detainees afforded a right to review of their detention before some form of judicial or quasi-judicial authority.16 17 RIGHTS & SECURITY INTERNATIONAL