EXECUTIVE SUMMARY I’m afraid that the heating explodes in the tent and kills a child. But if we don’t use it, they will die from cold. A Dutch woman in detention in North East Syria (February 2020) At present, we [the United Kingdom], the French and even the United States consistently talk with the likes of the Syrian Democratic Forces to ensure that prisons are still guarded and that we provide whatever support we can to help them with that United Kingdom Secretary of State for Defence, Ben Wallace (7 January 2020) Tens of thousands of women and children captured from territories formerly controlled by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (‘ISIL’) currently languish in detention camps in North East Syria run by the Syrian Democratic Forces (‘SDF’), the military force of the Autonomous Administration of North East Syria (‘AANES’). Hundreds of these women and children are nationals of the United Kingdom, Belgium, France, Germany, and the Netherlands. Well over half are children, most of whom are under the age of five. They are being detained without charge and, like those unlawfully detained for terrorist association at Guantanamo Bay, are afforded no legal rights and placed outside the protection of the law. The camps in which they are being held are fundamentally unsafe environments in which physical violence is common, the conditions are barbaric, and psychological trauma is rife. The camp authorities have no long-term plan, and there is a real risk that these camps, and the women and children detained there, may be caught up in a war with Turkey or renewed ISIL violence. As with those detained at Guantanamo Bay, these women and children are subject to treatment and conditions that have been classified by international experts as amounting to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. In some cases, their treatment at the hands of the SDF is so serious that it arguably amounts to torture. In just one of the camps – the al Hol facility – an average of 25 detainees died from various causes every month in 2019 and 2020. And children are particularly hard hit. Children of various nationalities have died from war wounds, malnutrition, severe dehydration, respiratory illness, hypothermia, and carbon monoxide poisoning from tent heaters, or from tent fires caused by the same unsafe heating devices. As one European woman in the camps said ‘last winter three young children burned alive. 3 RIGHTS & SECURITY INTERNATIONAL