New report from ICSVE reveals that Pro-IS Transnational Networks Step Up Online Fundraising Efforts, Successfully Extricating Foreign IS Women and Children from Syrian Detention Camps in Post-Assad Syria: Since the ouster of the Assad regime, IS has sought to exploit Syria’s fragile transitional governance period, marked by sectarian violence, US military drawdown, and other internal security problems, to escalate its attacks.
By Mona Thakkar and Anne Speckhard
Since the ouster of the Assad regime, IS has sought to exploit Syria’s fragile transitional governance period, marked by sectarian violence, US military drawdown, and other internal security problems, to escalate its attacks. Most of its claimed attacks this year have reportedly been in SDF-held areas of northeastern Syria, where the detention centres holding IS inmates and the detention camps holding the families of IS fighters are located.
Further, the group’s entrenched presence in Al-Hol camp is also evident in the arrests of many senior IS operatives and recruiters during recent security raids, the cohesive network of its female supporters, and the alleged recent escape and smuggling of IS operatives out of the Al-Hol camp.
This was facilitated by the swift redeployment, reorganisation of its cells, and the reinforcement of smuggling routes following the intensified U.S. airstrikes on its positions in December 2024 after Assad’s fall.
Meanwhile, the stalled talks between the SDF and the Syrian interim government over the SDF’s military integration into the Syrian army and the SDF’s push for autonomy over northeastern Syria has cast uncertainty over the future management and the fate of the prisons holding around 8500 IS fighters —and ostensibly around 38,000 IS women children in Al-Hol and Al-Roj camps. Amidst this backdrop, capitalising on the security gaps, the group and its financial networks, since February, through their reinvigorated fundraising campaigns, have facilitated the escape of an increasing number of third-country IS women and teenage boys out of the camps. Between February and July 2025, ICSVE tracked nearly 50 Telegram channels run by IS women in multiple languages, who coordinated these fundraising efforts with jihadist support networks in Central Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. The results of this tracking are reported herein.
Also relevant here is the Trump administration’s $117 million cut in humanitarian aid to detention camps, funding that covered data collection, security database analysis, and salaries for camp staff and guards—reductions that have possibly fueled increasing escapes. Beleaguered camp guards, paid in local wages and totally uncertain about their financial futures, easily fall prey to smuggling bribes from IS women who receive large amounts of money via hawala transfers into the camp. The major impetus for the escapes, as per the online accounts of IS women, is “reliable smuggling routes” that opened after the fall of the Assad regime and lower smuggling rates falling from $30,000 to as low as between 14,000–18,000 for extricating a woman and a child out of the Al-Hol camp into Idlib.
