-In July 2019, a video surfaced on social media
showing a woman carrying a child and walking out of a hospital
in the Kurdish-controlled region of northeast Syria.
Officials said they had been brought from a nearby camp,
where they were being held with other family members
of Islamic State fighters.
In the hospital bathroom, the woman changed clothes.
She walked out with the child,
slipping past her guards unnoticed.
A motorcycle for the pair waited at the entrance.
They rode off and disappeared.
The hospital kept what she left behind --
a toy truck, a child's backpack, and some clothing.
The escape illustrates the enormous security challenge
facing the Syrian Kurds.
The United States and its Kurdish allies
defeated the Islamic State's territorial caliphate in March,
but the Kurds has since found in their charge
some 90,000 Islamic State fighters and family members
with little outside support.
The vast majority of these families are being held
in an overcrowded displacement camp adjacent to Al-Hol,
a former Islamic State stronghold.
Signs of the group are still present in the town,
from trenches dug by the Islamic State,
white paint covering the black flag, and ISIS graffiti.
In the past year, the camp's population has swelled
to more than 70,000.
The vast majority are children.
"The Washington Post" spoke with Kurdish officials,
aid workers, and camp residents,
who described rising tension, fear, and violence in the camp.
Kurdish guards have been stabbed with kitchen knives.
Camp authorities and residents said ISIS loyalists
are terrorizing women seen as impious.
-Are you scared of other sisters?
-I'm scared.
I am scared. I am so scared.
It's not normal.
-Foreign women, who the guards consider to be more radical,
are kept in a separate section from the Syrians and the Iraqis.
Medical documents obtained by "The Post"
provided details on the deaths of two foreign women.
An Indonesian in her 40s was found dead, naked.
Bruises covered her lips, shoulders, and upper arms.
She was six months pregnant
and had suffered trauma to her abdomen.
Doctors concluded in another report
that an Azerbaijani teenager was strangled to death.
Teeth marks on her upper lip
indicated she had died of suffocation.
Her mother told aid workers the teen had slipped and fallen.
Some women have claimed abuse at the hands of guards.
One time I was, I usually have a wheelchair
that I put my kids in, because it's two, you know.
And I was walking and, I don't know,
[a guard] was talking to me and then,
okay, she was very rude, you know?
And then I matched her tone with her rudeness,
and then she pushed on my wheelchair
with my kids and I said, "Don't do it,"
and I got very angry because they're children.
Then she pointed a gun at them and says to me like "Daesh
[Islamic State], what, what, what?"
We're responsible for what we do but the children?
Why would you put a gun on his head?
-Conditions inside the camp are dire,
especially for children.
From December 2018 to July 2019,
nearly 300 children under the age of 5 died,
many from severe malnutrition.
A cemetery sits just outside the camp.
Small graves are marked with bricks and stones.
Elsewhere in the Kurdish region,
acts of terrorism puncture everyday life.
"The Post" witnessed the aftermath of a car bombing
in a town around a two hours' drive from the camp.
Security forces were the intended target,
but the blast killed three children.
They had been displaced from Aleppo by a war
that is meant to be winding down.