The head of US forces in the Middle East warned that displacement camps run by US-backed Kurdish forces in Syria will breed a new generation of Islamic State (IS) fighters if foreign governments don’t repatriate their stranded nationals.

“These children in particular are being radicalized, and unless we find a way to repatriate them, reintegrate them and de-radicalize them, we're giving ourselves the gift of fighters five to seven years down the road, and that is a profound problem,” Gen. Kenneth “Frank” McKenzie, commander of US Central Command, told the American Enterprise Institute during a virtual event on Tuesday.

McKenzie cited al-Hol camp, a sprawling site in northeast Syria’s Hasakah province that is run by Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) who ousted IS from its last Syrian stronghold in Baghouz in March 2019. More than 30,000 foreign relatives of suspected IS fighters live at al-Hol, a majority of them children.

“They are vulnerable to illness, cholera or coronavirus,” McKenzie said, describing the dire conditions as a “tactical problem.”