A lucrative network that connects women held in Islamic State detainment camps in Kurdish-controlled northeast Syria to like-minded suitors outside the country is operating on full blast, with many of the women making their way via the jihadi-run northwestern province of Idlib on the Turkish border. The women go to Turkey and then on to Europe, where some spread their radical ideas.

The women find their prospective husbands on the internet using mobile phones that are banned by camp administrators but smuggled in routinely as palms are greased — particularly at the largest of two such detainment camps, al-Hol.

The sprawling, tented complex erected on a dusty expanse of arid land is home to 41,000 people, more than half of whom are children. Some 8,000 are the wives and children of foreign fighters. Many, unwanted by their home countries, have been languishing at the camp in horrific conditions since 2019 when the final pocket of ISIS-held territory fell to US-led coalition forces and their Kurdish allies. Al-Hol is also an incubator of future jihadis, as mothers train their children to become loyal ISIS fighters ideologically and militarily, despite routine raids by camp authorities backed by coalition forces who seize weapons such as knives and telephones along with makeshift explosive devices, as previously reported by Al-Monitor.

Hale Gonultas, an award-winning Turkish investigative journalist who has published numerous groundbreaking stories on ISIS, including the sales of captive Yazidi girls on the dark web, uncovered further details of the marriage market. Posing as a 70-year-old man seeking to “salvage” an ISIS woman from al-Hol, she recently negotiated the acquisition of a wife from the camp with an individual linked to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the al-Qaeda offshoot that controls much of Idlib. The individual, who goes by the nom de guerre Abu Hawk, asked Gonultas for 25,000 euros ($27,000) to smuggle the woman out of al-Hol, arrange a fake passport and get her to Turkey for onward travel to Europe. The total cost could rise to up to 45,000 euros, he told Gonultas. Uyghurs who joined ISIS from China’s majority Muslim Xinjiang province are “the best” forgers and are generally located in the town of Reyhanli on the Turkish side of the border.