^ More on Syria.
In northeastern
Syria, there is a jihadist crisis waiting to happen.
Scattered across Rojava - the Kurdish-led autonomous region that spearheaded the global fight against the Islamic State - there are prisons holding thousands upon thousands of captured
ISIS fighters.
But another chilling threat lurks inside the sprawling refugee camps where their radicalised families are infecting helpless refugees with their ideology.
Nearly six years after the Battle of Baghuz marked ISIS' territorial defeat, Rojava's authorities are warning that the terror group is poised for a resurgence.
At the heart of their fears is Al-Hol - the largest refugee camp that many believe will become Ground Zero for ISIS' return.
Originally built in the early 1990s to shelter refugees from the Gulf War, Al-Hol steadily expanded with each new regional conflict - particularly the US-led invasion of
Iraq in 2003 and Syria's brutal civil war in 2011.
But when ISIS' caliphate was crushed by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in 2019, Rojava's authorities were confronted with a tidal wave of captured fighters and their extremist families.
The fighters were hustled into old schools and hospitals transformed into penitentiaries, but the under-resourced and overwhelmed administration had no choice but to corral tens of thousands of ISIS' women and children - including many from the West who had travelled to join the terror group - into Al-Hol.
The camp has since become a self-policing dystopia where extremist gangs spread their doctrine through intimidation and abuse to raise a new generation under their black flag - all while receiving orders from jihadist cells outside the camp, waiting for the moment to rise up.
Scattered across Rojava - the Kurdish-led region in Syria that spearheaded the global fight against the Islamic State - there are prisons holding thousands upon thousands of captured ISIS fighters
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