Crowdfunding the 'Islamic State' group

"This message is the beginning of an important call for donations," said a note in German on the instant messenger service, Telegram, in late July. "In the camp there are two brothers, 15 and 17 years old, in hiding. Their family in the land of the unbelievers has published their pictures and wants to bundle them back to their homeland."

But the mother of the boys wants "to bring them to safety," the note said, and to do so she would need a total of $14,000 (€14,000). The money would be used to pay people smugglers to get the teenagers out of al-Hol, a camp in northeastern Syriafor displaced people.

This is not the only such crowdfunding campaign that relates to al-Hol. There are thought to be around 56,000 people in the camp today and they include "victims, bystanders and perpetrators of extremist violence" under the "Islamic State", or IS, group. According to research by the United States Institute of Peace in Washington, over 90% of those in the camp are women and children. And of those, about two-thirds are under the age of 18.

Almost all of the women and children were brought here after 2018, when the IS group was pushed out of territory it controlled in Iraq and Syria. Many of the women were widows of the IS fighters. The camp is managed and guarded by the Syrian Kurdish military, who control this part of the country.

Life in al-Hol camp, which is the size of a large town, is difficult and dangerous. The UN reported 106 murders, including beheadings, in the camp between January 2021 and June 2022. Observers have said the camp is divided between those who still adhere to the IS' fanatical ideology — researchers estimate that's around a third — and those who have abandoned it.

Besides violence, there's also lack of sanitation, medicine, solid housing and education. Many of the women here have little in the way of income. This is why over the past few years, IS supporters outside the camp have been raising money for the families living inside the camp.

Aid for the 'sisters'

Researchers said that since around mid-2019, outsiders have promoted crowdfunding campaigns on pages with names like "Justice for Sisters," "Caged Birds" and "Sisters in the tent." The campaigns can usually be found on private messenger applications like Telegram or, despite the risk of being prosecuted for funding a terrorist organization, on more public platforms like Instagram and Facebook.

In a 2021 report, the Combating Terrorism Center at US military academy West Point counted up 40 such initiatives from around the world, most often appearing in the following languages: German, Arabic, Turkish, English, French and Russian.

Often the campaigners say they are raising money to help al-Hol families to buy food, medicine, toys or clothing.

Change of focus

But this is not always the case, as the recent crowdfunding campaign for the two adolescent boys on the German-language Telegram channel, called "Spend in the way of Allah," shows, said social media monitors at the US-based International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism, or ICSVE.

Instead of raising money for families' daily needs, several crowdfunding campaigns announced they would now be more focused on funds for smuggling people out of the camp, the ICSVE reported recently.

"And this shift has occurred for some very practical reasons," Anne Speckhard, the center's director, told DW.

One is that some of the children are now aging out of the general camp, she said. In particular, adolescent boys will eventually be separated from their families by the Syrian Kurdish military who manage al-Hol, and put into other prisons.

"This is causing deep distress and overwhelming despair among the mothers," said Speckhard, adding that they're asking for money to help smuggle the children out of the camp.

"Unfortunately though, they [the children] will be smuggled out into the hands of IS and other militant groups, and trained to become fighters," Speckhard said. Adolescent girls that get out are often sent to become wives for IS fighters elsewhere.

Beyond the camp gates

"Smuggling in and out of the camp happens on a daily basis," Christian Vianna de Azevedo wrote in an August 2020 paper in the journal, Perspectives on Terrorism. That includes "all sorts of goods as well as residents," de Azevedo concluded, and involves the bribing of guards as well as the evolution of a nearby network of people smugglers.

"The smuggling of young boys out of the camp and into militant groups has been going on since day one there," said Vera Mironova, a Russian-American academic and author of the 2019 book, "From Freedom Fighters to Jihadists."

"And often it goes in waves," Mironova told DW. "For example, this month they could be sending young boys out and then next month they won't have the money to do so. It's hard to predict as it's circumstantial and logistical. Last time I spoke to some of the women in the camp — it was about two months ago — they told me they'd just sent two orphans to Idlib for training," she said.

Idlib is part of Syria that is controlled by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a group that shares some of IS' conservative religious ideology and which was formerly associated with terror group al-Qaeda.

Crowdfunding competition

There's also a lot of competition between the different fundraising campaigns, Mironova explained in a 2020 article she wrote after a year of monitoring 30 such online campaigns.

In the past, some of the funding drives may have said they were using the money to free women or children from the camp because that idea has more appeal for potential donors. But "in the majority of cases, money sent to camps is used for food and other basic necessities," she pointed out.

The money raised is brought into the Syrian camp via a combination of official and unofficial financial systems. This includes the online payment system PayPal, banks and Western Union and similar exchanges, as well as the informal network of money transfers known as "hawala."

Speckhard and researchers at the ICSVE believe that at least one of the crowdfunding campaigns they were monitoring over the summer was launched because the pace of repatriations had picked up.

Although the German-language fundraiser didn't say so, the teenage boys in their note were actually originally from Tajikistan, a country that has taken a very proactive stance on repatriating its natives from al-Hol.

About 85% of al-Hol's residents are either Iraqi or Syrian but the rest are originally from 60 other countries. Most migrated to join the IS group and then stayed, because they believed in the group's extremist ideology.

Fate unknown

Despite the conditions at al-Hol, repatriating them from Syria remains a controversial subject. Governments have been reluctant to do so because they fear a possible security threat or negative public reactions or both, and according to Human Rights Watch. By 2021, only 25 countries had attempted to bring people home from al-Hol.

The central Asian states of Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan have been among the most proactive countries in this area. In late July, 42 Tajik women and 104 children arrived back in Tajikistan.

It is unlikely that the two Tajik teenagers will be on the next flight. By early August, just 10 days after the fundraising campaign began, several al-Hol-related Telegram channels reported in Russian and German that they had reached their target and had enough money to get the boys "to safety."

Edited by: Martin Kuebler