\n<\/p>\n
F<\/span>or weeks he hovered near Turkey\u2019s border with Syria<\/a> hoping for good news. In early February, Xhetan Ndregjoni got word of what he was waiting for \u2013 his niece Eva was on her way after escaping the squalid desert camp in Syria where she had been held without charge since she was a child.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t have the words to describe that moment,\u201d Ndregjoni said of their reunion.<\/strong><\/p>\n The family\u2019s ordeal had stretched back more than a decade, when Eva Dumani, then nine, and her younger brother, seven, were kidnapped from their home in Albania and taken to Syria by her father, who was later killed fighting for Islamic State<\/a>.<\/p>\n Dumani\u2019s release was a rare moment of joy amid what has been described as an unfolding catastrophe in northern Syria. The gradual emptying<\/a> of al-Hawl camp \u2013 where thousands of women and children from more than 40 countries with alleged ties to IS have been arbitrarily detained for years \u2013 has left many abandoned in a post-<\/strong>conflict zone, vulnerable to exploitation and raising fresh security fears.<\/p>\n The camp\u2019s collapse, along with the uncertainty<\/a> over the future of the smaller al-Roj facility, where many western European and Australian citizens are being kept \u2013 including Shamima Begum<\/a>, who travelled to Syria from the UK aged 15 \u2013 has led to renewed calls for governments to repatriate citizens held for years without charge or trial.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople are going to come back whether you want them to or not, specifically if they\u2019ve escaped,\u201d said Devorah Margolin, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.<\/p>\n About 6,000 foreign nationals from countries including Serbia, Bosnia<\/a> and Albania were detained at al-Hawl after the fall of IS in 2019, many of them women and children. Most have languished for years in what Human Rights Watch described<\/a> as \u201cinhuman, degrading, and life-threatening\u201d conditions, marked by chronic shortages of food and medicine as well as violence by women still loyal to the IS.<\/p>\n