Writing about children in a Syrian detention camp — and the limits of testimony

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The boy is about five or six years old. He sits with his back against a giant red water tank, one hand on the spigot, the other on the post of the rusted metal platform that holds the tank up off the ground. His hair and eyes are dark, and though his hands still possess the dimpled pudginess of childhood, his face has aged in a way that has nothing to do with years. He looks directly at the camera with an expression that seems perplexed and mildly irritated, as if asking whomever is behind the camera “what are you taking my picture for?”

There are three other children also in the picture. A girl, bent over at the waist, holds a dented tin bucket beneath the spigot the boy has opened. In her other hand is a plastic jug which she will fill once the bucket has reached capacity. Her thick, dark hair is tied back in a ponytail, and, like the boy, she is looking at the camera, though her gaze seems more of a tossed glance than a challenging stare; she is busy, mid-task. She is perhaps seven years old.

The last two children in the photograph are younger, both girls. One sits on the metal platform on the far side of the water tank, peering shyly around the red plastic at the camera. Her grey sweatpants are rolled to her knees, and her feet dangle above the ground. The other girl seems not to notice the camera; she is turned away, colorful leggings rolled up as she stamps in the run-off that has pooled on the dirt ground around the tank.

In the background of the photograph are canvas tents, ripped in spots, patchworked together, held down by metal stakes and small boulders. In this particular photograph, you can only see the backside of two tents, but, if the camera were to pull up and away and give us a bird’s eye view, you’d see 15,000 of them, an entire city of tents surrounded by barbed wire fence.

To write a child of Al Hol from the inside out… would have required me to imagine my way into a consciousness I could not reach.

This is Al Hol Camp, in the desert of northeast Syria. It is September, 2019, and here is where the families of ISIS fighters have been detained ever since the fall of the Caliphate in March, six months earlier. There are about 70,000 residents here. Perhaps two-thirds of them are children. More than half of the children are less than twelve years old, though there is no proper school. There is no fresh food, either, or access to adequate medicine, or clean water; the water that runs from the spigot and into the girl’s waiting bucket is cloudy and contaminated.

I have looked at this photograph countless times since I first encountered it six and a half years ago, and for some reason my eyes are always drawn to the little boy’s shirt. It is yellow, and on the front are two block letters: X and O. Is this Tic Tac Toe? Is it a hug and a kiss? Whatever it is, it seems entirely incongruous with the circumstances of the boy who wears it.

I don’t know whose child this is. I don’t know what he has lived through, or what horrors he may have witnessed during his brief life in the Caliphate. I don’t know whether his father has been imprisoned somewhere, or if he’s dead, killed in the final battle for Baghuz. I don’t know if this boy’s mother is with him at the camp, or if she, too, has been killed; of the roughly 45,000 children here, nearly half of them are orphans. I don’t know where his parents came from in the first place, if they came to Syria together or if they met here.

What I do know is that this boy likely has no birth certificate. He does not have a nationality that any state is willing to honor, regardless of his parents’ country of origin. This boy was born into the Caliphate, and the Caliphate no longer exists—nor was it ever recognized as a state by any government in the world. Now, this boy is being held indefinitely in a desert camp run by a Kurdish authority which is also unrecognized by the world. He is nameless, stateless; in the bureaucratic sense, he is an approximation. Because that is the imprecise language used in reference to the children of Al Hol; of the 70,000 residents, approximately two-thirds are children, of whom approximately half are under twelve. In 2019 alone, approximately 500 of these children died.

This image of the kids around the water tank and the countless others like it I encountered in the following months pointed me toward the book I would spend the next years writing. The images raised questions I could not put aside—not the political ones, which journalists and human rights activists were already seeking to answer, but the more personal, less answerable ones. Who were these kids, and what had they seen, in their short lives? Who had loved them, before all this? Who would love them after? These questions seemed like questions a novel might be able to answer, or at least explore.

Yet when I finished the novel five years later, the children who had started everything appeared only in the final three of three-hundred pages. They arrived as an epilogue, written not in third person like the rest of the novel, but in a collective they, unnamed and undifferentiated, a chorus rather than a cast of individual characters. It was as if the novel, having circled around them for three hundred pages, could only bear looking at the children directly for the last three.

I am still trying to understand why.

*

There was no shortage of journalism about Al Hol. Reporters from the New York Times , the BBC, and Al Jazeera made their way to the camp. They documented the overcrowding, the malnutrition, the lack of medical care. They wrote stories about sisters’ bodies found lifeless in an aqueduct, and tent fires, and babies stillborn. They published interviews with the mothers, some of whom had doubled down on their radical zealotry, some of whom had recanted and wanted badly to go home. They took photographs of children with their fingers hooked through the wires of the perimeter fence, looking out, and of children playing soccer with a half-inflated ball.

I read Human Rights Watch reports on indefinite detention, collective punishment, and violations of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. I read about the international resistance to repatriation. I read how the boys at Al Hol were routinely separated from their mothers at age twelve, when they were deemed too dangerous to remain in the family section of the camp.

I was frustrated by the politics of it all: the refusal to repatriate, the legal status of the Kurds, the questions over terrorism—both the history of it and the potential for it.

But what I found myself returning to again and again were the children, and the childhoods they were not having.

Childhood at its best is a specific and irreplaceable thing. It has a texture to it: the quality of a warm summer afternoon with nowhere to be, the freedom from knowing exactly how the world beyond your own small bubble works, the comfort of being known and unconditionally loved. Childhood has grandparents, and ice cream, and balloons, and school, which is an education not only in academics, but in socialization and compromise. Childhood has art, and music, comfort when you’re frightened, company when you’re lonely. The kids at Al Hol were not just deprived of good nutrition, clean water, and a place to call home; they were deprived of the experience of being children.

What bothered me most was that none of the children chose this for themselves. They were born in the Caliphate or else brought there before they had volition of their own. They were suffering daily for the misguided decisions of their parents, the consequences of which these children would bear for the rest of their lives. To think of those parents made me angry—it makes me angry even still. I can think of few things less forgivable than making a child complicit in something he or she cannot understand.

And I can think of few things more painful than the experience of the grandparents left at home. If thinking of these children’s parents fills me with rage, consideration of their grandparents fills me with grief. They lost not only the children that they loved, but the grandchildren they never even had the chance to meet.

They are the invisible figures in journalism, the nameless men and women sitting in New York or Melbourne or Paris, scouring the papers and television news for small faces that might possibly belong to the grandchildren they have never met. I could not—cannot—imagine how it would feel, to know that the child of your child exists in a place like Al Hol, and to be powerless to save them. I cannot imagine how it would feel to love someone you have never met—someone you might never have the chance to meet.

The grandparents didn’t choose this limbo either.

It was this—the grandparents and the grandchildren, the severed lines of love—that made me think in novelistic terms. Journalism could provide the facts with precision, could explain the politics and laws. What it could not do was get at the child’s experience of Al Hol from the inside out. It could not trace the filaments of connection that ran from these children to the outside world. It could not explore the invisible yokes of love between these children and the people who, through no fault of their own, were bound to them. This, I felt, was a novel’s work.

And so I started planning one. I wasn’t sure how, exactly, I would get there, but I knew the novel would arrive at a child—a little girl—living in Al Hol. She would have her own section of the book, her own point of view, her own interiority. The reader would know her in ways that they never could through non-fiction—from the inside out. The girl would be the incarnation of the novel’s contention that these children of Al Hol were blameless, that they deserved witness, that fiction could restore to them the individuality that the camp had robbed them of—at least on the page.

But when I came to this little girl’s section of the novel, I couldn’t find my way into her perspective. I have thought a lot about this, about how I walked right up to the line, then turned away, and I’ve arrived at an uncomfortable truth: my imagination failed me. To write a child of Al Hol from the inside out—to capture her inner life, her thoughts, her understanding of the world—would have required me to imagine my way into a consciousness I could not reach. This is a child born and raised in the Caliphate, formed entirely by her experiences there and now in the camp. She has never had ice cream. She has never been to school. She has seen people killed before her eyes, seen them flogged, seen their heads mounted onto spikes. I could not reach that consciousness not because it is foreign or because I lack empathy. I could not reach it because it has been made, by a series of specific and deliberate adult decisions, into something the ordinary imagination—the novelist’s tool—cannot transcribe without falsifying in the process.

If I’d written her anyway, with the novelistic confidence required to make fiction seem real, it would have been a kind of lie. And after everything, these children do not deserve to be lied about.

The epilogue was the best truth I could reach; it is what honesty looks like when imagination bumps up against its limits. The nameless, collective they that these children become, and the three pages they inhabit, is not a surrender, but an admission that they are still, finally, even in fiction, beyond what I could reach. I thought perhaps the distance between a writer at her desk in Massachusetts and a boy in a yellow shirt could be bridged by research, empathy, and five years of focused writing. But I discovered that it cannot. It can be bridged only by acknowledgement.

*

The question of which character interiors a writer can honestly access is one I have had to ask myself before. When I wrote The Mercy Seat , a novel told from nine points of view, I was deeply nervous about entering the perspective of Willie, a young Black man in 1943 Louisiana wrongfully convicted of raping a white woman who was, in fact, his lover. I am a white woman, and the distance between my experience and Willie’s felt impassably vast and frighteningly charged. But the rest of the novel revolves around his impending execution, and so I decided I had to try write him, despite my reservations. To leave the character at the center of his own story opaque, unknowable, a silhouette—would have been a different kind of dishonesty. A cop-out. And so I tried, and when I started writing, something held. The imagination found purchase.

With the little girl at Al Hol, it didn’t. And this, I think, is what the limits of imagination feel like as a writer—not a principled decision made in advance, but a sensation deep in your bones. It just feels wrong. It’s like playing a five-note chord on the piano when one of the notes is wrong. You might not know which note is off—you just know that the sound isn’t right , and that playing louder won’t fix it.

I can think of other writers who may have felt the same way, and rather than forcing dishonest writing have found a solution in formal invention—like my epilogue. In Beloved, Toni Morrison gives the trauma of slavery a body in the form of a ghost, perhaps because the reality it represented could not be approached directly without being diminished. In Rings of Saturn, W.G. Sebald orbits the Holocaust through photographs and digression; he avoids looking at it head-on as one might avoid looking at the sun—if you do, you can’t see anything at all. I don’t think either Morrison or Sebald was making a purely aesthetic choice. I think they were admitting, through the form itself, that some interiors—some experiences, some consciousnesses—are beyond what the imagination can honestly render. The collective they of my epilogue is a small, late entry in that tradition: a writer hearing the wrong note, and choosing restraint over a false chord.

*

There is one child in the epilogue I do know something about.

She appears in a single sentence: … one dark-haired girl has a scar that runs from the corner of her eye back to her ear . But in the context of the epilogue, the world of a collective “they,” she is as close as the writing gets to an individual. She doesn’t get a paragraph of her own. She doesn’t get a sentence of her own. She doesn’t even get named.

This, I think, is what the limits of imagination feel like as a writer—not a principled decision made in advance, but a sensation deep in your bones.

She alone of the nameless children in the epilogue exists also in the body of the novel. She appears only briefly, toward the end of the book, where she does have a name, a personality, a little bit of history. The scar across her face is her identifying feature, a thread pulled from the body of the novel into its aftermath.

The reader who reaches the epilogue and comes upon the girl with the scar is meant to recognize her. In Al Hol, she has no birth certificate, no nationality, no name. But she has the scar—her body’s own documentation, the piece of history that could not be erased when everything else was. I gave it to her and sent her into the anonymity of the epilogue trusting that readers would find her there and know her. Not intimately, and not from the inside out, but as more than an approximation.

The other children in the epilogue have no such thread, even as it was their faces that compelled me to write in the first place, their questions I hoped fiction could answer. But I could not reach them. The novel couldn’t reach them. They have zero history in its pages, zero present, and zero future—the precise structure of their erasure in the world.

The novel did not intend to reproduce the logic of abandonment it was trying to bear witness against. But it did, a little. And I think it is worth saying so.

*

In January 2026, the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces withdrew from Al Hol. The Syrian military forces moved in, but amid the chaos of the transition the camp fractured and the population scattered. It all happened so quickly that even the journalists who had covered the camp could not keep track of where the displaced had gone. The children of Al Hol were subsumed into a Syria being quickly remade after Assad’s fall in late 2024. I don’t know where they have gone, which is almost worse than having to say “there they are, behind that fence, in that desert.” I do not know even their approximate location. Their story was still being told; now it has gone dark.

As a novelist, it was a strange sensation to run up against the limits of what imagination can do, and to have to find a form that acknowledges that truth, rather than papering it over. But that form—the collective they—was less a solution than an honest account of the problem.

And now the problem has deepened into one that no form can address. The boy at the water tank is no longer there. Already beyond the reach of the novel that tried to find him, he has now passed beyond the reach of photography and journalism, too. I have looked at him so many times I have the image memorized—the dark hair, the childish fingers, the expression of mild, ancient irritation. But I do not know if he is alive. I know that he was alive, and where, that someone once photographed him and that photograph was the impetus for a novel that couldn’t reach him, or any of the children of Al Hol. The distance between us could not be bridged—only recognized, and now that the place where they once stood has dissolved that recognition feels thinner than ever. It isn’t enough. It doesn’t help them. It never did.

These kids were failed by their parents, and by the states that produced those parents, and by the international community that couldn’t figure out what to do with them. They were failed, too, by the camp that held them, and the chaos that scattered them. A novelist’s witness can’t change any of that. It cannot balance the ledger. But silence could have been a choice, too. It is always a choice to look away.

The boy in the yellow shirt did not look away. He looked directly into the camera—and by accidental extension, directly at me. The least I can do is return his gaze.

____________________________

Conviction by Elizabeth H. Winthrop is available from Grove Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic.