A young Albanian woman’s escape from al-Hawl offers rare hope – but as the camp empties many are left stranded, prompting urgent calls for repatriation
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or weeks he hovered near Turkey’s border with Syria hoping for good news. In early February, Xhetan Ndregjoni got word of what he was waiting for – 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.
“I don’t have the words to describe that moment,” Ndregjoni said of their reunion.
The family’s 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.
