INVISIBLE CITY

> After ists fell in Syria, supporters and victims alike were herded into a giant outdoor prison— and effectively given lifetime sentences.

- ANAND GOPAL

The dead turned up everywhere. Two decapitated corpses in a cesspit. The remains of a woman with a pierced skull. A child with a bullet hole in his temple. Men clustering around a ditch suggested the worst, as did women running at full speed through the dirt. With each grim discovery, Jihan Omar renewed a promise to herself: she had to find a way out.

Jihan lived in Al-Hol, a detention camp in eastern Syria which could more properly be called a concentration camp. Al-Hol was created decades ago, in a stretch of scrubland about ten miles west of the Iraqi border, as a haven for refugees. But in 2019, when the U.S.-led coalition vanquished isis—the armed group that had brief ly established a breakaway caliphate within Syria and Iraq, imposing an extremist interpretation of Islamic law—tens of thousands of people who’d been living under its rule were herded to the camp. Guard towers and armored vehicles and concertina-crowned walls appeared, and residents could no longer walk out the gate.