AL-HOL, Syria — Like a flock of ravens, the women hover around the food supplies, their black burqas fluttering in the breeze. But even through the narrowest of eye slits, their origins can be distinguished. Africans, Asians, Europeans and Arabs, they span the continents. The ethnic constellation of children around them might offer further clues, but these are the wives and widows of Islamic State fighters now sheltering at the al-Hol camp in northeastern Syria. Some have borne offspring from multiple husbands from multiple countries, and now they are on their own.

"My identity card was stolen by the other women. My children will starve. We don't have a tent,” quavers a slight female with slanted dark eyes. “Please help me explain my situation to the camp authorities, I don’t know how to communicate with them,” she begs as a little girl with thick brown lashes and cherry lips clings to her side. She is 30-year-old Mahina Muradaleva from the former Soviet republic of Tajikistan. Muradaleva was married to two Islamic State fighters. “The first was killed in an airstrike. The second one disappeared,” she told Al-Monitor through a Russian interpreter. Both men were Tajiks.

As the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces press their final ground offensive against the jihadis making their last stand in Baghuz, a steady stream of so-called Islamic State “brides” and their children continue to arrive at the sprawling desert camp close to the Iraqi border. “There is enormous pressure on us, we can barely cope,” Nabil Hassan, a spokesman for al-Hol, told Al Monitor in an interview on March 12. “75 Syrians, 13 Iraqis, 14 foreigners came today,” Hassan said.

As of this week, the total population has ballooned to 67,000, most of them women and children. The camp was built in April 2016 for Iraqis fleeing the Islamic State and was designed to accommodate no more than 10,000. Now it has five separate blocks for Syrians and Iraqis, and a special “transit wing” for the foreign IS families, Hassan explained.