Aamina spends her days confined, and managing her children’s confinement.
The 30-something-year-old feels lucky to have made friends in the Roj detention camp, a group of Somali-British detainees who taught her English and help her look after her children, a favour she reciprocates.
Their living arrangement is a bit better than others, too, thanks to the money her extended family sends her.
She used $150 to buy an additional tent, setting the two up to create a small inner courtyard where her seven-year-old son can run around and expend some of his boundless energy.
They also have a television, on which the children watch nature documentaries – a “window to the outside world” for children who have known nothing but detention camps their entire lives.
Whenever they see a new animal or landscape, the children are full of wonder and questions, and her eldest, a nine-year-old girl, picks up her colours to draw dramatic and abstract interpretations of the world outside the camp.
Aamiina is their constant companion, even homeschooling them with books she borrows from the camp’s educational facility.
She had liked school as a kid, especially history class, and it makes her sad that her children do not feel safe going to the camp school because the teachers scream at them, and the other kids always want to fight.
Trying to create a sense of normalcy, she makes dinner every night as her son watches cartoons after his lessons.
Using whatever she has available, she experiments with recipes, a passion she developed in the camp.
She manages to rustle up quite a few dishes in her rudimentary cooking space, sometimes making her favourite, lasagne, or the children’s favourite, pancakes. When she is feeling homesick, she will make Swedish meatballs.
As smells waft out from her cooking space, she can usually count on one or both of their cats to come and investigate.
An animal lover all her life, Aamiina had adopted the two cats in the camp, taking care of them, playing with them, and keeping them around her and the children, who love them dearly.
Overall, things in Roj are marginally better than they were in the al-Hol detention camp, a three-hour drive to the south, where she and the children spent the first year and a half of their captivity.
But in early 2025, the guards in Roj seemed to get jumpy, raiding more tents and, she heard, even shooting a woman in the hand for trying to smuggle herself out.
One night in February, it was taking her longer than usual to get her two daughters and son to bed.
They had heard a visitor was coming to see them the next day, and were excited to meet someone from outside the camp.
Then, camp security raided their tent, frightening the children, who took even longer to fall asleep.
The next morning, when guards arrived to take them to meet Al Jazeera in the administration office, they felt scared and decided to stay with their neighbours instead.
Aamiina pulled on a face mask and headed out with the guards into the damp, windy day.
The tension in the sparsely furnished administration office was palpable.
Aamiina, softly spoken and slightly built, fidgeted with her mask as she introduced herself in English, exchanging glances with a stone-faced female guard.
She had forgotten all her Swedish in the more than 10 years she spent in Syria, she said.
Still nervous, she started talking about herself, sharing a brief account of how she travelled from Somalia to Sweden as an unaccompanied minor when she was 11 and was granted permanent residency shortly after.
She spent seven years in her adopted homeland before travelling to ISIL-controlled territory in 2014, when she was 20, a decision she said she would not speak about.
Aamiina said she has done her best with the children, but is mindful that their chances of integrating into a society outside the camp diminish rapidly as they grow older. She believes they must leave the camp soon if they are to stand a chance of living a normal life.
“It’s sad because I came from Sweden. I don’t even have Somali citizenship. [The children] are Swedish… and they are supposed to be there,” she said.
Then, with the guard distracted for a minute, Aamiina suddenly began speaking urgently in fluent Swedish.
“They [the guards] play nice now, but that’s not how they are with us,” she said. “My son can’t go to the camp fence because he says they’ll shoot him.”
Roj, where 2,600 women and children are held, is a smaller and marginally cleaner version of the al-Hol camp, which holds about 40,000 people displaced by ISIL or related to ISIL fighters.
But it has poor sanitation and lacks access to health services, Aamiina said, adding that her eldest daughter has been chronically fatigued and underweight for years.
The charity Save the Children paid for medical tests at a nearby hospital, but the results were inconclusive.
“If we were back in Sweden, I’m sure we could find out what’s wrong with her in a day,” she added.
As the meeting drew to a close and camp guards ushered her out, she whispered: “Please try and meet my husband.
“No one has heard from him for a long time.”