In April, a 15-year-old female relative of mine attempted to escape from al-Hawl camp, the displacement facility in eastern Syria that hosts families of Islamic State fighters. My cousin was one of thousands of civilians displaced from areas previously held by Isis and kept at the camp as they fled the group’s last strongholds.

My relative never joined the organisation, nor did any member of her family. But when she was caught, the guards noticed she was wearing a burqa, the face veil that Isis imposed on women living under its so-called caliphate. Since she was no longer living under Isis, the Kurdish interrogators accused her of being a “Daeshiyah” – a pejorative word to describe female Isis sympathisers. Rather than defending herself as a civilian with no association or sympathy to Isis, she opted for a defiant tone: “This is Islam, like it or not.”

To outsiders, such answers are often taken as evidence of persistent loyalty to Isis. While in some cases this may be true, others are a sign of the limited success Isis had in persuading portions of the population that certain practices represented authentic Islam, which does not necessarily equate to loyalty to the organisation or its ideology.

About 80,000 people live in al-Hawl, which is in southern Hasakah near the border with Iraq. Most of those are children, women and old men. The Syrian Democratic Forces, a Kurdish-dominated coalition backed by the US, held fleeing families in the camp, without a process to vet or release them. In May, the SDF planned to introduce a system allowing elders from villages and towns to vouch for individuals before their release, but the plan never materialised. As a result, families have been trapped in the camp – some for six months, since the caliphate collapsed in March, and others for up to two years. Despite the lack of a system to determine the backgrounds of those in the camp, officials somehow classify all those inside as Isis families.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Most of the people in the camp are children, women and the elderly. Photograph: Ali Hashisho/Reuters

This treatment is creating a popular backlash that has gone largely unnoticed: increasingly, families see the internationally backed force as invaders who have contempt for the local population. This is creating a widening schism between the force and residents affected by the situation.

Helpless, some local people appear to find in Isis or its slogans an expression of defiance against what they view as strangers running their areas and labelling them as “dawaesh”, or adherents to Isis. Moreover, there is a risk of radicalisation merely in keeping innocent civilians, especially children, among hardened Isis sympathisers.

Discussions about al-Hawl camp have centred on foreign fighters and their families, and the understandable dilemma facing western governments in accepting individuals who travelled thousands of miles to live under an extremist Islamic caliphate. But the dynamics for locals can be entirely different, and lumping them in the same camp – quite literally – could breathe new life into the Isis ideology.

Most of those currently held in the camp can still be peeled off from the ideology. Like thousands of children and young people there, my relative was traumatised by the war and life under Isis. She left her village after her mother was killed in shelling by Kurdish forces.

Civilians had already endured so much under Isis, and many had no choice but to stay in their homes until the end; they had nowhere else to go. The risk is that, when they find themselves trapped in a camp in the middle of the desert under horrible conditions, they become focused not on the radical group that caused them to suffer but on those holding them and accusing them of being sympathetic to the jihadists they despised.

As a native of eastern Syria, I am confident that the majority of those in the camp once blamed Isis for their suffering. That attitude currently takes a backseat to rage directed at the force that is perpetuating their suffering. Outside the camp, thousands more view the Kurdish force in the same light because their family members are kept in horrible conditions.

The solution to the problem lies in recognising the SDF’s biased attitude toward the local population, or at least how locals perceive its behaviour. For those locals, another model of dealing with civilians who lived under Isis already exists: even though civilians acknowledge that the SDF is less brutal than the Syrian regime, Damascus did not hold families in such camps. It allowed them to move freely, and only persecuted those it suspected of actually joining Isis.

In everything except the holding of civilian families, the SDF is seen more favourably by local people. In continuing the current approach, the SDF is missing an opportunity to show that it is a better alternative to the regime, and is eroding whatever popular goodwill it had gained in expelling Isis from these areas.

After her escape attempt, my relative was released from the camp. Several months after her release, she appears to have recovered and has shown clearly that she has rejected Isis. Thousands of those in al-Hawl, especially children and women, deserve the same opportunity.

Hassan Hassan is co-author of Isis: Inside the Army of Terror, and the director of the non-state actors programme at the Centre for Global Policy thinktank in Washington DC