Syria and ISIS: Kurdish-Led Militia Claims to Retake Prison Stormed by ISIS (Published 2022) (2024)

BEIRUT, Lebanon — After six days of deadly battles, the Kurdish-led militia that had been battling Islamic State fighters for control of a prison in northeastern Syria regained full control on Wednesday after its forces besieged the remaining militants into surrender, three militia officials said.

“In the end, they had no choice but to surrender or they would all die, so they decided to surrender,” said Siyamend Ali, one of the officials.

The reassertion of control by the Kurdish-led militia, the Syrian Democratic Forces, brings to an end one of the most audacious attacks by Islamic State fighters since the collapse of their so-called caliphate nearly three years ago.

The prison, in the city of Hasaka, held thousands of ISIS members taken captive as the caliphate fell apart as well as about 700 boys whose families had joined the Islamic State. S.D.F. officials deemed them dangerous, but human rights activists said their detention could violate international law and could potentially radicalize them, creating a new generation of jihadists.

The United States, which leads an international military coalition that partnered with the S.D.F. to fight the Islamic State in Syria, backed the Kurdish force in the prison battle, using armored vehicles, attack helicopters and airstrikes.

S.D.F. officials acknowledged Wednesday that instead of just taking over part of the prison, as an S.D.F. spokesman had said, the militants had joined with rioting prisoners to take over the entire prison complex.

ISIS’s attack on the prison, an effort to free the group’s fighters held there, was one of several recent military operations illustrating that it has again become a potent regional threat.

“This is not a problem solely within this city,” Maj. Gen. John W. Brennan, Jr., the coalition commander, said in a statement. “This is a global problem that requires many nations to come together to develop an enduring long-term solution.”

Using an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State, he said, “The makeshift prisons throughout Syria are a breeding ground for Daesh’s failed ideology.”

The militants attacked Thursday with two suicide car bombs on the entrance. Scores of armed fighters entered the complex, joining their detained comrades and burning plastic and blankets, S.D.F. officials said.

ISIS sleeper cells in surrounding neighborhoods also attacked the S.D.F., so its forces had to secure those areas before it could get to the prison.

For the last two days, S.D.F. forces imposed a siege on a handful of wards where prisoners and attackers had refused to surrender and were holding prison workers and the 700 boys hostage.

By Wednesday, the militants were running low on food and water and had no way to treat those who had been wounded in the fighting, so they surrendered, said Nuri Mahmud, an S.D.F. official.

S.D.F. officials posted images of scores of men who appeared to be prisoners lined up in the prison yard after surrendering on Wednesday.

They said they had not yet been able to assess the situation of the boys who had been held hostage. But their forces had known which building the boys were in and did not use heavy weapons near it.

“ISIS tried to take advantage of the youths in the prison to a certain extent,” Mr. Mahmud said. “The forces were careful about that.”

The officials said they were still trying to determine how many of their fighters and how many ISIS attackers and prisoners had been killed. During the battles, videos circulated on social media showing dead bodies strewn around the prison and an S.D.F. spokesman said at least 30 S.D.F. fighters and more than a hundred militants had been killed.

It also remained unclear how many prisoners had escaped.

The prison lies in a predominantly Kurdish region of northeastern Syria outside the control of the Syrian authorities in Damascus. The Kurdish-led S.D.F. fought alongside the United States to help drive ISIS from the region in 2019 and has since maintained a wide measure of autonomy there.

The United States still has a base at Hasaka with about 700 troops, and a smaller base near the Jordanian border in the south.

Hwaida Saad and Asmaa al-Omar contributed reporting.

The prison at the center of the fighting in northeastern Syria was never meant to be a prison.

Built years ago as a training institute, the complex was taken over by the Kurdish-led militia that partnered with the United States and other nations to fight the Islamic State.

As the jihadists’ so-called caliphate collapsed several years ago and its fighters were captured, that militia, known as the Syrian Democratic Forces, fortified the Sinaa prison in the city of Hasaka with higher walls, heavy metal doors and bars and put its captives there.

They have been there, and in other makeshift lockups in the area, ever since because nobody knows what to do with them.

Many of the approximately 3,500 men at the prison were fighters and some have lingering injuries. Reflecting the international draw of the Islamic State, they hail from all over the world, and most of their countries have refused to take them back. A separate part of the compound holds about 700 boys, who are the children of suspected members of ISIS and were also taken captive as the caliphate collapsed.

The Kurdish-led officials who govern the area have said it is not their job to put the men on trial, and since no one else will either, the prisoners have been stuck in limbo — that is until Islamic State fighters attacked the compound on Thursday to try to break them out. They used suicide bombers to blow open the gates and seized control of the facility.

Terrorism experts and U.S. officials have warned of the dangers of keeping so many former ISIS fighters in an unstable region under the control of an ad hoc administration that lacks the resources to keep the place secure.

This week’s fighting only amplified those concerns.

S.D.F. officials said Wednesday that they were still trying to determine how many people had been killed in the siege. Earlier, an S.D.F. spokesman said at least 30 S.D.F. fighters and more than a hundred militants had been killed.

It is unclear how many prisoners have managed to escape.

During a visit to the prison in 2019, reporters for The New York Times saw hundreds of men, many of them emaciated and injured, dressed in orange jumpsuits and crammed into crowded cells. Those interviewed either denied they had been with the Islamic State or claimed to have had nonviolent jobs as teachers or cooks.

Human rights organizations have criticized Western governments for not repatriating their citizens from northeastern Syria, comparing their indefinite detention without trial to the plight of men held in the U.S. detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

In addition to the men held in prisons, tens of thousands of others, mostly women and children, who were detained as the caliphate collapsed, are held in camps nearby that aid groups have warned are unsanitary and serve as jihadist recruitment centers.

For U.S. forces in Syria, an on-again off-again alliance is very much on again.

The fighting around Sinaa prison in Hasaka, a city in northeastern Syria, has cast a spotlight on the predominantly Kurdish region, and also renewed questions of America’s role there.

The Syrian conflict dates to 2011, when a popular rebellion began against the government of President Bashar al-Assad, the country’s longtime dictator. The revolt started with peaceful demonstrations but quickly descended into a bloody conflict between rebels and government forces.

The Kurds, comprising about 10 percent of Syria’s population and concentrated in the northeast, largely stayed out of the fight.

But that changed in 2014, when jihadists of the Islamic State swept across eastern Syria and northern Iraq, creating a so-called caliphate the size of Britain. The rise of ISIS brought the United States directly into the conflict, with President Barack Obama assembling an international coalition to fight the group, and ordering airstrikes and dispatching the U.S. military to support local forces on the ground.

The coalition turned to a Kurdish militia that was already fighting the jihadists in Syria and formed a partnership that grew into the Syrian Democratic Forces, or S.D.F., and included fighters from other ethnic groups as well.

In March 2019, the S.D.F., backed by the United States, recaptured the last piece of ISIS-held territory. “We have won against ISIS,” President Donald J. Trump declared, adding “now it’s time for our troops to come back home.”

But the victory left a lot of unfinished business that set the stage for the events of the past week.

The S.D.F. fighters seized the opportunity to establish a wide measure of autonomy for themselves over northeastern Syria. They called their enclave Rojava and rapidly set up their own administration.

Diplomatically, the Kurdish-led administration has had only limited success, failing to win recognition from any country, including the United States. And the Kurdish-led push for political autonomy in Syria raised fears in Turkey, which sees the S.D.F. as deeply connected to the PKK, a Kurdish militant group considered a terrorist organization by Turkey and the United States that has fought a long, bloody insurgency against the Turkish state.

But Turkey declined to intervene, largely because of the thousands of American troops then working with the S.D.F., until October 2019, when President Trump abruptly ordered the withdrawal of most U.S. forces. That was seen as a green light for Turkey to invade, and it did, seizing control of a slice of northeastern Syria, which it still occupies.

More recently, the U.S. kept about 700 troops in northeastern Syria to help the S.D.F. battle the remnants of ISIS. But the withdrawal also provided the space that allowed the Islamic State to regroup, which helps explain why U.S. forces found themselves back in the fight in Syria this week.

BAGHDAD, Iraq — An audacious attack on a prison housing thousands of former Islamic State fighters in Syria. A series of strikes against military forces in neighboring Iraq. And a horrific video harking back to the grimmest days of the insurgency that showed the beheading of an Iraqi police officer.

The evidence of a resurgence of the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq is mounting by the day, nearly three years after the militants lost the last patch of territory of their so-called caliphate, which once stretched across vast parts of the two countries.

The fact that ISIS was able to mount these coordinated and sophisticated attacks in recent days shows that a terrorist group that had been believed to have shattered into disparate sleeper cells is re-emerging as a more serious threat.

“It’s a wake-up call for regional players, for national players, that ISIS is not over, that the fight is not over,” said Kawa Hassan, the Middle East and North Africa director at the Stimson Center, a Washington research institute. “It shows the resilience of ISIS to strike back at the time and place of their choosing.”

BEIRUT, Lebanon — The battle for control of a prison in Hasaka, Syria, yanked from the shadows the bleak plight of the nearly 700 boys detained there. They are among the tens of thousands of children held in prisons and detention camps in northeastern Syria because their parents belonged to the Islamic State.

The boys in the prison had slept in groups of about 15, in cells with no windows, according to aid workers.

They could get fresh air and see the sun only during visits to a walled-in yard, and they could receive no visitors. Ranging in age from 10 to 18, they have received no schooling since being detained three or more years ago.

The Kurdish-led militia that operates the prison, known as the Syrian Democratic Forces, says that the children’s ties to the Islamic State make them dangerous. It has also criticized foreign governments for refusing to repatriate their citizens held in the camps and prisons, including the children.

But aid workers and rights advocates say that detaining the children punishes them for the actions of their parents — and could fuel the very radicalization that the authorities who locked them up say they want to prevent.

The U.S. troops in northeast Syria are part of a residual force of the American-led military coalition that was kept in the country to assist in the fight against ISIS and to protect oil installations.

There are currently about 700 American troops in the region, operating mostly from a base in Hasaka, and another 200 near Syria’s border with Jordan.

The Pentagon said that the coalition had moved in armored Bradley fighting vehicles to back the S.D.F. forces, indicating for the first time that U.S. ground forces were involved in the fight. A coalition official said the vehicles had been fired at and had returned fire.

“We have provided limited ground support, strategically positioned to assist security in the area,” John F. Kirby, the Pentagon spokesman, told reporters in Washington. U.S. military officials said the Bradleys were being used as barricades while the S.D.F. tightened its cordon around the prison.

The United States has also dispatched attack helicopters and carried out airstrikes on the prison to help the Kurdish-led militia, known as the Syrian Democratic Forces, reassert control. Some of the prisoners were killed in the strikes, U.S. officials said.

American officials defended the attacks.

“The coalition has taken great measures to ensure the humane treatment of detainees, but when ISIS detainees took up arms, they became an active threat, and were subsequently engaged and killed by the S.D.F. and coalition airstrikes,” said Maj. Gen. John W. Brennan Jr., commander of the anti-ISIS coalition in Iraq and Syria.

The Syrian Democratic Forces are a U.S. partner in the autonomous Rojava region of northeastern Syria.