The Syrian military claimed Tuesday that guards from the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces had abandoned a camp in northeast Syria housing thousands of people linked to the Islamic State group, allowing the detainees to escape. The al-Hol camp houses mainly women and children who are family members of IS members or accused of being otherwise affiliated with the group. Thousands of accused IS militants are separately housed in prisons in northeast Syria.
The SDF, meanwhile, said in a statement that “violent clashes are currently taking place between our forces and Damascus-affiliated factions in the vicinity of al-Hol camp.” The Associated Press could not independently verify either statement. Representatives of the U.S. military did not respond to requests for comment.
Syria’s ministry of interior said Tuesday that 120 Islamic State members escaped from a prison in northeast Syria a day earlier, amid clashes between government forces and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, which guards the prison. Security forces recaptured 81 of the escapees, “while intensive security efforts continue to pursue the remaining fugitives and take the necessary legal measures against them,” the statement said.
The SDF and the government have traded blame over the escape at a prison in the town of Shaddadeh, amid the breakdown of a ceasefire deal between the two sides. Also Tuesday, the SDF accused “Damascus-affiliated factions” of cutting off water supplies to the al-Aqtan prison near the city of Raqqa, which it called a “blatant violation of humanitarian standards.”
The SDF, the main U.S.-backed force that fought IS in Syria, controls more than a dozen prisons in the northeast where some 9,000 IS members have been held for years without trial. Many of the detained extremists are believed to have carried out atrocities in Syria and Iraq after IS declared a caliphate in June 2014 over large parts of Syria and Iraq. IS was defeated in Iraq in 2017 and in Syria two years later, but the group’s sleeper cells still carry out deadly attacks in both countries. Under a deal announced Sunday, government forces were to take over control of the prisons from the SDF, but the transfer did not go smoothly.