Amid Turkey's offensive, Iraqis & Syrian Kurds fear Islamic State's attempts to free thousands of prisoners

The Islamic State is likely to take advantage of the spiralling conflict in Syria and free thousands of its terrorists held in numerous prisoners, according to senior Iraqi and Syrian Kurdish officials.

For years, the terrorist group Islamic State (IS) controlled large swathes of territories across Syria and Iraq. It called the territories it ran as ‘Caliphate’. Around 2015, the Caliphate was at its peak and controlled around 33 per cent of Syria and 40 per cent of Iraq, including Syria’s Raqqa and Iraq’s Mosul — some of the largest cities in the region. By 2017, however, the IS lost most of its territories and the final IS-controlled village was recaptured in 2019.

In Syria, the US-backed Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) defeated the IS. It is also in charge of numerous prisons where several thousands of IS terrorists and their family members, including several notorious figures like Shamima Begum and Jihadi Jack, are housed.

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As Turkey and Islamist groups supported by it have opened a front against Kurds , the SDF forces are stretched thin and there are figures that there could be attempt from both inside and outside to free the IS prisoners.

Amid such fears, Abdul Karim Abd Fadhil, the head of Iraq’s national security service, has warned that IS was planning to target these prisons, according to The Daily Telegraph.

Fadhil said an IS jailbreak would be a “nightmare” for both the United States and Europe.

The Telegraph noted that around 40,000 inmates are there in SDF-run prisons, including around 9,000 well-trained, battle-hardened IS terrorists. The rest of the inmates are their wives and children. There are around 8,000 foreign inmates as well.

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Bassam Ishak, a representative of the Syrian Democratic Council (SDC), the political wing of Kurds, told the newspaper an IS resurgence was already underway.

Ishak said that IS would try to attack SDF-run prisons as the forces are stretched thin amid Turkey’s offensive against Kurds.

“The SDF is occupied with fighting Turkish-backed rebels and the more they become engaged in these new fronts, the more IS will try to attack. That increases the risk of a prison break with the help of sleeper cells. There is a very serious danger now. It’s very important that the SDF receives help to defend the region,” said Ishak.

Previously, the top SDF commander, General Mazloum Abdi, said that half of the SDF prison guards had to be deployed to deal with the Turkey-led attacks , leaving IS prisons thinly-guarded.

“All of the prisons still are under our control. However, the prisons and camps are in a critical situation because who is guarding them? They are leaving and having to protect their families. I can give you one example like the Raqqa ISIS prison, which contains about 1,000 ISIS ex-fighters. The number of guards there have diminished by half which is putting them in a fragile position,” said Abdi in an interview with Fox News.

Abdi went on to flag fears of the resurgence of IS and convergence of various Islamist groups.

Abdi said, “We expect those Islamists, different factions to unite, to fight with ISIS and that will bring back tougher extremists, terrorist organisations back to the country.”