Prison seige proves Islamic State is far from defeated
FOR a long time now, international observers have warned that prisons like this were timebombs waiting to explode. The latest detonation came just over a week ago when, on January 20, more than 100 fighters from the Islamic State group (IS) attacked and seized Ghuwayran prison near Hasaka, in north-eastern Syria, in a well-planned assault.
The overcrowded jail housed 3,500 suspected IS members including some of its leaders as well as about 850 children whom the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) alliance, who battled to retake the prison, said were used by IS as “human shields”.
The whole issue of such prisons has been controversial for some time. Though most of the detainees are Syrian and Iraqi, thousands are foreigners, originating from about 60 countries.
The controversy focuses on two issues. The first from the fact that many countries, particularly in Europe, are reluctant to bring their citizens home, fearing they will be hard to prosecute or monitor.
The second, in the words of UN’s counterterrorism chief Vladimir Voronkov, is that many of those held “have never been charged with a crime, yet remain in prolonged detention”.
In particular, the battle over the prison highlights the plight of thousands of foreign children brought to IS’s so called caliphate in Syria by their parents and who have been detained for three years in camps and prisons in the region, abandoned by their own countries. Some of those at the embattled Ghuwayran prison included boys as young as 12.
While some were Syrians and Iraqis, there were also about 150 non-Arab foreigners who had been transferred to the jail after they were deemed too old to remain in detention camps that held families of suspected IS fighters.
Many critics argue that such children are simply being punished for the sins of their fathers and mothers, given that many were too young at the time to have been involved in the activities and atrocities committed by IS.
Ignoring their plight, the same critics maintain, only leaves them vulnerable to indoctrination when held alongside adult IS members potentially spawning a new generation of extremists to fill IS’s ranks.
“Responsibility for anything that happens to these children also lies at the door of foreign governments who have thought that they can simply abandon their child nationals in Syria,” observed Sonia
Khush, the Syria director for Save the Children.
“Risk of death or injury is directly linked to these governments’ refusal to take them home,” Khush added, speaking to The New York Times a few days ago.
But the plight of such children aside, last week’s assault on the detention facility in Hasaka by IS fighters, some using suicide vests and vehicle bombs, is also further evidence of what some Middle East watchers say is a resurgence of the group that is growing by the day.
There is no question that IS today is not the force it was back then, but evidence of its resurgence is also undeniable
While IS has a history of conducting a campaign of what it calls “Breaking the Walls” with a series of jailbreaks going back almost five years, the attack on Ghuwayran prison marked the biggest IS operation since the group was toppled in 2019 after the SDF, working with the US-led coalition, cornered the jihadists in the village of Baghouz, in southeast Syria.
According to Charlie Winter, an Associate Fellow at the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR) and an expert on IS, the
Ghuwayran operation was “profoundly different” from other recent attacks.
At the height of it power in 2014 and 2015, IS governed its self-styled caliphate which stretched over large swathes of Syria and Iraq. Further abroad, too, it was linked to massive terror attacks, including a truck bomb that killed almost 300 people in Baghdad in 2016, just months after gunmen and suicide bombers attacked the Bataclan and other locations in Paris. Europe truck attacks also occurred in Berlin and Nice.
There is no question that IS today is not the force it was back then, but evidence of its resurgence is also undeniable. With attacks like that at Ghuwayran prison the signs are there of a capacity to mount multiple, co-ordinated, and sophisticated attacks that move beyond the limitations of mere sleeper cells.
Make no mistake, it’s a worrying sign and potentially an ominous portent of things to come.