ISIS f ighters are left behind
Chaos in northern Syria with U.S. forces pulling out
The U.S. military was unable to carry out a plan to transfer about five dozen “high-value” Islamic State detainees out of Kurdish-run wartime prisons before the Pentagon decided to move its forces out of northern Syria and pave the way for a Turkish-led invasion, according to two U.S. officials.
In the same area Sunday, hundreds of Islamic State sympathizers escaped from a low-security detention camp in the region, taking advantage of the chaos caused by the Turkish ground invasion and the accompanying strikes.
Both developments underscored the pandemonium unleashed by President Donald Trump’s sudden decision to order
U.S. troops to evacuate part of the Syrian region bordering Turkey.
That allowed President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey to order an invasion of Syrian territory controlled by a Kurdishled militia that was at the center of U.s.-led efforts to contain the Islamic State group over the past several years.
On Sunday, the militia was forced to seek the protection of the Syrian government.
The Turkish government sees the Kurdish military presence so close to its border as a serious security threat because the Kurdish forces have close ties with a guerrilla group that has waged a decades-long insurgency inside Turkey itself.
Turkey’s invasion upended a fragile peace in northern Syria and has already begun to unleash sectarian bloodshed.
It also risks enabling a resurgence of the Islamic State group. The extremist group no longer controls any territory in Syria, but it still has sleeper cells and supporters across parts of the country.
ISIS has already claimed responsibility for at least two attacks since the start of the invasion, including one car bomb in a border city, Qamishli, and another on an international military base outside Hasaka, a regional capital farther to the south.
Trump claimed last week that the United States had taken out the worst ISIS detainees to ensure they would not escape. But in fact the U.S. military was able to take custody of only two British detainees — half of a cell dubbed the Beatles that tortured and killed Western hostages — the officials said.
As the week progressed and Kurdish casualties mounted, the onetime U.S. ally known as the Syrian Democratic Forces grew increasingly angry at the United States. They cast Trump’s move as a betrayal.
The Kurds refused, the officials said, to cooperate in permitting the U.S. military to take out any more detainees from the constellation of ad hoc wartime detention sites for captive ISIS fighters. These range from former schoolhouses in towns like Ain Eissa and Kobani to a former Syrian government prison at Hasaka.
The prisons hold about 11,000 men, about 9,000 of them Syrian or Iraqi Arabs. About 2,000 come from some 50 other nations whose governments have refused to repatriate them.
Five captives escaped during a Turkish bombardment on a Kurdishrun prison in Qamishli on Friday, Kurdish officials said.
The Kurdish authorities also operate camps for families displaced by the conflict that hold tens of thousands of people, many of them non-syrian wives and children of Islamic State fighters.
One major camp in Ain Eissa was left unguarded Sunday morning after a Turkish airstrike and as Turkish-backed troops advanced close to the town, according to an administrator at the camp, Jalal al-iyaf.
In the mayhem that followed, more than 500 relatives of ISIS fighters housed in a secure part of the camp escaped, al-iyaf said. A Kurdish official also said that the ISIS flag had been raised in the countryside between the camp and the Turkish border.
The camp escape came hours before the U.S. military said it would relocate its remaining troops in northern Syria to other areas of the country in the coming weeks.
Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper announced in an interview with CBS’ “Face the Nation” that the United States found itself “likely caught between two opposing advancing armies” in northern Syria.
The reference was to the possibility of an impending clash between Turkish forces and the Syrian government and its Russian allies. Kurdish militias are now allying with them in the absence of support from their former U.S. allies
On Sunday evening, the Kurdish authorities announced a deal with the Syrian government to allow the Syrian army back into Kurdish-held areas, with regime troops due to enter the city of Kobani overnight.
“It has been agreed with the Syrian government, which hasa duty to protect the country’s borders and preserve Syrian sovereignty, that the Syrian army can enter and deploy along the Syrian-turkish border to support the SDF to repel this aggression and liberate the areas entered by the Turkish army and its mercenaries,” the Kurdish authorities said in a statement on Sunday.