The Syrian military’s takeover of the al-Hawl prison camp, which housed tens of thousands of ISIS detainees and their families in eastern Hasakeh Governorate, seems to be going just as badly as many feared, with reports that the Islamist central government’s forces have released thousands of the detainees.
Details on what is happening at the site are scant, because the military just took it over from the Kurdish SDF on Tuesday, and immediately accused the SDF of secretly releasing around 100 inmates for no apparently reason. The SDF had been holding the enormous number of ISIS detainees for years, urging the international community to repatriate the detainees to their countries to origin.
This largely hasn’t happened, as the prisons have just remained dumping grounds for the international community, and the SDF was expected to handle them right up to the point that the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the other Islamist faction in Syria, decided they were taking over the matter.
al-Hawl prison camp after government takeover | image from X
The HTS and ISIS have been violently at odds for years over which of them was the authentic al-Qaeda-affiliated jihadist group, the HTS has ultimately ended up in control of Syria, and has loaded the Syrian security forces with jihadist allies of a similar ideological bent.
The SDF estimated by Tuesday evening that at least 1,500 inmates, including a lot of ISIS members, have escaped from Shaddadi, and Kurdish officials released videos on social media showing what they said were HTS forces releasing those inmates. Even more were being freed at al-Hawl, a much bigger site that holds by various accounts 25,000 to 40,000 inmates.
The government, by contrast, sought to downplay the number of escapees at no more than 120, all released Monday by the Kurds for some inscrutable reason, and claimed to have recaptured most of them already.
The US presented the ISIS detainees as under control, and suggested that they are going to be transferred into neighboring Iraq to be held there instead. CENTCOM suggested 150 had already been moved.
The SDF and the HTS telling completely different stories while being at one anothers’ throats is pretty ordinary, as the two sides have been fighting off and on since the HTS seized power and each side almost always claims the other started it.
In this case, there was fighting outside the prison as HTS-aligned forces advanced, the SDF reported they contacted the US for aid that never came, and ultimately had to cede control to the HTS. The US has not commented on the matter.
The HTS, on the other hand, claimed no fighting ever took place, and that they were securing the outskirts of the prison despite the SDF still operating inside at the time. They also claimed they had offered aid to the SDF forces.
What will happen to the ISIS fighters and families after they escape is the big question. The international concern is doubtless that they will return to their countries of origin after many years in detention and cause the sort of problems that were the reason so many nations decided to just leave them for the SDF to deal with.
Ideological similarities between ISIS and the HTS, however, means there is also a very real possibility many of the fighters will simply be merged into the assorted auxiliary forces operating in Syria and carrying out attacks on religious minorities with relative impunity. Or they will remain in Syria as the one major Islamist faction on the outs with the Islamist government and lead to more fighting. None of the possibilities seems very encouraging, which is why the world is closely watching these prisons they’d seemingly forgotten about nearly a decade ago.
