Battle rages after Isis storms Syrian jail and takes ‘hundreds’ of hostages

Jihadists who took over the largest prison holding Islamic State fighters in northeast Syria are holding out against western-backed forces and fighter jets in the biggest battle since the “caliphate” was destroyed three years ago.

Scores of troops from the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the Kurdish-led militia supported by Britain, the United States and other allies in the long war against Isis, have been killed in the three-day battle, along with even more jihadists.

An Isis online media channel released a video of men it said were captives seized by inmates who had begun a mutiny in Gweiran prison, in the Syrian city of Hasakeh, on Thursday night.

In a reminder of the images regularly released by Isis’s so-called caliphate at the height of the wars in Iraq and Syria, a masked gunman chants threats against the captives and the forces trying to free them laden with religious references.

The SDF said the captives were kitchen staff from the prison, though some were clearly seen to be wearing military uniforms.

A statement said that its troops had “tightened the security perimeter” around the prison as they sought to take back control, but there was still fighting not only inside but in nearby areas of Hasakeh which Isis fighters had managed to infiltrate.

“Our forces have raided specific locations in the neighborhood, pursuing these terrorists,” the statement said.

US forces sent in Bradley armoured vehicles, according to reports. They also flew sorties by Apache helicopters and F16 fighter jets, striking the attackers, but the SDF troops on the ground failed to storm the prison or even clear the area around it.

The uprising in the prison, which contains around 3,500 male inmates including children, was followed by a major Isis attack on Friday morning on an army barracks north of the Iraqi capital Baghdad, in which eleven Iraqi troops were killed as they slept.

Taken together, the two attacks show a level of sophisticated planning that the group has not reached since the fall of Baghouz in south-east Syria to the SDF, backed up by US and British air strikes, in March 2019, the end of the territorial caliphate.

Amaq, the Isis media channel, said that the mutiny began with an assault by two suicide bombers who blew themselves up in trucks packed with explosives outside the walls.

Squads of fighters then moved in, attacking the prison towers and setting light to nearby fuel tanks to obscure the scene from coalition aircraft above. They also attacked an SDF base in the city and fanned through the area to cut the prison off from relief efforts.

Inside the prison, inmates managed to overpower guards, killing some and seizing their weapons.

The statement named the two suicide bombers as “Abu Abd al-Rahman al-Muhajir and Abu al-Faruq al-Muhajir” - the word Muhajir, meaning immigrant, indicating they were foreign fighters.

With many of the hundreds of inmates of the prison also foreign fighters, their involvement will once again draw attention to the SDF’s main current grievance with its western partners, that it is being left to handle Isis cells, including many foreigners, with too little support.

In late 2019, US president Donald Trump halved the number of US forces in north-east Syria and threatened to withdraw the rest, while western governments have refused to take back jailed jihadists despite their European passports.

It was unclear how many prisoners had managed to escape, though the SDF said more than 100 had been recaptured. Al-Qaeda, Islamic State and the Taliban have all managed to launch successful insurgencies in Afghanistan, Iraq and Yemen on the back of prison breaks, and there will also be concern that the publicity value of the battle will encourage former Isis fighters who had laid down their weapons to return to the fray.

The Amaq statement claimed to have killed 200 SDF fighters. A war monitor, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, put the figure at 39, with more than 70 Isis dead, along with seven civilians. The SDF puts its losses at seventeen.