A witness said fighting between the Islamic State group and Kurdish forces in Syria raged for a third day Saturday after IS raided a prison housing jihadists, claiming over 70 casualties.
Since IS’s “caliphate” was proclaimed defeated in Syria nearly three years ago, the assault on the Ghwayran jail in the northern city of Hasakeh has been one of its most crucial.
“At least 28 members of the Kurdish security forces, five civilians and 45 members of IS have been killed” in the violence, said Rami Abdel Rahman, head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
According to the Observatory, IS attacked the prison housing 3,500 alleged members of the terrorist organisation, including some of its commanders, on Thursday night.
Hundreds of jihadist convicts have been caught since then, with roughly ten suspected to have escaped, according to the Observatory, a Britain-based monitor that gets its information from sources inside Syria’s war-torn country.
“The exceptional situation continues in and around the prison,” said Farhad Shami, spokesman for the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).
The fighting on Saturday morning was taking place north of the prison, he added.
The jihadist group said in a statement released by its Amaq news agency that its attack on the jail aimed to “free the prisoners”.
IS has carried out regular attacks against Kurdish and government targets in Syria since the rump of its once-sprawling proto-state was overrun on the banks of the Euphrates in March 2019.
Most of their guerrilla attacks have been against military targets and oil installations in remote areas, but the Hasakeh prison break could mark a new phase in the group’s resurgence.
The Kurdish authorities have long warned they do not have the capacity to hold, let alone put on trial, the thousands of IS fighters captured in years of operations.
According to Kurdish authorities, more than 50 nationalities are represented in a number of Kurdish-run prisons, where more than 12,000 IS suspects are now held.
The war in Syria broke out in 2011 and has since killed close to half a million people and spurred the largest conflict-induced displacement since World War II.
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