Up to 45,000 people displaced since the Islamic State terrorist attack on Syria prison

Up to 45,000 people fled their homes in a Syrian city where battles between Kurdish forces and jihadists have raged for days following a prison attack, the UN said Monday.

“Up to 45,000 people have been displaced from their homes” in Hasakeh city since the Islamic State (ISIS) group launched an attack on the Ghwayran prison last Thursday, said the UN humanitarian agency OCHA.

Kurdish forces geared up Monday for an assault on a prison in north-eastern Syria that ISIS fighters stormed last week, sparking fears over the fate of hundreds of under-age detainees.

ISIS fighters on Thursday rammed two explosives-packed vehicles into the Kurdish-run Ghwayran prison to launch a brazen jailbreak operation that has plunged the city of Hasakeh into chaos.

The attack, the group’s biggest since their once-sprawling proto-state was defeated in 2019, has already killed more than 150 people, including more than 100 among jihadist ranks.

Fighting drove thousands of residents of Syria’s largest Kurdish city to flee, but the violence receded on Monday, with the presence of hundreds of children inside the prison complicating an assault.

The Britain-based group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said elite Kurdish forces had moved armoured vehicles inside the main prison yard, ahead of a possible attempt to storm the facility.

ISIS fighters were holed up in one building on the northern side of the prison after “dozens of jihadists surrendered to Kurdish forces” in recent hours, according to the war monitoring group.

Farhad Shami, a spokesman for the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), said several ISIS members had handed themselves over following an SDF raid inside the jail.

A correspondent in the area saw buses and military vehicles transferring what appeared to be ISIS fighters out of the prison.

The autonomous Kurdish authorities running the region imposed a state of emergency across Hasakeh, after at least seven civilians were caught in the crossfire and killed.

According to rights groups and the United Nations, more than 700 minors are thought to be held in Ghwayran, a former school converted into a detention facility which is badly overcrowded, housing at least 3,500 suspected ISIS members.

Source: Arab Weekly