Syria has to extricate itself from warfare

The attacks on an army post in north-eastern Iraq and the Kurdish prison in Hasaka in northern Syria appear to mark the resurgence of Daesh in the countries where the movement established its false caliphate in 2014. Ten Iraqi soldiers and an officer, whose Daesh signature beheading was posted online, were slain in Dyala province where Daesh has long established a presence in the countryside and the mountains.

The well-planned assault on the Ghuwayran prison, the largest run by the US-sponsored Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), began when two lorries broke through the gates and crashed into a wing of the complex, formerly an engineering college.

Armed Daesh fighters provided weapons for prisoners who staged an uprising, enabling an unknown number to escape although Kurdish defenders of the facility were backed by US airstrikes. The Daesh website announced 800 fighters — out of 3,500 — had been freed but this has not been confirmed.

The operation appeared to be modelled on the 2013 attack on the infamous Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad when Daesh liberated 500 fighters who joined the campaign to seize territory in Iraq and Syria and establish a cross-border caliphate. Constructed by British firms in the 1950s, Abu Ghraib, which I visited in 2004, is a huge fortified structure up a slope on the outskirts of the town. It is a far more formidable facility to breach than makeshift Ghuwayran.

Following the fall of the caliphate in 2017 and the rout of the surviving pocket of Daesh fighters based in the Syrian town of Baghouz in 2019, some 12,000 suspected fighters have been imprisoned without trial in 14 temporary facilities while 60,000 relatives remain incarcerated in over-crowded, violent al-Hol and al-Roj camps near the Iraqi border. According to a UN report issued last year camp dwellers, 40,000 of whom are children, suffer conditions that amount to “torture, inhuman, and degrading treatment.” At least one-fifth are foreigners whose governments have refused to repatriate them. Their treatment makes it all the more imperative for Daesh, determined to be seen as concerned about its veterans, to liberate fighters and smuggle their relatives out of the detention camps.

There are a number of reasons why Daesh has remained in the field and continues to recruit fighters in order to mount attacks in both Iraq and Syria. Neither the Iraqi army nor the Shia militias of the Popular Mobilisation Units have been able to capture or kill fugitive Daesh fighters who continue to mount such assaults on military and civilian targets. Baghdad has failed to address the concerns of the marginalised Sunni community or clamp down on Shia militiamen who abuse Sunni villagers and refuse to allow them to return to their homes. Three million Iraqis, 58 per cent Sunnis, remain in internally displaced camps without hope of re-claiming their lives. Resentment drives some young men to join Daesh or and villagers to collaborate with it.

In 2013, the Western powers failed to tackle Daesh while the movement seized control of the city of Raqqa in northern Syria and Sunni cities and towns in western Iraq. Their leaders only took notice of Daesh after the capture of Mosul in June 2014. Consequently, it took three years of aerial bombing by the hastily formed US-led coalition and ground fighting by the Syrian Kurds and the Iraqi Shia militias to wrest the territory conquered by Daesh from its grip and another offensive in March 2019 to finish off Daesh’s final territorial base at Baghouz in Syria.

Since then 57 governments have refused or unable to deal with their nationals who are Daesh survivors, the majority being Syrians and Iraqis. They have been left in what should have been temporary prisons and camps administered by the Kurds who have neither the means to try individuals nor the funds to provide proper prisons for suspected fighters and facilities for their relatives and fellow-travellers.

UN and other international agencies manage to provide essential supplies. This is a recipe for the sort of insurrection staged at Hasaka this month. There have been previous, less serious uprisings.

Consigning Daesh prisoners and their families to a bare existence in limbo creates a reservoir of anger and hatred within each person which cannot be assuaged and could be doubly dangerous. The captives are simply being warehoused indefinitely without being tried for crimes allegedly committed during their service with Daesh and, if found innocent, being freed.

The US-protected Kurdish-ruled area in eastern Syria is not a safe zone. If the US military presence were to be reduced to a token force or withdrawn, Turkey could attack the SDF, which Ankara insists is an arm of the secessionist Turkish Kurdish Workers’ Party. Turkey has exerted pressure on Hasaka and nearby areas by cutting off water from a pumping station occupied by the Turkish army.

Hasaka also hosts units of the Syrian Arab Army which have clashed with Kurdish fighters on occasion and local Syrian Arabs, who are the majority, Kurdish domination and efforts by the Kurds to draft their men into the SDF. Some tribesmen want the area to reunite with the 75 per cent of Syria governed by Damascus.

Meanwhile the situation in Syria itself is deteriorating due to the determination of the US and its Western allies to isolate and impose punitive, ruinous sanctions on the country. US official spokesmen have repeatedly stated that Washington will not lift sanctions and normalise relations with the government of President Bashar al-Assad and urge wiser Arab governments, including that of the UAE, which have begun this process, to desist. Unless Syria itself recovers from 11 years of warfare and economic embargo, the country will continue its downward slide and its citizens and residents, including Daesh prisoners of the Kurds, will become increasingly destitute and desperate.