ISIS emerges in Syria with the biggest attack since its defeat in 2019

The sleeper militias of the Islamic State (ISIS) have woken up with the biggest attack launched since their territorial defeat in March 2019. In an unexpected coup, a hundred ISIS fighters on Thursday blew up a Tanker truck loaded with fuel at the gates of the Ghwayran prison, in the city of Hasaka (northeast Syria), where more than 3,500 prisoners are interned, including hundreds of jihadists and leaders of the Islamic fundamentalist militia, under the control of security forces. Kurdish allies of the United States.

The battle for the prison has intensified since then with the intervention of US aviation, as confirmed by the Pentagon. As of this Sunday, more than 120 deaths have been counted – 77 jihadists, 39 militiamen of the Syrian Democratic Forces (FDS, an opposition alliance with a Kurdish majority) and seven civilians – according to data collected by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, NGO based in the United Kingdom that has informants on the ground.

Dozens of prisoners fled from Ghwayran prison, the largest prison run by the SDF, which has some 12,000 prisoners of the Islamic State under its power in declared centers, of whom a third are foreigners from fifty countries, according to the NGO Human Rights Watch. The jihadist attack follows in the wake of the campaign of massive prison escapes organized by Iraqi Sunni armed groups in 2012 to regroup their fighters before embarking on the conquest of a vast territory, straddling Syria and Iraq, on which they founded the so-called Islamic caliphate two years later.

The Kurdish forces keep the prison surrounded after having captured a large part of the escaped inmates, according to statements to France Presse by Abdelkarim Omar, international spokesman for the self-proclaimed autonomous Kurdish administration in northeastern Syria. Many of the inmates rioted on Thursday after the explosion of the car bomb, seized weapons from the guards and have barricaded themselves in the northern area of ​​the prison. ISIS has claimed responsibility for the operation in a video, according to the British network BBC, and ensures that most of the jihadist prisoners have been released.

Arab tribal chiefs in the area quoted by Reuters assure that the policy of discrimination exercised by the SDF on the Sunni Arab population had already unleashed the discontent of the population before the armed intervention of ISIS against the prison.

Thousands of civilians have fled the Hasaka area as fighting escalates

The military resurrection of the Islamic State occurs in Syria after its militias were crushed in March 2019 by Kurdish-Arab militias on the banks of the Euphrates in the town of Baguz, bordering Iraq.

Since then, ISIS has roamed the desert on the Iraqi-Syrian border, hiding in sleeper cells that have now woken up.

End of the territorial caliphate

Proclaimed in June 2014 by its leader, Abubaker al-Baghdadi in the great mosque of Mosul, Iraq's third largest city, the territorial caliphate ceased to exist in 2019 after having accumulated a territory equivalent to that of the United Kingdom and having 10 million inhabitants, a population similar to that of Portugal. The Kurdish forces fought the jihadists together with an international coalition led by Washington starting in the summer of 2014. In a conflict in which large global powers such as the US and Russia, and regional ones such as Iran and Turkey, the fight against ISIS has been the only common denominator between the opposing sides.

The attempted genocide against the Yazidi minority in northern Iraq, the multiplier effect of barbarism on social networks and the chain of attacks in Western countries —from the massacre at the Bataclan in Paris in 2015 to the attack on the Ramblas de Barcelona, ​​in 2017—, are compelling reasons why an armed resurgence of ISIS once again arouses concern in the world.

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