A Closer Look at the ISIL Prison Break
About two weeks ago, ISIL sleeper units in northeast Syria attacked the Ghweiran prison in al-Hasakah, a city of 250,000 about equidistant from the borders with Turkey and Iraq. The Ghweiran prison is one of nine detention facilities controlled by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a consortium of rebel militias supported by the US-led coalition. Since the dissolution of the ISIL caliphate in late 2017, the SDF has been tasked with overseeing the tens of thousands of former ISIL fighters on behalf of the US.
The attack on the prison was in a long line of attempted prison breaks, which have formed the backbone of ISIL’s political mythology since the beginning of the caliphate in 2013. On January 20, ISIL fighters seized the prison, which houses an estimated 5,000 inmates, and allowed hundreds to escape into the surrounding city. For two weeks SDF forces, with air and equipment support from the United States, fought to retake the prison. In the aftermath, the bodies of at least two teenage boys were found in the rubble - an indication that many of the estimated 700 children incarcerated at Ghweiran participated in the fighting or were used as human shields. Many of the escaped prisoners remain unaccounted for, though the security situation at the prison appears to have calmed.
So what have we learned? First, this episode has brought to light many details about SDF prisons that regional experts have long decried as violations of human rights. SDF prisons, including Ghweiran, house not only confirmed ISIL militants from the previous decade, but also members of their families and suspected sympathizers. The al-Hol refugee camp (many analysts place “refugee camp” in scare quotes) is home to 70,000 alleged acquaintances of ISIL combatants, none of whom have been detained with any due process that resembles what is standard in the west. The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights at the United Nations has published reports condemning the “arbitrary detentions.” Through hundreds of interviews, observer groups like the OHCHR and Amnesty International have chronicled the miscarriages of justice perpetrated by members of the SDF, including torture of activists and civilian political opponents, prison cell overcrowding, enforced disappearances, and sexual violence.
Second, it isn’t necessarily the case that these human rights violations are a systematic carceral strategy of the SDF. It’s likely, instead, that the SDF’s lack of institutional capacity to self-regulate and administer its prisons in an orderly and stable manner leads to these abuses. Indeed, the SDF’s government, the Autonomous Authority of North and East Syria (AANES) is split into seven self-governing cantons with extremely limited central authority. The AANES scarcely provides basic goods like electricity and education to its citizens; tax rates remain vastly different across the cantons; the AANES struggles to extract, transport, and sell the oil from available oilfields under its control due to shortages of manpower and logistical inefficiencies.
This lack of administrative capacity extends to its prisons. At al-Hol prison camp, the SDF’s largest at 56,000 inmates, the majority detained are children, but adult male prisoners have set up an ISIL-style religious police, which bans smoking, music, and all but a few forms of clothing. This religious police, known as the “Hisba,” is also responsible for indoctrinating many thousands of the youth in their midst into core tenets of the Islamic State’s ideology. The ad hoc police is also responsible for the murders of at least 80 women in the prison camp in 2019 alone, as revenge for allegedly passing information about ISIL to SDF guards. According to one of the few political economists to do work in the AANES in the last decade, the region spends half of its available funding on prison upkeep, but this cash infusion is not only unable to guarantee the security of the prisons, but also important tertiary considerations, such as the behavior of the detainees.
This is bad news for stability in the AANES, and the January prison break attempt, which led to the deaths of at least 700 SDF and ISIL combatants, may not be the last. ISIL’s current operations, lacking territory under their control, are limited to periodic attacks on places of and individuals in authority: in December, ISIL fighters beheaded an Iraqi police colonel after holding him hostage for two weeks, and a sleeper cell in western Iraq stormed a military outpost, killing 11. ISIL typically claims around 100 to 150 total attacks per month in Syria and Iraq, according to American officials. ISIL’s relative success with the prison break - a two-week long disruption of the entire Jazira canton and a diversion of SDF soldiers from their ongoing endeavors on the Turkish border - could motivate more attacks of this nature. It also remains to be seen whether the US’s assasination of ISIL’s leader on February 3rd will alter the organization’s tactics, but the 2019 killing of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, ISIL’s previous commander, yielded the group’s current insurgency strategy. The Ghweiran prison break is thus less a new development in the region’s politics, and more a symptom of the deeper flaws in the post-ISIL cleanup phase of the Syrian conflict as a whole.
"File:Tal hajar Quarter in AL-Hasakah.JPG" by haitham alfalah is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0
