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The US’ key anti-ISIS partners in Syria said on Wednesday that the ISIS detention facilities they guard are coming under attack, and that they have been forced to halt anti-ISIS operations, complicating the US military’s efforts to prevent the terror group from reconstituting following the ouster of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
The SDF, which is largely made up of Kurdish fighters from a group known as the Peoples’ Protection Units (YPG), has come under relentless attack by Turkish-backed militants in recent days, raising concerns among US officials and experts about the security of the more than 20 detention facilities and camps holding suspected ISIS members and their families in northern Syria.
The SDF’s top commander in Syria, General Mazloum Abdi, told CNN that the SDF has had to begin relocating ISIS detainees because the prisons have been threatened. “With the increasing threats that faced the city of Manbij, we relocated ISIS detainees from the prisons there to other, more secure detention facilities,” he said.
The SDF has now withdrawn from Manbij altogether following a fragile ceasefire with the Turkey-backed groups, which was brokered with the help of the US on Tuesday. The fighting has also forced the SDF to halt its anti-ISIS operations, Abdi said. “At the moment, joint operations against ISIS are halted, this is not a decision, but a military reality,” he said.
The US has been scrambling to ensure that the terrorists cannot regroup in Syria, and has carried out dozens of airstrikes on ISIS targets in recent days, as dozens of competing factions, including some backed by Turkey, now vie for control in different parts of the country.
Senior US officials, including Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff CQ Brown, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, have all spoken with their Turkish counterparts in recent days to underscore the need for communication and deconfliction as Syria undergoes a highly complex political transition.
Further underscoring the chaotic nature of the fighting, the SDF downed a US MQ-9 Reaper drone on Monday because they thought it was Turkish, multiple officials told CNN. An American defense official said that US forces have recovered some of the drone’s components and destroyed remaining portions of it.
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