What Would Happen if Isis Came to America
Every bit Islamic State Resurges, U.S. Is Drawn Back Into the Fray
"ISIS is non over": Attacks in Syrian arab republic and Iraq make clear that the militants have lost neither their will to fight nor their ability to practise so.
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Kurdish Forces Battle ISIS After Prison Attack
The endeavour to break out thousands of sometime Islamic State fighters from a prison in Syria has swelled into the biggest confrontation between American-backed forces and ISIS in three years.
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[explosion] [gunshots] [gunshots] [gunshots] "We are especially disturbed by reports that pregnant number of boys, mayhap several hundred, are held there, and are extremely concerned for their rubber and well-being." "We have conducted a series of strikes through this days- long functioning to include the precision targeting of ISIS fighters who are attacking the South.D.F. from buildings in the area. And we have provided limited footing support strategically positioned to assist security in the expanse."
BAGHDAD, Iraq — An audacious attack on a prison house housing thousands of onetime ISIS fighters in Syrian arab republic. A series of strikes against military forces in neighboring Iraq. And a horrific video harking dorsum to the grimmest days of the insurgency that showed the beheading of an Iraqi police officer.
The testify of a resurgence of the Islamic Land in Syria and Iraq is mounting by the solar day, nearly three years after the militants lost the last patch of territory of their and then-called caliphate, which once stretched across vast parts of the two countries. The fact that ISIS was able to mountain these coordinated and sophisticated attacks in recent days shows that what had been believed to be disparate sleeper cells are re-emerging as a more than serious threat.
"It'south a wake-up call for regional players, for national players, that ISIS is not over, that the fight is non over," said Kawa Hassan, Eye East and North Africa director at the Stimson Center, a Washington research institute. "It shows the resilience of ISIS to strike back at the time and place of their choosing."
On Tuesday, fighting between a Kurdish-led militia backed by the Us and the militants spread from the embattled Sinaa prison in northeastern Syria to surrounding neighborhoods, swelling into the biggest confrontation between the American armed forces and its Syrian allies and ISIS in three years.
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The U.S. military joined the fight afterward the militants attacked the makeshift prison in the city of Hasaka, trying to free their swain fighters. The Islamic State now controls about a quarter of the prison house and is property hundreds of hostages, many of them children detained when the caliphate that their families had joined fell in 2019.
The The states has conducted airstrikes and provided intelligence and ground troops in Bradley fighting vehicles to assistance cordon off the prison.
Even as skirmishing was taking place around the prison Tuesday, fighting involving ISIS fighters also broke out about 150 miles abroad, in Rasafa, well-nigh 30 miles outside the city of Raqqa.
The militants' show of force was not limited to Syria.
In Iraq, around the aforementioned time as the prison set on began, ISIS fighters stormed an regular army outpost in Diyala Province, killing 10 soldiers and an officer in the deadliest attack in several years on an Iraqi armed forces base. Gunmen approached the base of operations from three sides late at dark while some of the soldiers slept.
The attack raised fears that some of the same weather in Iraq that allowed for ISIS's ascent in 2014 were now making room for it to reconstitute.
In December, insurgents kidnapped four Iraqi hunters in a mountainous area of northeast Republic of iraq, including a police colonel. The militants beheaded the law officer, and so released the gruesome video.
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The attacks in Iraq, conducted past ISIS sleeper cells in remote mount and desert areas, have highlighted a lack of coordination betwixt Iraqi government forces and the Peshmerga, Kurdish forces of the Iraqi Kurdistan Region. Many of the attacks have place in disputed territory claimed by both the Iraqi Kurdish government and the central authorities.
Ardian Shajkovci, director of the American Counterterrorism Targeting and Resilience Institute, said many of the militants arrested in attacks since the group lost the last of its territory iii years agone appeared to be younger, and from families with older members tied to ISIS.
"If so," he said, "this is a new generation of ISIS recruits, changing the calculus and threat landscape in many ways."
Iraq has struggled to deal with tens of thousands of Iraqi citizens who are relatives of ISIS fighters and accept been collectively punished and placed in detention camps — at present feared to be convenance grounds for radicalization.
Corruption in Iraqi security forces has left some of their bases without proper supplies and allowed soldiers and officers to neglect their duties, contributing to the collapse of entire ground forces divisions that retreated in 2014 rather than fight ISIS.
In Syria on Tuesday, the Syrian Autonomous Forces said that they had conducted sweeps in Hasaka neighborhoods nearly the prison, killing five ISIS fighters who were wearing suicide belts.
The militia said that on Monday it had freed ix prison employees held past the Islamic State and killed some other ix militants, including two suicide bombers, in raids around the prison. An S.D.F. spokesman, Farhad Shami, said that so far, 550 detainees who took role in the siege had surrendered.
The militia has besides been negotiating with the ISIS leaders in the prison.
There are an estimated 3,500 detainees in the overcrowded prison. As many equally 700 minors are as well at that place, some 150 of them citizens of other countries who had been taken to Syria equally immature children when their parents left dwelling house to join the insurgency. An estimated twoscore,000 foreigners fabricated their way to Syrian arab republic to fight or work for the caliphate.
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The prison siege has highlighted the plight of thousands of foreign children who have been detained for iii years in camps and prisons in the region, abandoned by their own countries.
The prison inmates include boys every bit young as 12. Some were transferred to the prison afterwards they were deemed too quondam to remain in detention camps that held families of suspected Islamic State fighters.
The Syria director for Save the Children, Sonia Khush, said those detaining the children were responsible for their safety. Only she also pointed a finger at foreign governments that have refused to repatriate their imprisoned citizens.
"Responsibility for anything that happens to these children also lies at the door of strange governments who take idea that they can simply abandon their child nationals in Syrian arab republic," Ms. Khush said.
At its peak, in 2014, ISIS controlled about a third of Republic of iraq and big parts of Syria, territory that rivaled Britain in size. When the last piece of information technology, in Baghuz, Syria, brutal three years ago, women and young children were put in detention camps, while those believed to be fighters were sent to prison.
The main detention army camp for the families, Al Hol, is squalid, overcrowded and dangerous, lacking sufficient nutrient, medical services and guards. Amidst the chaos, an increasingly radicalized segment of detainees has emerged to terrorize other camp residents.
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When the boys at the camps get teenagers, they are usually transferred to Sinaa prison, where they are packed into overcrowded cells. Nutrient, medical care and even sunlight are in scarce supply.
Merely their plight gets harder nonetheless when they turn 18. Even though none of the young foreigners have been charged with a crime, they are placed with the full general prison population, where wounded ISIS fighters sleep three to a bed.
Exterior the prison, the U.S. troops that take once over again engaged in battle with ISIS fighters are function of a residual force of the American-led military coalition that was largely pulled out of the state in 2019. There are currently nearly 700 American troops in the region, operating mostly from a base in Hasaka, and another 200 near Syria'southward border with Hashemite kingdom of jordan.
The Pentagon said that the armored Bradley fighting vehicles put in place to back the Kurdish-led S.D.F. forces were being used as barricades while the Kurdish militia tightened its cordon around the prison. A coalition official said the vehicles had been fired at and had returned fire.
"We take provided express ground support, strategically positioned to assistance security in the area," John F. Kirby, the Pentagon spokesman, told reporters in Washington.
Jane Arraf reported from Baghdad, and Ben Hubbard from Beirut, Lebanon.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/25/world/middleeast/isis-syria.html