Islamic State fighters in Syria launched a coordinated attack on a local prison housing thousands of ISIS militants that national security experts warned showed the group’s capabilities.
The fighting, which broke out in neighboring communities as well, lasted for multiple days while the Syrian Democratic Forces attempted to regain control, and they had air support from the U.S. military.
National security adviser Jake Sullivan announced in a statement on Sunday that the Syrian Democratic Forces were able to “re-take full control of the Hasakah prison.”
“Thanks to the bravery and determination of the SDF, many of whom paid the ultimate sacrifice, ISIS failed in its efforts to conduct a large-scale prison break to reconstitute its ranks,” he said. “The barbarity of ISIS’s actions during this attack reaffirms why this group must be denied the ability to regenerate and why nations must work together to address the thousands of ISIS detainees in inadequate detention facilities. ISIS remains a global threat that requires a global solution.”
DEMOCRATS CALL ON BIDEN TO OVERHAUL DRONE PROGRAM OVER CIVILIAN CASUALTIES
A day later, State Department spokesman Ned Price said that “senior ISIS leaders were captured or killed during the attempt to free detained ISIS members from detention,” though he didn’t specify any names. He added: “This battle is a reminder that the enduring defeat of ISIS requires the support of the international community.”
While ISIS has been able to launch “small-scale” attacks and hasn’t controlled major territory in recent years, this recent one “is suddenly like a big wake-up call, a shot of adrenaline into the ISIS support community, and that’s been really clear over the last week,” Charles Lister, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, told the Washington Examiner.
This battle is the largest attack launched by ISIS since the fall of its “caliphate,” which included significant portions of Iraq and Syria in 2019, and it demonstrated ISIS’s “very slow but very methodical recovery,” Lister added.
His “big concern right now” is that the prison assault could be “encouraging many of those so-called sleeper cells to be coming back out into the open and becoming active again because they’ve kind of received a signal now that ISIS is trying to sort of ramp up the scale and scope of their operations.”
Bill Roggio, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, made a similar argument. He told the Washington Examiner that people should “expect there to be other prison breaks,” which is a common tactic for the group, adding, “If we think they used up all their capabilities on this one attack, you’d be fooling yourself.”
Vladimir Voronkov, the undersecretary for the United Nations’s Counterterrorism Office, told the U.N. Security Council last week that ISIS “has been highlighting and calling for jailbreaks” and that “there have been previous instances in Syria and elsewhere in the world,” according to the Associated Press.
Geir Pedersen, the U.N. special envoy for Syria, reiterated that sentiment to the Security Council as well, saying the assaults on Gweiran Prison “bring back terrible memories of the prison breaks that fueled the original rise of ISIL in 2014 and 2015.”
ISIS carried out 2,705 attacks in 2021 globally, according to the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, an Israeli think tank. It launched 365 terror attacks within Afghanistan, causing 2,210 casualties, and it participated in 82 such attacks, resulting in 835 casualties, the year before.
With the number of attacks and casualties having increased significantly year to year, Lister concluded, “It’s all bad news.” However, he added, “We shouldn’t panic. … They’re not about to start capturing towns and cities anytime soon.”
The ISIS affiliate in Afghanistan is known as ISIS Khorasan, and the group conducted its most high-profile assault of the year on Aug. 26 of last year.
ISIS-K operative Abdul Rehman al Loghri, who was previously held at Bagram prison but was subsequently released by the Taliban when they assumed control of Afghanistan during the final stretch of the United States’s two-decade presence there, detonated a suicide device at the gates of Hamid Karzai International Airport, where the U.S. and allies were evacuating at-risk Afghans. The attack killed 13 U.S. service members and roughly an additional 170 civilians.
The Meir Amit report revealed that ISIS-K became one of the group’s “most dominant and active provinces,” and it said its increased activity last year “came in the wake of the pullout of U.S. forces from the country, the disintegration of the old regime and the takeover of the country by the Taliban movement.”
The attacks in Afghanistan rose month after month from June 2020 through June 2021, though the average number of casualties per attack dropped every year from 2018 through 2021, according to a recent report from the Combating Terrorism Center.
Shahab al Muhajir, whose real name is Sanaullah Ghafari, is the leader of ISIS-K, per the Combating Terrorism Center report, which noted that his family belonged to an Afghan jihadi party, Hizbi Islami Gulbadin Hekmatyar.
He joined the jihadi war in Afghanistan and had close links to the Haqqani network, which is tied to al Qaeda. Some senior Haqqani officials have received top positions in the Taliban’s “caretaker” government, though he later renounced those ties and joined ISIS, per the report. It also explained that he was praised for his knowledge in urban warfare, including his work to free ISIS-K prisoners.
Without troops in Afghanistan, the U.S. military will be relying upon its over-the-horizon capabilities, though a strike is more difficult without having people in person collecting real-time intelligence. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced plans to revamp the strike system to prevent civilian casualties.
The strategic change will become more apparent in the next couple of months after a string of hits against the U.S. military’s drone program. It targeted and killed Zemari Ahmadi, an innocent aid worker, and nine other civilians, including children. The U.S. has since acknowledged the mistake and investigated it. Austin signed off on investigations that found no illegalities or punishments resulting from the strike.
Weeks ago, Austin ordered an investigation into a March 18, 2019, strike that killed 80 people in Syria. Commanding Gen. Michael Garrett of the U.S. Army Forces Command was given 90 days to submit the findings of his investigation, which will loosely coincide with the end of February.
Even with the U.S.’s attention now in the Asia-Pacific, the military and government leaders will have to weigh the possibility of further action as it relates to terror threats emanating from the Middle East.
A spokesperson for the Joint Chiefs of Staff told the Washington Examiner earlier this month that ISIS-K or al Qaeda could gain the capacity to launch international attacks in a matter of months, which follows Gen. Mark Milley’s previous timeline. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said in September that the two groups could reconstitute within six to 36 months, which would occur as soon as in the spring.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
“How can I advocate the U.S. getting involved militarily in these areas when we’ve shown zero competency, both militarily and politically, in these fights?” Roggio added when asked if there’s a possibility that a future president would seriously consider putting troops back in the Middle East.
“It’s almost a fool’s errand to do anything other than launch punitive strikes or target things of that nature to set these groups back because engaging on the ground with these groups and trying to do counterinsurgency … we suck at it,” he added. “We don’t have the will.”
