A12 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 2 , 2019
shocking. Pale, sick prisoners with
shaved heads filled almost every
gap on the floor. Their faces, legs
and chests were riddled with
shrapnel, and in many cases, bro-
ken bones had been reset with
thick metal rods and bolts.
“You can see that we have en-
tered hell,” said Yasser Mohamed
Abdulazim, a prisoner who said
he had traveled to Syria from Hol-
land in 2015, as the Islamic State
group made headlines around the
world for its atrocities.
SDF officers described their
work as a duty, but a heavy one.
Most had fought against the Is-
lamic State for years. Another offi-
cer said he had been a student
when the Syrian war began eight
years ago. The youngest of four
brothers, all of them fighters, he
was the only survivor of the mili-
tary campaign.
“It’s heavy work,” the 24-year-
old said softly, looking down at his
fingernails for a moment. “I want
to continue my studies, not carry a
gun, I don’t like this uniform. But
in the end you have to defend your
family and community. Circum-
stances have forced us here.”
[email protected]Ossama Mohammed in Hasakah and
Ellen Nakashima in Washington
contributed to this report.Many of the prisoners were part
of a conquering army that swept
across borders, forging a new em-
pire based on a radical interpreta-
tion of their faith. This campaign
involved genocide against Iraq’s
Yazidi minority and the imposi-
tion of extreme punishments.
But lacking investigations into
individual conduct, foreign gov-
ernments say it is impossible to
know what part specific prisoners
had played in the atrocities. Most
have yet to be questioned, guards
say. In many cases, Syrians and
Iraqis were conscripted after their
hometowns fell under Islamic
State rule. Some continued doing
their same jobs after the creation
of the caliphate out of financial
necessity.
Inside a former school complex,
there were dozens of children.
A 14-year-old Syrian boy, Ab-
dullah, clutched the window to his
cell as he asked to be moved to a
place for only children. “I don’t
want to be here, please,” he said.
In the jail’s clinic, another 14-
year-old, from Iraq, said he had
sent his mother a letter through
the International Committee of
the Red Cross but heard nothing
back. “I’m sorry, I’m just too sad,”
he said, on the verge of tears. “I
just want to see her.”
The scene around him wastion facilities across the region,
indicating confusion about exact-
ly who was being held where.
In addition to the prisoners,
tens of thousands of women and
children who lived under the ca-
liphate are detained in camps in
northeastern Syria — notably the
al-Hol camp, which is now home
to about 70,000 people.
The scale of the prison problem
was captured on a bank of CCTV
cameras in one of the detention
facilities. In cell after cell, the pris-
oners were packed so tightly there
wasn’t enough floor space for ev-
eryone to lie down without resting
their limbs on others, and men
would trip over each other as they
tried to pass.
The military coalition had pro-
vided the orange jumpsuits, war-
dens said — creating jarring visual
parallels with Guantánamo Bay,
or the brutal execution videos that
the Islamic State made them-
selves.
“You should have seen their fac-
es when they first saw the jump-
suits,” a guard said. “They thought
we were going to do what they did
to other people. They thought we
were going to kill them.”
The International Committee
of the Red Cross has access to the
detainees. Other international or-
ganizations have limited visibility.miles away.
“They know things are happen-
ing out there, they just don’t know
what,” said Hossam.
Guards are doing what they can
to stop news of the invasion from
leaking into the cells, fearing that
knowledge of the deteriorating se-
curity situation might incite un-
rest. Televisions have been discon-
nected, and family visits, where
they were possible, are on hold.
“Information is like oxygen to
them. We are doing everything we
can to stop the flow,” said an offi-
cer who gave his name as Hassan.
“But how can the world leave us
with this place? All its citizens are
here and we are shouldering the
burden for all humanity.”
Even before the Turkish offen-
sive, the Kurdish-led force barely
had infrastructure to cope. The
speed at which the caliphate’s last
inhabitants poured out of their
final redoubt sent authorities
scrambling to repurpose schools,
large buildings and anything else
that might double as a detention
facility.
Prison authorities said there
are now roughly 10,000 prisoners
held in just the two facilities visit-
ed by a Washington Post reporter
this week. But officials from the
U.S.-led military coalition said
there were at least 23 more deten-a steady stream of small-scale at-
tacks across the region. In an au-
dio recording released Thursday,
the group’s new spokesman, Abu
Hamza al-Qurashi, reiterated the
slain former leader’s call to “free
the prisoners.”
Prison breaks have a storied
history in the Islamic State. The
group’s rise to power was fueled by
a string of audacious escapes from
Iraqi prisons in July 2012 and 2013
that sent hundreds of militants
back to the front lines.
On Oct. 12, a car bomb exploded
outside the perimeter wall of a pris-
on originally built by the Syrian
government, lighting up the night
sky and causing detainees to riot.
“They thought they saw the oppor-
tunity to escape, and went mad in
every cell. It was chaos,” said Hos-
sam, an officer in charge of the old
government prison. Like other
wardens, he spoke on the condition
that his full name not be used be-
cause of concerns that his family
might be targeted by Islamic State
sympathizers. Amid a cacophony of
jeers and metal bed poles hitting
the cells’ iron doors, it took hours
for guards to restore calm.
News of Baghdadi’s death did
not appear to have reached the
prisoners in the days afterward.
Nor had word of the Turkish inva-
sion, even as fighting raged 30these men and the potential
threat they pose for the world
outside their prison walls?
“Can you tell us anything?” a
rail-thin German man, Zakaria
Mohammed Ismail, 53, asked a
reporter, craning his head
through a window in his cell’s iron
door.
Behind him, prisoners in or-
ange jumpsuits — some as young
as 14 — were listless or flapped
their hands in a vain attempt to
fan the stiflingly hot air. Guards
covered their mouths with green
surgical masks against the stench.
European countries have most-
ly refused to bring their citizens
home for trial, instead exploring
the possibility of transferring the
men across the border to Iraq,
where more than 17,000 men and
women have already been
charged with terrorism offenses.
“They were all trying to cut a
deal with the Iraqis where the Iraq-
is would take custody of their for-
eign fighters and use their system,”
said one U.S. official, speaking on
the condition of anonymity be-
cause of the sensitivity of the issue.
But the deal fell apart, according to
two people with knowledge of the
issue, after Iraqi authorities asked
for payment and reserved the right
to carry out the death penalty.
At least 48 “high-value detain-
ees,” however, have been trans-
ferred to Iraq over the past month,
according to U.S. and Iraqi offi-
cials.
Security for the prisons in north-
eastern Syria has deteriorated in
the weeks since Turkey invaded
northern Syria on Oct. 9, seeking to
clear Kurdish fighters from the bor-
der area, with half the guards rede-
ployed to the front lines to resist the
incursion. More than 100 people
with alleged links to the Islamic
State have escaped from prisons
and detention camps during that
period, U.S. officials say.
The Islamic State’s leadership
has urged supporters to attack
detention facilities like these and
break the prisoners out.
“Your brothers and sisters, do
your utmost to free them and tear
down the walls restricting them,”
ISIS leader said Abu Bakr al-Bagh-
dadi in his last known recording
before he died last week in a U.S.
Special Forces raid on his hideout
in northwestern Syria.
Mass prison breaks could bol-
ster the group’s ranks at a critical
time. The hasty withdrawal of U.S.
troops from parts of Syria’s north-
east is threatening to subvert the
fight against Islamic State rem-
nants, which continue to carry out
PRISONS FROM A
In Syria,
prisoners’
future is
undecided
PHOTOS BY ALICE MARTINS FOR THE WASHINGTON POSTA 14-year-old boy peeks out of a cell holding men and boys accused of being Islamic State militants in a prison in Hasakah, Syria. It is one of at least 25 makeshift prisons housing more than 10,000 prisoners.
Eight months after Islamic State militants fought for their last square mile in eastern Syria, men sit on the floor of a Hasakah prison, some with missing limbs and others who
had bones set with metal rods and bolts. Members of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, who guard the prison, wear masks to minimize the smell.