The Daily - Is ISIS Back on the Rise?

Episode Date: February 3, 2022

A recent ISIS attack on a prison in northeastern Syria became the biggest confrontation between the terrorist group and the United States and its allied forces since 2019. The attack raises a question: Could the Islamic State group be on the cusp of a resurgence? We explore what the attack means, why the prison was so vulnerable in the first place and what has become of the thousands of fighters and families left behind after the fall of the Caliphate. Guest: Jane Arraf, the Baghdad bureau chief for The New York Times.Have you lost a loved one during the pandemic? The Daily is working on a special episode memorializing those we have lost to the coronavirus. If you would like to share their name on the episode, RECORD A VOICE MEMO and email it to us at  [e-mail]. You can find more information and specific instructions here.Background reading: The Islamic State may no longer be able to control territory, but the attack on a prison in northeastern Syria has shown that it can still pull off opportunistic military operations.Want more from The Daily? For one big idea on the news each week from our team, subscribe to our newsletter. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

From The New York Times, I'm Sabrina Tavernisi. This is The Daily. Three years after the United States declared victory over the Islamic State, a well-organized attack in northern Syria is raising questions about whether the terror group could be on the cusp of a resurgence. My colleague, Jane Araf, traveled to the site of the battle. It's Thursday, February 3rd. Jane, you've been in Syria reporting on an ISIS attack that started about two weeks ago.

Tell us how it began. Well, this was, first of all, really the biggest confrontation between ISIS and the U.S. and its allied forces since the fall of the Islamic State in 2019. That's when ISIS lost the last of its territory in what it called the caliphate. What happened was that the news suddenly broke out that ISIS fighters were attacking a prison complex in northeast Syria. Live on a Middle East bureau with more on this. More than 100 gunmen assaulted a prison

in northeastern Syria, where some 3,000 ISIS militants were being held. Kurdish forces who control the area say a car bomb struck the prison gates as detainees began rioting. It's a prison in this residential neighborhood in the middle of a city, actually, a city called Hasakah, which holds suspected ISIS members. Dozens of militants staged a riot inside the prison to create a scene of chaos. The attackers outside, which included gunmen and suicide bombers, were trying to break out

the prisoners inside. Many of the guards were being held hostage by ISIS, making it difficult to liberate the complex. And it became apparent pretty quickly that this was not one of those attacks that would be put down easily and everyone would move on. We saw that the forces guarding the prison, those are the U.S.-backed Kurdish-led forces called the SDF or Syrian Democratic Forces, were struggling to defend it. The Americans have been involved as well, providing air support as well as airstrikes.

involved as well, providing air support as well as airstrikes. And what really caught our attention was not just the nature of this attack and the size of this attack. It was that the U.S. sent in ground forces. The first time in a long time we'd heard that. So we were monitoring this in Baghdad for a few days, and then we decided we really needed to get there on the ground and see what was going on. So we drove for 14 hours to get to northeastern Syria, and we went as quickly as we could to the site of the prison

in a city called Hasakah. That's the sound of explosions coming from the prison still. We're just down the road from it. And as we were driving around, we kept hearing these explosions. There are American armored vehicles rushing towards the prison, so clearly the fighting isn't over yet. There were fighter jets flying overhead. And there were security forces, SWAT teams, counterterrorism teams

going through the neighborhoods around the prison. There were people fleeing neighborhoods and other people trying to get back to their neighborhoods. They were dragging small children with them and carrying loaves of bread. I'm actually looking at burning oil tankers. It seems that there was an airstrike here. And we started driving around where there were clearing operations going on. Clearing operations is where security forces go in, and they go house to house.

They're looking for escaped prisoners and for ISIS fighters. And then we go a little bit away, and there's a front-end loader. We're looking at a bulldozer that's just brought a load of dead bodies and dumped them in the middle of the street. They say they're ISIS fighters that were killed in the prison. And now you can hear the bulldozer approaching.

It's actually picking them up and dumping them into another vehicle to take them away. There are just piles of bodies. The pile that I'm looking at is maybe about 10, 15 bodies. Some of them were wearing prison uniforms, so clearly escaped prisoners. This is kind of, this image is beyond belief. prisoners. This is kind of, this image is beyond belief. These are ISIS. We killed them from the prison.

You know, we asked about this and we were told. There is a big number of them. That's why we are not. We know this isn't right, but there are just so many of them. It was an absolutely surreal scene and it was an indication of how intense the fighting was. And that was when I realized that this was a much bigger deal. This fighting was on a much bigger scale than it had seemed. So, Jane, you're watching this incredible scene. And after days and days of fighting in this town, how does the battle come to an end?

Well, it comes to an end more than a week after it started, which, when you think of it, is an incredibly long time for a prison siege to be unfolding. And it comes to an end after we're told by the Kurdish-led forces that they gave them an ultimatum. They said, either give up or essentially we will kill you. And according to the Kurdish forces, they said the prisoners, the gunmen, gave up. We don't really know what happened in those final moments. We just have their account. But they say that they essentially surrendered because they were surrounded and realized that there was no other option.

Okay, but why is this happening? I mean, the last news I remember was that ISIS was vanquished. The caliphate was over. Yeah, it was over in the sense that it no longer held territory. I mean, it went from controlling a third of Iraq and parts of Syria to basically being territorially defeated, driven out of the last piece of territory it held in 2019. But it didn't entirely go away. The fighters retreated. They went to the mountains. They went to the desert. They went to sleeper cells. Now, it's been off the front pages. It really takes a huge attack with a lot of casualties, really, to get a lot of attention these days,

if we're talking about an ISIS attack or anything else. But in Iraq, there are ISIS attacks almost every other day. They might be an attack on a tribal leader's house. It might be an attack on Iraqi security forces. But the attacks continue. So you're describing kind of small, low-level attacks, nothing as high profile as this prison siege, why did ISIS turn their attention here? And why now? So to understand the importance, really, of this prison and this attack, we have to go back to 2019, where this started. In 2019, the U.S. and these Kurdish-led forces were taking back the last piece of ISIS territory. There was weeks of bombing in the Syrian town where ISIS was holed up. The people who survived the fighting there included tens of thousands of ISIS fighters and their families, women and children. And as they all streamed out, the U.S. and the Kurdish-led forces had to figure

out what to do with them, these people who had come to fight and to live in the self-described caliphate. So what did the Kurdish-led forces do with all these families and the ISIS fighters who were left after the airstrikes? The families went to detention camps. There's one detention camp called El Hall, where there were about 60,000 people, mostly the wives and children of fighters, and many of those fighters had been killed. prisons in the region. One of those became the prison in the city of Hasakah, the one that was attacked. The Kurdish-led forces looked around and they found this large complex which had been a technical training institute right in the middle of a residential neighborhood. And they turned that into a prison. And they were thinking it might be temporary, that other countries, for instance, would take back their prisoners because some of them were foreigners. They were thinking that perhaps the U.S. and other countries could build them better prisons, you know, more secure prisons.

And that didn't really happen. So you're saying that this Hasaka prison was never intended to be a permanent solution, but three years later, it's still there. Tell us what it's like. So when I saw it, I was with NPR in 2019. And I saw it then. It looked like a former college. It basically had these big rooms that had been turned into cells where people were packed like sardines inside. They didn't even have room to stretch. The places that I saw, the cells that I saw had very small windows. There was almost no sunlight.

There was a very large room where the wounded were and most of them lying down because they were thin and sick and there was almost no medical care. Again, these aren't prisons like we know prisons to be. You know, those big purpose-built institutions that are heavily secured and there's wire around and high walls. These essentially are buildings that have been turned into detention facilities and prisons for what are considered some of the most dangerous people in the world. And there was something else happening there as well, because these weren't just adult accused fighters. There were 700 children in there under the age of 18. Wow, children. Yeah. According to the SDF, they are child fighters,

children who were taken away from their families by ISIS and forced to be fighters. That's obviously a very controversial characterization, because generally when they're children and they're forced to be fighters, even they're victims. And to a certain extent, the authorities here realize that the SDF, this U.S. ally, these Kurdish-led forces, say that they realize that they shouldn't be holding kids in prison, and they don't want to hold kids in prison. They want rehabilitation centers. They have only one. It's very small. They say they've been asking for money for support to build others, and they say they haven't gotten any response. So essentially, when asked,

why are you holding children in this horrible, overcrowded prison with inhumane conditions, they say, because we don't have anywhere else to put them. So there are thousands of prisoners in this place, some of them children. Are they charged with something? I mean, are these people on trial? That is a great question.

And here's the short answer. If you're Syrian, you will probably go to trial and you'll either be convicted and put back in prison or you'll be released. If you're not Syrian, security forces don't know what to do with you because the Iraqis won't take Iraqis back for the most part. They've taken some back. And then there are the foreigners because what do you do with the foreigners? They can't put them on trial here. There's no internationally recognized court. because you either detain them and put them on trial, except you can't put them on trial because you don't have a court that anyone will recognize, or you send them home. But you can't send them home because these countries won't take them back. It's just this circular stuckness.

What comes to mind is kind of a sort of Guantanamo situation in the desert in northeastern Syria. One of the people I actually talked to, one of the residents in a neighborhood behind the prison whose house was destroyed, said, you know, did they put Guantanamo in the middle of a city? No. And he was saying, why did they put this prison in the middle of our city? You know, locking away thousands of ISIS fighters, some of them from any one of more than 50 different countries, and then tens of thousands of women and children in just absolutely horrible, inhumane conditions, basically locking them up and throwing away the key, that has consequences. We'll be right back. So, Jane, what are the consequences of leaving these fighters and kids together in this prison system for the last three years?

So in a prison like this, which has thousands of people in it, you've got probably thousands of different reasons why people joined ISIS. And along with the hardened fighters who are ideologically driven, you've got people who kind of fell into it, people who were forced rehabilitated. But instead, what you've got is a situation where people are crammed together in inhumane conditions that are so inhumane, it inevitably increases the hatred for their captors, which leads to even more radicalization. And it's the same situation in the detention camps, because in the main camp, Al-Hal, where there are tens of thousands of people, when I've been there in the past, I've had not just women, the wives of ISIS fighters, but children, like little girls, tell me that they were praying for the caliphate to return. like little girls, tell me that they were praying for the caliphate to return. And part of the reason they were doing that is because they believed they were being punished by being held in that camp. And not just punished because they were detained,

but punished because they didn't have enough food, they didn't have enough shelter, they didn't have enough medical care, and they believed that all of this was deliberate. The thing that amazes me about this situation is that there doesn't really appear to have been any kind of international effort to really try to deal with it. countries from the EU, the U.S. in a lot of ways, just took this problem of the end of ISIS and dumped it by the side of the road and then declared mission complete and then drove away. There's not really an effort to deal with this pretty serious problem. It's astonishing. You know, I'm not shocked by very much, but this whole situation is astonishing. You've got 12,000 foreigners. And according to the head of the administration here, who I've spoken with, he said maybe about 800 of them, 800 of 12,000 have been repatriated. 800 of them, 800 of 12,000 have been repatriated because their countries just have found it a lot easier just to forget about them. I mean, I think we have to acknowledge that it is very difficult

for many countries. What do you do with hundreds and hundreds in some cases of your citizens who joined ISIS? Do you bring them back and prosecute them when you might not be able to convict them because the crimes they committed were so far away and you don't really have evidence? And perhaps even more importantly, public opinion in most of these countries don't want these people back. But it's been three years now, so you have to wonder how long is this going to go on? So given what you're saying, I mean, that the conditions of these prisons and detention camps lead to radicalization and that ISIS hasn't gone away, what are foreign governments going to do to prevent another attack like this, to stop the spread of ISIS? And here I'm thinking about the United States. Is there a plan?

Well, that's a great question. I think there are lots of little plans. I think the question is, is there an actual overarching strategy? And that is a much tougher question, because if there is an overall strategy, it's not really apparent to a lot of U.S. partners. So regarding the prisons, I talked to the head of security forces. He's a man named Muslim Kobani. And he said essentially that he had spoken with U.S. officials since the prison siege. They had promised more help. And when I asked him, well, does that mean that you've asked for more troops? He said, no, I haven't asked for them yet, but I want to say that we could use more troops. Now, that one's going to be a very tough call, of course, because the last thing the U.S. seems

to want to do is to put more troops into this region. But something clearly needs to be done because this is an unfolding crisis. If not troops, then what? Well, what the U.S. has been doing is taking on ISIS along with its partners, Iraqi security forces on the other side of the border, and here in Syria, these Kurdish-led forces. A lot of what they've been doing has been arrests of suspected ISIS fighters and also drone strikes. And those drone strikes are the most visible and the most controversial part, perhaps, of what the U.S. is doing to fight ISIS. Because as we've learned, it's not just drone strikes killing ISIS suspects. They're also killing quite a lot of civilians. The big question, though, and the big problem is that without some sort of strategy to get rid of the

ideology of ISIS that still exists in Iraq and Syria and other places and get rid of the conditions that created ISIS, which is, you know, oppression, despair, security forces treating people unfairly, a lot of people really have no confidence that ISIS won't just emerge and launch attacks like this, but be able to become a force again, if not a force that takes over territory, at least a force that continues to destabilize these countries. So, Jane, how worried should we be about ISIS right now? Yeah, I think not worried as in ISIS is going to knock on my door and kill me if I live in the West, worried, but certainly worried in the sense that the conditions that created ISIS still exist in many places. now, local security forces are much better equipped to deal with them now. But still, you have this extraordinary series of events that created ISIS and allowed it to take over

parts of countries. And then when it was defeated, it wasn't entirely defeated because you have all these people and the ideology lives on. And instead of trying to change that ideology and give them an alternative, you cram them into one place, treat them horribly, and think that that's somehow going to solve anything. Instead, what it's done is created this powder keg because you still have ISIS on the outside, and you still have ISIS fighters and sympathizers on the inside. It really points to the fact that what we've got is a really gruesome, intractable problem of having the remnants of this caliphate confined in a very small, very vulnerable, very remote part of this region. And the thing is that nobody really has to pay attention to it in other countries because it's so far away. But the problem is that if this remains unsolved, the threat isn't just going to be contained in these complexes of prisons and detention centers in a remote part of Syria. It is going to expand. These are choices, policy choices, that could have a serious cost. They could,

and countries, I think, are really ignoring this at their peril. Jane, thank you. Thank you, Sabrina. On Thursday morning, the Biden administration said it had carried out what it called a successful raid in Syria that killed the leader of ISIS. The Times reports that the raid, which involved U.S. special forces, killed at least 13 people. And in a statement, Biden said the operation would, quote, make the world a safer place. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. On Wednesday, President Biden approved the deployment of about 3,000 American troops to Eastern Europe.

The move was meant to reassure allies in the region, as the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, threatens an invasion of Ukraine. I want to be very clear about something. These are not permanent moves. They are moves designed to respond to the current security environment. Moreover, these forces are Germany, members of NATO, the Western Military Alliance. And authorities in Manhattan announced the arrests of four men who they said sold a deadly dose of fentanyl-laced heroin to actor Michael K. Williams in September. Williams played Omar Little,

a shotgun-wielding robber of drug dealers, on the acclaimed HBO television series The Wire. Federal prosecutors say the arrests were part of an investigation into a Brooklyn drug trafficking group that began early last year. Today's episode was produced by Stella Tan, Ricky Nowetzki, Sydney Harper, and Aastha Chaturvedi. It was edited by M.J. Davis-Lynn and Patricia Willans. Contains original music by Marion Lozano, Dan Powell, and Alicia Baitube.

And was engineered by Dan Powell. Our theme music is by Jim Brumberg and Ben Landsvark of Wonderly. That's it for The Daily. I'm Sabrina Tavernisi. See you tomorrow.