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Hundreds of ISIS Supporters Flee Detention Amid Turkish Airstrikes U.S. Forces Leave ‘High-Value’ ISIS Detainees Behind in Retreat From Syria
(about 1 hour later)
AKCAKALE, Turkey — Hundreds of relatives of Islamic State fighters fled a Kurdish-run detention camp on Sunday morning after Turkish airstrikes hit the surrounding area, deepening the crisis prompted by the Turkish-led invasion of northern Syria. The American military was unable to carry out a plan to transfer about five dozen “high value” Islamic State detainees out of Kurdish-run wartime prisons before the Pentagon decided to move its forces out of northern Syria and pave the way for a Turkish-led invasion, according to two American officials.
The escapes came hours before the United States military said it would withdraw its remaining troops from northern Syria in the coming weeks, despite a likely resurgence of the Islamic State amid chaotic efforts by Turkish-led troops to wrest the region from Kurdish control. In the same area on Sunday, hundreds of Islamic State sympathizers escaped from a low-security detention camp in the region, taking advantage of the chaos caused by the Turkish ground invasion and the accompanying strikes.
A Kurdish official also said that the flag of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, had been raised in the countryside between the camp in the Kurdish-held town of Ain Issa and the Turkish border, another indication of how the Kurdish authorities were losing control of a region they had freed from the extremists only months ago. Both developments underscored the pandemonium unleashed by President Trump’s sudden decision to order American troops to evacuate part of the Syrian region bordering Turkey.
“We are facing very fierce attacks and we’re forced to decrease numbers of guards,” said the official, Ciya Kurd, of the Kurdish-led regional authority, who confirmed the break from the displacement camp after the Turkish strikes. That allowed President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey to order an invasion of Syrian territory controlled by a Kurdish-led militia that was at the center of American-led efforts to contain the Islamic State over the past several years.
Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper announced in an interview with CBS’s “Face the Nation” broadcast on Sunday that the United States would be evacuating about 1,000 American troops from northern Syria in a “deliberate withdrawal.” About 50 United States troops were previously removed from the area in anticipation of the Turkish incursion. On Sunday, the militia was forced to seek the protection of the Syrian government.
He said that the United States found itself “likely caught between two opposing advancing armies” in northern Syria, and called the escalation of the conflict in the region a “very terrible situation.” The Turkish government sees the Kurdish military presence so close to its border as a serious security threat, because the Kurdish forces have close ties with a guerrilla group that has waged a decades-long insurgency inside Turkey itself.
The defense chief added that the United States had learned that Turkey was likely to expand its incursion “farther south than originally planned and to the west” in Syria, according to a transcript of his remarks published by CBS. Turkey’s invasion upended a fragile peace in northern Syria, and has already begun to unleash sectarian bloodshed.
The Kurdish authorities are in negotiations with the Syrian and Russian governments to form an alliance against the Turkish force, Mr. Esper said, adding that the United States did not want to be caught in the crossfire. It also risks enabling a resurgence of the Islamic State. The extremist group no longer controls any territory in Syria, but it still has sleeper cells and supporters across parts of the country.
The Kurdish authorities are “looking to cut a deal, if you will, with the Syrians and the Russians to counterattack against the Turks in the north,” Mr. Esper said. ISIS has already claimed responsibility for at least two attacks since the start of the invasion, including one car bomb in a border city, Qamishli, and another on an international military base outside Hasaka, a regional capital further to the south.
President Trump took to Twitter to defend his decision last week to pull troops back from the border, where their presence had shielded Kurdish allies, effectively clearing the way for the Turkish incursion. His decision has generated intense criticism from Republicans and Democrats that he had betrayed Kurdish fighters who fought alongside American troops against the Islamic State. Mr. Trump claimed last week that the United States had taken out the worst ISIS detainees to ensure they would not escape. But in fact the American military was able to take custody of only two British detainees — half of a cell dubbed the Beatles that tortured and killed Western hostages — the officials said.
“The Kurds and Turkey have been fighting for many years,” Mr. Trump wrote on Sunday. Referring to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, a faction of Kurds known as the P.K.K., he added: “Turkey considers the PKK the worst terrorists of all. Others may want to come in and fight for one side or the other. Let them! We are monitoring the situation closely. Endless Wars!” As the week progressed and Kurdish casualties mounted, the onetime American ally known as the Syrian Democratic Forces grew increasingly angry at the United States. They cast Mr. Trump’s move as a betrayal.
Even as he sought to wash his hands of the region’s intractable conflicts, Mr. Trump tried to assuage his critics, including Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican who has usually been one of his strongest allies but broke with the president over his Syria decision and is promising bipartisan legislation to slap economic sanctions on Turkey. The Kurds refused, the officials said, to cooperate in permitting the American military to take out any more detainees from the constellation of ad hoc wartime detention sites for captive ISIS fighters. These range from former schoolhouses in towns like Ain Eissa and Kobani to a former Syrian government prison at Hasaka.
“Dealing with @LindseyGrahamSC and many members of Congress, including Democrats, about imposing powerful Sanctions on Turkey,” Mr. Trump wrote. “Treasury is ready to go, additional legislation may be sought. There is great consensus on this.” The prisons hold about 11,000 men, about 9,000 of them Syrian or Iraqi Arabs. About 2,000 come from some 50 other nations whose governments have refused to repatriate them.
Mr. Trump has declared ISIS defeated, but his decision to pull back American troops could result in the group’s resurgence and has raised questions about the fate of thousands of Islamic State detainees that the Syrian Kurds, had been holding in makeshift wartime prisons. Five captives escaped during a Turkish bombardment on a Kurdish-run prison in Qamishli on Friday, Kurdish officials said.
The decision has already had devastating consequences for the Kurds. They lost thousands of fighters in the battle against the extremists and are now fighting a war on two fronts. A video capturing the execution on Saturday of at least two Kurdish prisoners by Turkish-backed Syrian Arab fighters illustrated the fallout of the invasion. The Kurdish authorities also operate camps for families displaced by the conflict that hold tens of thousands of people, many of them non-Syrian wives and children of Islamic State fighters.
On Sunday, American troops stationed in Ain Issa withdrew from the town as Turkish-led forces moved closer to its perimeter, a United States military official said, even as relatives of ISIS fighters mounted an escape from the detention facility elsewhere in the town. One major camp in Ain Eissa was left unguarded on Sunday morning after a Turkish airstrike, and as Turkish-backed troops advanced close to the town, according to an administrator at the camp, Jalal al-Iyaf.
The retreat came as Turkey’s airstrikes pummeled Ain Issa, about 20 miles south of the Turkish-Syrian border, causing panic and unrest in a camp that housed nearly 13,000 displaced people, fewer than 10 percent of whom were relatives of Islamic State fighters. In the mayhem that followed, more than 500 relatives of ISIS fighters housed in a secure part of the camp escaped, Mr. al-Iyaf said. A Kurdish official also said that the ISIS flag had been raised in the countryside between the camp and the Turkish border.
Scores of people, including more than 700 relatives of ISIS, fled the camp, according to the Kurdish authorities. The number could not be independently verified, but a witness confirmed by phone that he had seen crowds of people hurrying from the camp around 9:30 a.m. Sunday. But determining the exact state of play on the ground proved difficult, as the advances by Turkish-backed Arab fighters scattered Kurdish officials who had previously been able to provide information.
The humanitarian aid group Save the Children also confirmed that foreign nationals had left the camp. Sonia Khush, who oversees the group’s work in Syria, citing her colleagues at the camp, said that a secure facility that housed ISIS relatives was now empty. The likelihood of an ISIS resurgence remains hard to gauge, since the Syrian Kurdish leadership may have exaggerated some incidents to catch the West’s attention.
“What was not clear to us was whether some of the women and children were taken by coalition forces or whether they all managed to escape,” Ms. Khush said. “It seems to be a mix of the two. Some women and children may be in the main camp.” The camp escape came hours before the United States military said it would relocate its remaining troops in northern Syria to other areas of the country in the coming weeks.
The Kurdish authorities had repeatedly warned that, while they were confronted by the Turkish invasion, they would not have the resources to secure the prisons and camps containing ISIS fighters and their relatives. Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper announced in an interview with CBS’s “Face the Nation” that the United States found itself “likely caught between two opposing advancing armies” in northern Syria.
The reference was to the possibility of an impending clash between Turkish forces and the Syrian government and its Russian allies. Kurdish militias are now allying with them in the absence of support from their former American allies
On Sunday evening, the Kurdish authorities announced a deal with the Syrian government to allow the Syrian Army back into Kurdish-held areas, with regime troops due to enter the city of Kobani overnight.
“It has been agreed with the Syrian government, which has a duty to protect the country’s borders and preserve Syrian sovereignty, that the Syrian army can enter and deploy along the Syrian-Turkish border to support the S.D.F. to repel this aggression and liberate the areas entered by the Turkish army and its mercenaries,” the Kurdish authorities said in a statement on Sunday night.
Mr. Trump took to Twitter to defend his decision last week to pull troops back from the border region, portraying himself as powerless to end a longstanding feud between Kurdish militants and a Turkish government that sees their quest as a threat to its sovereignty.
“The Kurds and Turkey have been fighting for many years,” Mr. Trump wrote on Sunday.
Mr. Trump also tried to assuage his critics, including Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican who broke with the president over his Syria decision and is promising bipartisan legislation to slap economic sanctions on Turkey.
“Dealing with @LindseyGrahamSC and many members of Congress, including Democrats, about imposing powerful Sanctions on Turkey,” Mr. Trump wrote. “Treasury is ready to go, additional legislation may be sought.”
But his decision has already had devastating consequences for the Kurds.
They lost thousands of fighters in the battle against the extremists. Now they are now fighting a war on two fronts, with dozens of fighters killed since the new round of fighting began on Wednesday.
The fighting has caused the deaths of dozens of civilians killed in airstrikes, and has forced over 130,000 from their homes, according to the United Nations, and raised the specter of sectarian bloodshed.
Turkish-backed Syrian fighters killed a Kurdish politician and at least two other captives, one with his hands tied behind his back, in what could constitute a war crime. In a video of one of the killings, the fighters used a sectarian epithet to describe the victims.
The fighting has displaced people who have already been forced from their homes several times.
At the camp in Ain Eissa where around 500 ISIS sympathizers staged a breakout on Sunday, the 13,000 other residents include refugees from Iraq who had sought safety in Syria because of war and insurgency at home. Scores of residents fled the camp in the aftermath of an airstrike on Sunday, according to aid workers there.
“Everyone thought that the camp was internationally protected, but in the end there was nothing,” said Mr. al-Iyaf, the administrator at the camp. “It was not protected at all.”
By nightfall, the camp remained unguarded, with Turkish-led forces close to the outskirts of the city, Mr. al-Iyaf said.
After establishing a foothold on Saturday in Ras al-Ain, a strategic town close to the Turkish border, Turkish troops and their Arab proxies made major progress on the ground on Sunday. A Syrian Arab militia under Turkish command pushed deeper into Kurdish-held territory, blocking major roads, ambushing civilians and claiming the capture of a second strategic town in northern Syria, Tel Abyad, that lies adjacent to the border.After establishing a foothold on Saturday in Ras al-Ain, a strategic town close to the Turkish border, Turkish troops and their Arab proxies made major progress on the ground on Sunday. A Syrian Arab militia under Turkish command pushed deeper into Kurdish-held territory, blocking major roads, ambushing civilians and claiming the capture of a second strategic town in northern Syria, Tel Abyad, that lies adjacent to the border.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey announced that his forces now controlled nearly 70 square miles of territory in northern Syria. They have also taken control of the most important highway that connects the two flanks of Kurdish-held territory, the Turkish defense ministry said. This allows Turkish troops and their proxies to block supply lines between Kurdish forces. On Sunday afternoon, Mr. Erdogan announced that his forces now controlled nearly 70 square miles of territory in northern Syria.
Mr. Erdogan also suggested his campaign was now expanding in scope. He announced that the Turkish force would attempt to capture Al Hasaka, a major Kurdish-run city that sits well beyond the territory that Mr. Erdogan initially said he had set out to capture. They have also taken control of the important highway connecting the two flanks of Kurdish-held territory, the Turkish defense ministry said. This allows Turkish troops and their proxies to block supply lines between Kurdish forces — and cut an exit route to Iraq.
Turkey and its Syrian Arab allies are trying to wrest control of northern Syria from a Kurdish-led militia that spearheaded American-backed operations against the Islamic State and that is the offshoot of a Kurdish guerrilla group based in Turkey. It also makes it harder for American troops to leave Syria by road.
Since the Syrian civil war began eight years ago, northern Syria has changed hands several times, as secular rebels, Islamist rebels, extremist groups and Kurdish factions have vied with government forces for control. Mr. Erdogan suggested his campaign was now expanding. He announced that the Turkish force would attempt to capture Hasaka, a major Kurdish-run city that sits well beyond the territory that Mr. Erdogan initially said he had set out to capture.
Since the Syrian civil war began eight years ago, northern Syria has changed hands several times, as rebels, Islamists, extremist groups and Kurdish factions have vied with government forces for control.
After partnering with American troops to drive out the Islamic State, the Kurdish-led militia emerged as the dominant force across the area, enraging and frightening the Turkish authorities, who see the group, which calls itself the Syrian Democratic Forces, as a terrorist organization. After joining American troops to drive out the Islamic State, the Kurdish-led militia emerged as the dominant force across the area, taking control of former ISIS territory and guarding former ISIS fighters on behalf of the United States and other international allies.
On Sunday morning, Turkish-backed Arab militias ambushed and captured four employees of the Kurdish Red Crescent, a medical aid group, traveling north from Ain Issa toward the besieged town of Tel Abyad, a member of the aid group said by phone. The four employees were in a two-car convoy. But with Turkey making increasing noise in recent months about forcing the Kurdish militia away from its border, the American military began making contingency plans to get about five dozen of the highest-priority detainees out of Syria.
The Turkish-led force also took control of Suluk, an Arab town about five miles inside Kurdish-held territory, according to the Turkish state-run news agency Anadolu. A Syrian activist in touch with the combatants and civilians in the area, Mustafa Hamida, confirmed the news. The planning began last December, when Mr. Trump first announced that he would withdraw troops from the country before his administration slowed down that plan, one official said.
Close-fire fighting could be heard in Tel Abyad on Sunday morning from the Turkish border town of Akcakale, suggesting that Turkish forces had entered the town after a four-day siege. The two adjoining towns are separated by customs buildings and a cement border wall. American special forces moved first to get the two British detainees, El Shafee Elsheikh and Alexanda Kotey, out on October 9, in part because there was a clear disposition plan for them already in place: The Justice Department is planning to bring them to Virginia for prosecution. They are now being held in Iraq.
Turkish-backed Arab fighters posted photos on an online chat room of combatants standing in front of a security building in a western neighborhood of the town, and Turkish television footage showed Arab fighters within the town’s perimeter. But as the military then sought to take custody of additional detainees, the Kurds refused to cooperate, the two American officials said. Privately, the Kurds — who announced a deal on Sunday with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad — also threatened to call for the United States to leave Kurdish-held territory in northern Syria.
The invasion has caused a huge surge in displacement, with more than 130,000 people fleeing their homes since fighting began on Wednesday. Many had already been displaced during the Syrian conflict. Now, with the Pentagon withdrawing American forces, the ability to take any more detainees out — even if the Kurds were to start cooperating again — has essentially evaporated, they said.
Carlotta Gall reported from Akcakale, Turkey, and Patrick Kingsley from Istanbul. Ben Hubbard contributed reporting from Dohuk, Iraq, Eric Schmitt from Washington, Hwaida Saad from Beirut, Lebanon, and Iliana Magra from London. Charlie Savage and Eric Schmitt reported from Washington, Carlotta Gall from Akcakale, Turkey, and Patrick Kingsley from Istanbul. Ben Hubbard contributed reporting from Dohuk, Iraq, Eric Schmitt and Peter Baker from Washington, Hwaida Saad from Beirut, Lebanon, and Iliana Magra from London.