US officials fear ISIS prison break will unleash ‘terrorist army’ on Middle East

U.S. officials warned Wednesday that thousands of ISIS members currently behind bars in Syria could end up making a break for it, Politico reported.

After the fall of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (SNA) pushed hard into the territory of the U.S.-backed Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), who currently hold 9,000 ISIS soldiers and 50,000 others in shoddily-secured detention centers, according to Politico. If the SNA attacks do not cease, an army-sized ISIS force might be let out of detention and cause a resurgence in the terrorist group, U.S. officials told the outlet.

“I usually hate this cliche, but this is the closest thing we have to a ticking time bomb,” a senior U.S. counterterrorism official told Politico. “If Turkey doesn’t get these attacks on the [Syrian Democratic Forces] halted, we could have a massive jailbreak on our hands.”

The prisons were meant to be temporary as the SDF organizes the extradition of the fighters to their home countries, but their home countries are reluctant to repatriate them, according to Politico.

“This is essentially a terrorist army in detention,” Joseph Votel, a retired general who led U.S. Central Command during the fight against ISIS from 2016 to 2019, told Politico. “I am very concerned.”

The Trump administration wiped out the vast majority of ISIS‘s presence in the Middle East during his tenure, according to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Currently, the U.S. helped broker a ceasefire between the SNA and SDF over the northeastern Syrian city of Manbij, with SDF chief Mazloum Abdi looking to extend it further, according to Politico. The SDF has long fought alongside the U.S. against ISIS, with the U.S. having 900 troops stationed in Syria.

“We continue to engage with the SDF, with Turkey about a path forward,” State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller told Politico. “We don’t want to see any party take advantage of the current unstable situation to advance their own narrow interests at the expense of the broader Syrian national interest.”

Assad was ousted by a rebel group led by the Islamic terrorist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), with the larger group including some SNA forces. The sudden rise of HTS along with Russia’s waning influence in the region creates an extremely volatile situation in the region, experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

The State Department did not immediately respond to the DCNF for comment.

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