A fortnight before the killing of ISIS leader Abu Ibrahim al-Qurayshi in Syria’s northwest Idlib enclave in a Delta Force raid on Feb. 3, hundreds of heavily armed ISIS militants allegedly attempted an audacious prison break in the Kurdish-held northeastern city al-Hasakah on Jan. 20, ferociously freeing hundreds of prisoners.
High-security al-Sina’a prison is one of several detention
centers in Syria’s northeast guarded by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic
Forces (SDF). The facility hosted 3,000 ISIS militants who were captured by the
Kurds after the fall of the ISIS caliphate in 2019.
The ensuing ten-day manhunt to re-capture the escaped
inmates and subdue the insurrection inside the prison lasted until Jan. 30,
just two days before the killing of the ISIS leader. The death toll in the
clearance operation was 500: 121 fatalities among the SDF, 374 suspected
members of the Islamic State and four civilians, according to SDF sources.
Regarding the killing of the ISIS chief in the outskirts of
Atmeh across the Turkish border, just 15 miles from Barisha village where his
predecessor al-Baghdadi was killed in a similar Special Ops night raid in Oct.
2019, the Washington
Post reported [1] on Feb. 10 that the hideout of the ISIS leader was
disclosed on a tip-off from Kurdish sources of SDF, which President Biden
effusively praised in the official announcement of the killing of al-Qurayshi
following the raid.
The information regarding the whereabouts of the ISIS leader
was obtained last fall, several months before the raid, the Delta Force
commandos began preparing for the operation late Sept., and President Biden
authorized the raid on Dec. 20.
The report notes: “The officials said Qurayshi — distinctive
because of the leg, which CIA analysts think was amputated after injuries
suffered in a 2015 airstrike — was sometimes spotted outside the house, or when
taking brief strolls through the olive trees.
“Word eventually made its way to informants who work for the
Syrian Democratic Forces, a mainly Kurdish militia group closely allied to the
United States, current and former U.S. officials said. Intensive surveillance
began immediately afterward, with Kurdish watchers following the arrivals and
departures of armed men who trudged upstairs to meet with Qurayshi.”
Thus, the Kurdish leadership of SDF was frequently consulted
by the US forces in Syria during the months-long manhunt for the ISIS chief and
was kept informed of the movements of al-Qurayshi’s couriers.
A glaring contradiction in the Kurdish account of the events
leading to the jailbreak in al-Hasakah is that if the US claims the ISIS leader
remained in operational command via a network of couriers who were closely
monitored and their communications intercepted by the CIA, then how is it
possible that the fugitive ISIS chief staged a brazen prison break at
al-Hasakah, hundreds of miles from his northwestern Idlib hideout, without the
knowledge of the US forces tracking him down?
The report adds: “After a two-year manhunt, the elusive
Qurayshi had been spotted, first by informants on the ground, and then that tip
was confirmed by the drone’s telescopic lens. For U.S. officials involved in
the search, two questions remained. One was how to kill or capture him while
minimizing risk to U.S. forces and to the more than a dozen women and children
who lived in the same building. The other: whether to strike quickly, or to
wait and try to gather more information about Qurayshi’s far-flung network of
underground terrorist cells.
“The waiting, which ultimately stretched over several
months, proved to be worthwhile […] There was foot traffic: couriers and
communication between cells,’ said a former senior intelligence official
briefed on the events. ‘They milked it, to collect as much data as they could.
They had to see who he was talking to.’
“The picture of Qurayshi that emerged from the surveillance
is that of a hands-on commander who was firmly in charge of his organization
and harbored ambitions for re-establishing the self-declared Islamist caliphate
that once controlled a territory the size of England. His intensive involvement
in operational planning made Qurayshi especially dangerous, officials said. But
over time, it also made him more vulnerable.
“‘He was very much in command,’ a senior Biden
administration official said of Qurayshi, a 45-year-old Iraqi who was born Amir
Mohammed al-Mawli al-Salbi […] ‘His lieutenants and couriers were very active,’
the official said, in ‘making sure that his commands and orders were known.’”
Clearly, either there are inaccuracies in the Washington
Post report pieced together from insider accounts of the details of operational
planning of the raid revealed to the paper by “credible” Biden administration
officials on the condition of anonymity and the fugitive ISIS leader wasn’t in
command, or if he was actively directing the operational planning of the
terrorist organization through a web of couriers tracked by the CIA, then how
did the premier intelligence agency overlook his orders to mount an audacious
jailbreak in al-Hasakah and didn’t give forewarning to the Kurdish SDF allies
of imminent storming of the detention center by hundreds of heavily armed ISIS
militants?
According to Syrian sources who refused to divulge
identities due to fear of repercussions, what really transpired at the
high-security al-Sina’a prison was that the Kurdish guards of the penitentiary
incited an insurrection on the night of Jan. 20 and let hundreds of prisoners
escape. Then the SDF forces mounted a ten-day manhunt for the fugitives and
killed hundreds of unarmed prisoners who were hiding in adjacent areas.
US air support was occasionally requested to mount random
airstrikes on indiscriminate targets often hosting the escaped ISIS militants
and sometimes civilians. The whole orchestrated show was led by irregular SDF
militias while a handful Special Ops units assisting the Kurds were kept at
safe distance to avoid unnecessary loss of precious American lives.
Although the SDF might have suffered negligible casualties
in skirmishes with the fugitives, majority of the death toll was among the
prisoners, which the SDF refused to host in the first place and was asking
third countries for their repatriation.
Biden’s abrupt withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan last
August and consequent overrunning of the country by the Taliban is indicative
of his inclination to disengage from myriad conflicts of the Middle East and
bring troops back to the US.
The false-flag prison break by the SDF was a desperate
attempt by the Kurds to keep the specter of the ISIS resurgence alive after the
fall of the militant group’s caliphate in 2019 and the killing of both the
caliphs, and to keep the US forces engaged in the Syrian conflict, the Kurds’
only assurance against overrunning of their newly acquired territories in eastern
Syria by organized and well-armed Turkish and Syrian security forces.
After the liberation of the ISIS-held territories in Mosul
and Anbar in Iraq and Raqqa and Deir al-Zor in Syria in 2017 and the clearance
operations at the Iraq-Syria border that lasted until 2019, the remnants of the
militant group are on the run and the rest have already joined the ranks of
Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), led by al-Qaeda’s formidable Syrian franchise
al-Nusra Front, in Syria’s northwest Idlib enclave controlled by the regional
US ally, Turkey.
Thus, the principal rationale for keeping the US forces in
Syria is no longer valid. Biden would’ve withdrawn troops long ago, not only
from Syria but also from Iraq, whose legislators passed a parliamentary
resolution asking the US to withdraw its forces from the country following the
killing of venerated commander of IRGC’s Quds Force General Qassem Soleimani
who was assassinated in an American airstrike on a tip-off from the Israeli
intelligence at the Baghdad airport on January 3, 2020.
Following the dismantling of the ISIS caliphate in 2019,
Biden would’ve withdrawn US forces from Iraq, which have repeatedly come under
rocket fire from Iran-backed Iraqi militias, as soon as he was inaugurated
president in Jan. 2021. The only reason he cannot withdraw troops from Iraq is
because the US forces in Iraq have been deployed in support of contingents of
American troops stationed across the border in Kurdish-held regions in eastern
Syria and at al-Tanf.
Al-Tanf military base is strategically located in
southeastern Syria on the border between Syria, Iraq and Jordan, and straddles a
critically important Damascus-Baghdad highway, which serves as a lifeline for
Damascus. Washington has illegally occupied 55-kilometer area around al-Tanf
since 2016, and several hundred US Marines have trained thousands of Syrian
militants at the sprawling military base.
Rather than battling the Islamic State, the foremost purpose
of continued presence of the US forces at al-Tanf military base is to address
Israel’s security concerns regarding the expansion of Iran’s influence in Iraq,
Syria and Lebanon.
Nevertheless, it’s worth pointing out that the orchestrated
jailbreak wasn’t the only incident when the Kurdish-led SDF has shown utter
disregard for civilian casualties in its all-out war on Syrian Arabs.
Five years following a potentially catastrophic incident
that could’ve inundated Islamic State’s former capital Raqqa and many towns
downstream Euphrates River in eastern Syria and caused more deaths than the
deployment of any weapon of mass destruction, the New York Times reported
last month [2] that at the height of US-led international coalition’s war
against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, US B-52 bombers struck Tabqa Dam
with 2,000-pound bombs, including at least one bunker-busting bomb that
fortunately didn’t explode.
In March 2017, alternative media was abuzz with reports that
the dam was about to collapse and entire civilian population downstream
Euphrates River needed to be urgently evacuated to prevent the inevitable
catastrophe. But Washington issued a gag order to the corporate media “not to
sensationalize the issue.”
The explosive report noted that the dam was contested
between the US-backed and Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, the Syrian
government and the Islamic State. A firefight broke out in which SDF incurred
heavy casualties. It was then that a top secret US special operations unit Task
Force 9 called for airstrikes on the dam after repeated requests from the
Kurdish leadership of the SDF.
“The explosions on March 26, 2017, knocked dam workers to
the ground. A fire spread and crucial equipment failed. The flow of the
Euphrates River suddenly had no way through, the reservoir began to rise and
authorities used loudspeakers to warn people downstream to flee.
“The Islamic State group, the Syrian government and Russia
blamed the United States, but the dam was on the US military’s ‘no-strike list’
of protected civilian sites, and the commander of the US offensive at the time,
then-Lt. Gen. Stephen J. Townsend, said allegations of US involvement were
based on ‘crazy reporting.’”
Citations:
[1] With watchers on the ground and spy drones overhead,
U.S. zeroed in on Islamic State leader’s hideout:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/02/10/isis-qurayshi-raid/
[2] A dam in Syria was on a ‘no-strike’ list. The US bombed
it anyway:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/20/us/airstrike-us-isis-dam.html
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