A female Kurdish fighter stands guard over women and children in the al-Hol detention camp (via @cmoc_sdf on Twitter).
The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) announced on Friday the completion of a five-day operation in the al-Hol prison camp, where ISIS sleeper cells have been active amongst the 62,000 detainees. The General Command of the Internal Security Forces, known as “Asayish” in Kurdish, conducted the dangerous operation inside the sprawling camp, which netted 125 jihadist infiltrators. SDF spokesmen, including Commanding General Mazloum Abdi, have commented on the success of the operation, suggesting that it was only the first phase of an ongoing effort to prevent a resurgence of the Islamic State in Northeast Syria. The spokesman for the US-led Coalition in Iraq and Syria, known as Operation Inherent Resolve (OIR), congratulated the SDF on its success and pledged a united front against the remnants of ISIS.
The operation was prompted by the growing incidence of murder and other lawlessness in the sprawling camp, where a form of organized Sharia law and tribalism has taken root, and at least 47 murders have been committed in the first three months of 2021. The SDF has warned for years that the camp was a seedbed for ISIS, where thousands of stateless women and children had been trapped in an incubator of radical Islam since the fall of the Caliphate two years ago. Twenty of the militants arrested were identified as leaders of ISIS sleeper cells, acting as a bridge between camp detainees and the active remnants of ISIS in Syria and Iraq. Military equipment and weapons components were also seized, providing evidence that the camp has played an active part in supporting ongoing ISIS terrorism.
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The SDF is the de-facto military and police force of the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria. The AANES has been governed by a conglomerate of local Kurdish, Arab and Assyrian tribes since Syrian regime forces withdrew in 2012 to fight rebel forces west of the Euphrates River. The backbone of the SDF is the Kurdish YPG militia, which played a pivotal role in halting the advance of ISIS on the outskirts of the Kurdish city of Kobane before driving the Caliphate back towards the border with Iraq, eventually securing the entire AANES region in the Fall of 2019. This week’s operation in the al-Hol camp underscores the ongoing threat of the Islamic State in Syria, as thousands of foreign detainees are caught in legal limbo, their home nations refusing to repatriate them.
We would ask the Maranatha global family to pray for the SDF, the people of Northeast Syria, and the detainees of the al-Hol camp. We pray that the AANES and the SF would be given the support it needs from the international community to manage the camp and create a legal process for its 62,000 detainees. We pray that the jihadism of ISIS would be restrained, and in its place, a new message of peace and hope would infiltrate the al-Hol prison camp. We believe that the Good News of the Light of the World can invade even the darkest corners of the Earth, and that the gates of a Hellish Jihadi camp cannot prevail against it.
Maranatha.
