Raqqa: Syrian government forces took control on Friday of a prison housing members of the Islamic State group in the north of the country, after hundreds of Kurdish fighters evacuated from the area as part of a recent deal.
Syria’s Interior Ministry said in a statement that the government’s prisons authority is now in charge of al-Aqtan prison north of the northern city of Raqqa, and the files of the detainees are being reviewed.
Al-Aqtan prison is the second jail to come under government control after troops entered Shaddadeh prison on Monday near the border with Iraq, from where 120 IS detainees managed to flee amid the chaos. Most of them have been recaptured, state media said.
The move into al-Aqtan prison comes two days after the US military said that it has started transferring some of the 9,000 IS detainees held in more than a dozen detention centers in northeast Syria controlled by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF, in northeast Syria.
The SDF was the main force fighting IS in Syria over the past decade, and in March 2019, captured the last sliver of land that the extremists held. During the battles against IS, thousands of extremists and tens of thousands of women and children linked to them were taken and held in prisons and the al-Hol camp, which was taken by government forces on Wednesday.
The capture of al-Aqtan prison came after government forces surrounded it from all sides earlier this week during a two-week offensive against the SDF. Raqqa governor Abdul-Rahman Salama said there are up to 2,000 detainees at al-Aqtan. Deputy Interior Minister Maj. Gen. Abdul-Qader Tahan visited the prison on Friday to see the conditions of the detention centre and the detainees, state television reported.
Negotiations had been ongoing for days, after which a deal was reached to open a corridor for the nearly 800 SDF fighters to head west toward the region of Kobani, which is still controlled by the US-backed group.