Britain ‘at risk of attack from returning Islamic State militants’

Britain is at risk of attack by Islamic State fighters exploiting turmoil in Syria to escape prison, Western officials say.

More than 10,000 Islamic State (IS) fighters – including extremists who travelled from Britain to join – and their families are held in prisons and detention camps in the north-east of Syria, controlled until now by Kurdish troops.

Syrian government troops are sweeping into the region and the rapid retreat of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) has alarmed the West.

Officials are increasingly worried that prisoners could seek to return to Europe to conduct attacks or recruit others to their cause, with sources warning the camps house “committed fighters” whose release would pose a significant threat.

There are also concerns over the potential risk posed by children born to former British nationals deprived of their citizenship who have been raised in the camps, where sources say Islamist propaganda is rampant.

It is unclear how many are currently detained in the camps but it is estimated there are around 65 British or former British citizens, roughly half of whom are children.

The adults include Shamima Begum, who travelled to Syria from Bethnal Green aged 15 with two school friends to join IS in 2015.

Begum became a child bride to Yago Riedijk, a Dutch Islamic convert, with whom she had three children who all died as infants.

She could be freed from the al-Roj detention camp if there is a breakdown of order in the area.

Analysts said the camps have served as an ideological hub for IS, acting as “a space for recruitment, indoctrination and a place for family networks to help sustain command and control”.

On Wednesday night, the US launched an urgent operation to transfer some detainees from Syria to Iraq.

Adml Brad Cooper, commander of US Central Command, said this was “critical to preventing a breakout that would pose a direct threat to the United States and regional security”.

But fears remain that many other detainees could either escape or be freed.

For years, the two largest camps, al-Hol and al-Roj, were secured by the US-backed SDF.

But after the fall of Bashar al-Assad, Washington signalled it was happy for the troops of Ahmed al-Sharaa, the Syrian president who displaced him, to assume control.

In the last few days, clashes between government forces and militia groups including the SDF have heightened concerns that IS devotees could exploit the instability.

The SDF and the Syrian government traded blame over the escape of IS members from the Shaddadeh prison on the border with Iraq Monday.

On Wednesday, Syrian government forces seized control of al-Hol, which houses around 24,000 people, mostly women and children of IS militants, following two weeks of clashes with the SDF.

Most of the detainees there are Syrian or Iraqi nationals, but some 6,500 are foreigners.

Ahmad Sharawi, a senior analyst at the US-based Foundation for Defence of Democracies, said the conflict risked “unleashing” tens of thousands of IS-linked detainees, reviving a threat that the US, Britain and other Western allies spent years containing.

Mr Sharawi said many of the militia forces that had taken part in advances around the prisons in recent days had “sympathy” with IS fighters.

He said some had been filmed stating their intention to go to al-Hol to “liberate our brothers and sisters”. “Some of them are getting quite excited,” he said.

Mr Sharawi added: “Some of the families in al-Hol, they’ve been radicalised for the past seven, eight years.

“Some of these children who were aged four at the time, they might not be battle-hardened but they have the ideology and all they need is a gun to implement the thoughts that they learned.”

He said the threat was severe, noting all it would take was for one released detainee “to reach the West and you have a problem”.

While Mr Sharaa, a reformed jihadist fighter, has pledged to contain the threat posed by IS, there is unease over how much control he is able to exert over his forces on the ground.

Dr Burcu Ozcelik, a Middle East security analyst at the Royal United Services Institute, said it was significant that the Syrian president had joined the global coalition to counter IS.

She described it as “an almost existential test” for his government which risks a backlash from regional allies if it fails to contain IS.

“The problem is that the handover is happening under extreme pressure and uncertainty rather than through a stable and planned transfer,” she said, describing the current transition as “the most dangerous phase”.

Dr Ozcelik noted that the SDF had considerable experience running the camps and had “a strong intelligence presence and network focused on countering IS influence inside al-Hol”.

[Source: Daily Telegraph]