BEIRUT —
Kurdish forces slowly
advanced Wednesday inside a Syria prison where Islamist extremists have been
holed up for six days, in violence that has cost hundreds of lives, a war
monitor said.
اضافة اعلان
More than 100
Daesh extremists last week
attacked Ghwayran prison in the northeast Syrian city of Hasakeh, held by a
semi-autonomous Kurdish administration.
The brazen assault on the Kurdish-run prison
involved a double suicide bombing and saw the extremists free fellow Daesh
members.
It is considered the most sophisticated
attack carried out by the group since it was territorially defeated in Syria
nearly three years ago.
On Wednesday, the Kurdish-led
Syrian Democratic Forces and allied fighters "carried out search operations
inside prison blocks" and in areas surrounding the facility, where
intermittent clashes had broken out overnight, said the Syrian Observatory for
Human Rights.
US-backed Kurdish forces were
"advancing slowly" inside the facility where Islamist extremists were
still holed up, said the Britain-based monitor.
Fighting in and around the prison since
Thursday has killed 181 people, including 124 Daesh extremists, 50 Kurdish
fighters and seven civilians, according to the Observatory.
Kurdish forces have freed 32 prison staff,
some of whom appeared in video footage that Daesh had shared on social media
after launching the attack, the Observatory says.
Some of the Islamist extremists have also
reportedly surrendered.
Farhad Shami, who heads the SDF media
office, told AFP on Tuesday that "more than 850 terrorist inmates, who
either participated in the attack or the mutiny, have surrendered" since
the onset of the assault.
Shami said Kurdish forces had called on the
Daesh members to "safely surrender," but denied reports of
negotiations with the extremists.
Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman on
Wednesday said that a Syrian Daesh leader was negotiating with Kurdish forces
to end the mutiny and secure medical care for wounded extremists.
"This issue is an international
problem," Abdulkarim Omar, head of foreign relations in the Kurdish
semi-autonomous administration, told AFP on Wednesday.
"We cannot face it alone."
He called on the international community to
"support the autonomous administration to improve security and
humanitarian conditions for inmates in detention centers and for those in
overcrowded camps."
Daesh’s self-declared caliphate, established
from 2014, once stretched across vast parts of Syria and Iraq and administered
millions of inhabitants.
A long and deadly military fightback led by
Syrian and Iraqi forces with backing from the
US and other powers eventually
defeated the Islamist extremist proto-state in March 2019.
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