ISIS stepping up attacks on prisons, Kurds: report

ISIS has seized on instability in northern Syria to launch new bombings and attacks over the last week, intelligence officials and terrorism experts told The Washington Post.

The ISIS attacks follow President Trump’s decision to pull U.S. troops from the region, a decision that allowed Turkey to launch an offensive against Kurdish forces that had been working with the United States.

Hundreds of ISIS forces and their families are estimated to have escaped from prisons in the area since Kurds who had been holding them had to divert their efforts to attacks from Turkey.{mosads}

ISIS’s official media arm mocked the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), referring to Kurdish group as an abandoned U.S. ally, the Post reported. An editorial in the ISIS’s al-Naba newsletter said the Kurds were just the latest American ally to be dropped.

“Once they [Americans] attained what they sought from them, they handed them over to the Rafidha,” the essay said, according to The Washington Post, “so we took vengeance on them.” Rafidha is a term used by Sunni extremists for Shiite Muslims.

Since Turkey’s invasion into Syria on Oct. 9, ISIS fighters and family members were released from two detention camps. The group also claimed responsibility for attacks on other facilities, in addition to assaults on SDF bases.

An attack on an SDF base near Raqqa killed six Kurdish fighters and led to a release of “multiple Muslim women,” according to an ISIS statement, the Post reported.  

“Prison breaks are happening. The imminent return of the Islamic State is assured by the command of Allah,” one commentator posted in a pro-ISIS forum on the social media site Telegram, the Post reported. The writer said the escapes show extremist militants are “taking advantage of the war between the Kurds and the Turks.”