Forgotten by the west, Syria’s IS prisons are under threat as militant group mobilises

Kurdish officials warn that Islamic State threat is greater than ever in the vacuum left from Syrian regime’s collapse. With each gust of wind came a wave of body odour, the stench of two-dozen men wafting through the small hatch of the prison cell’s heavy iron door. Inside, gaunt prisoners clad in brown jumpsuits sat on thin gray mattresses.

Six years have passed since the end of the so-called caliphate of the Islamic State, but to the 4,500 men held inside Panorama prison in north-east Syria, little has changed since their initial capture. “There’s a war going on, right?” Muhammad Saqib Raza, a 45-year-old British-Pakistani doctor accused of being an IS fighter, asked Guardian reporters during a visit to the desert facility in early February. He confessed he knew “nothing” of what was going on in the outside world, though he had learned from a visiting human rights worker that Donald Trump was now the US president.

Detainees had no idea that Bashar al-Assad no longer ruled Syria – a fact the prison administration asked reporters not to share, for fear it would stir trouble within the prison. Guns, mobile phones and information were considered contraband within the four buildings that housed mostly non-Syrian men accused of fighting for IS. Guards carried clubs and wore balaclavas to conceal their identities from the prisoners, fearful that their families could face retribution in the case of a prison break.

Outside the heavily fortified prison walls, the world has seemingly tried to forget that thousands of suspected IS fighters are still languishing in detention. But experts warn IS has not forgotten about them. The presence of US troops in Syria, which joined Kurdish-led forces to defeat IS in 2014, is in question. Governments such as the UK, Australia and France have mostly chosen to ignore the problem, stripping the alleged fighters of citizenship and declining to repatriate their nationals.

After the fall of the Assad regime on 8 December, however, the world may no longer be able to ignore the remnants of IS. Kurdish officials have sounded the alarm, warning that the IS threat is greater than ever as the extremist group exploits the security vacuum left from the Syrian regime’s collapse. IS activity has surged in northern Syria and sleeper cells, which for years lay low in the Syrian desert, have once again mobilised.

“When Assad fell, IS took lots of new territory and regime weaponry. IS is slowly rebuilding itself and one of its key goals will be the prison,” the director of Panorama prison said, asking for his name not to be shared for fear of being targeted by members of the radical group.

Kurdish authorities hold up to 65,000 – 42,000 of which are foreign – suspected IS fighters and their relatives in prisons and camps across the autonomous region they rule in north-east Syria. Rights groups have consistently called on countries to bring their foreign nationals being held in north-east Syria back home. Human Rights Watch has said that the detention of foreign nationals is “unlawful” and that Kurdish-led authorities are holding them in “life-threatening conditions”.

Kurdish officials fear the group will take advantage of Syria’s current security vacuum to attack the detention facilities and try to spring their alleged peers free. The prison director’s office overlooks the old prison facility, the site of a 2022 attack on the prison when IS sleeper cells attacked from the outside while prisoners took guards hostage on the inside.

During the 10-day-long attack hundreds of IS prisoners escaped and almost 500 people were killed. The broken facade of the old facility now looms over the newly built Panorama prison, the jagged holes carved out from missiles a reminder not to grow complacent.

“Their faith in IS has gotten stronger in prison. The organisation is alive in prison. For now, it’s dormant, but if we open the doors, it will come back to life,” the prison director said. Prisoners inside Panorama denied any connection to IS ideology. Many claimed never to have been part of the group at all.

Raza, a maxillofacial surgeon who worked with the NHS in Leicester, claimed to have been exploring real estate prospects in Turkey when he was offered work at a hospital in Syria in an opportunity he described as “good for the resume”. Once in Syria, he said he was kidnapped, thrown into a van and sold to IS, where he worked as a doctor.

He further claimed that whatever IS sympathies his fellow prisoners once had, were gone. “I’ve never found anything unusual with these guys. What I see here [in prison], I don’t see anybody who could be a threat,” he said from behind bars in his cell as his fellow inmates looked on. The British government declined to repatriate Raza, as it did in many cases where its citizens had a second nationality.