“The al-Sinaa prison crisis was the predictable result of governments turning a blind eye to the fate of their nationals and all others held in horrific conditions in northeast Syria,” Tayler said. “This assault should be a wakeup call to countries that outsourcing responsibility for their nationals won’t make this problem go away,” she said. “It will only increase the suffering of these detainees, most of them young children.”
Hundreds of boys are missing from a Syrian Kurdish prison that held members of the Islamic State group and their families, after the U.S.-backed Kurdish forces fought IS militants for 10 days to retake the facility, an international human rights group said Friday, AP reports.
The report by Human Rights Watch came a day after IS’s top leader, Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi, was killed in a U.S. raid on his safehouse in northwest Syria. President Joe Biden said al-Qurayshi had been responsible for the Syria prison assault, as well as genocide against the Yazidi people in Iraq in 2014.
The children are from a mix of backgrounds and nationalities. Some were brought from their own countries by their jihadi parents who joined the so-called “caliphate” declared in 2014 over parts of Syria and Iraq, while others were born there.
It is unclear how many of the boys in the prison were trained by IS, or whether any had committed crimes.
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