The Internal Security Forces of the Kurdish administration in North and East Syria have thwarted a suicide attack by killing two Islamic State (ISIS) bombers on Friday before they could infiltrate one of its security points, the local Hawar News Agency reported.
The incident took place in Al-Nashwa neighbourhood of al-Hasakah city, a district close to the Sina’a Prison in Ghuwayran, a maximum-security prison of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) located in the city’s southeast. The prison holds around 5,000 ISIS fighters.
This is not the first time that Syrian forces have faced or managed to foil the fundamentalist group’s attacks. ISIS sleeper cells have recently been carrying out attacks targeting civilians as well as the security forces in central, northeastern and eastern areas of the country.
The largest ISIS attack since their defeat in Syria in 2019 was the Sina’a Prison riot following a car bomb that targeted the prison in al-Hasakah in January 2021, aiming to free ISIS fighters who had been jailed there.
After heavy fighting that lasted over a week, 154 SDF fighters lost their lives while trying to regain control. Some 346 ISIS members were killed and 1,100 were re-arrested. A total of 400 prisoners managed to escape.
The SDF recently warned that ISIS aims to regain control over certain territories and that the regions under the control of Turkish forces and their allied Syrian rebel groups have become safe havens for ISIS cells in a statement released on the fourth anniversary of ISIS’s territorial and military defeat.
The US-led Global Coalition and SDF fighters regularly conduct joint operations against ISIS cells in North and East Syria.
No confirmed Kurdish casualties were reported in Friday’s attempted attack.
