Islamic State’s Version of the Attack on the Sinaa Prison in Syria
The Islamic State (IS) launched a major attack on the Sinaa prison in the Ghwayran area of Hasaka city on 20 January, which is still ongoing, and IS cells in the surrounding areas also grabbed small pockets of territory and are still holed up in those.
This has been a stark demonstration that the U.S.-led Coalition’s anti-IS partner force, the “Syrian Democratic Forces” (SDF)—the Kurdistan Workers’ Party’s (PKK) political front—has a much more tenuous grasp on the territories nominally under its control in north-east Syria, a situation partly a result of the PKK’s own illegitimacy in the eyes of much of the Arab population and considerably worsened by the military operations of the Asad/Iran system to the south in the Badiya that forced many IS cells to flee into the PKK zone.
IS held off reporting its version of the Sinaa events last week in its newsletter, Al-Naba, but as expected this week’s, issue 323 published on 27 January, was dominated by it. The headline claims are questionable. IS claims that its attack team only consisted of twelve jihadists, rather than the eighty to one-hundred that most reports sourced to the PKK had suggested, and that it had killed 260 PKK militiamen; the incentives for IS to minimise the former and maximise the latter are obvious. IS also pointedly does not repeat the claim it made a few days ago that 800 jihadists had escaped, instead refusing to give a number at all. The contention of Al-Naba that this is a major morale boost to IS, however, is on sounder footing.
The main editorial of Al-Naba 323 on page three cast “the Epic of Ghwayran” (Malhama Ghwayran) as a reply to “the Epic of Baghuz”, the eastern Syrian town that was the last one in IS’s caliphate, defeated in March 2019. Al-Naba insists the Sinaa attack “was not a revenge for the prisoners [taken at] Al-Baghuz, so much as it was the heroes of Al-Baghuz that were its craftsmen and knights”; the attack was “a fruit worthy of their patience”.
In Al-Naba’s telling, with only monotheism to support them, the jihadists attacked this “mightiest” of prisons from inside and out, with captives taking up arms to free themselves as men who had “pledged allegiance to death so that others might live” assaulted the place. The external attack team included both local and foreign fighters, according to Al-Naba.
“The whole world was dumbfounded by what he saw”, Al-Naba gloats: the disbelievers and hypocrites “cry out in desperation [that the jihadists] have returned again”, while the believers “rejoiced”. Al-Naba adds that the ball had been placed back in the court of “the Crusaders and apostates” who claimed to have “destroyed the last pocket” of the caliphate.
By fighting for its “doctrine” (aqeeda), “the soldiers of the Caliphate shall live”, even if individuals die, Al-Naba states. This is a reiteration of IS’s consistent messaging over more than a decade, which it believes was vindicated in the recovery after 2008. The jihadists are “killed in order to breathe life into the umma (Islamic community) after them”, Al-Naba goes on, explaining why they “broke the walls of the prison” and threw themselves into a mass of unbelievers without a second thought under the slogan, “death, not the [temporal] world” (al-maniya la al-dunya): they had “pledged to leave this battle free, or to be killed as slaves of God Almighty, and we think they fulfilled their pledge”.
This is a “victory” for IS, says Al-Naba, and an encouragement to jihad for others—and on this they are surely correct, despite lame counter-messaging efforts by the Pentagon to claim this was a plea for attention that had weakened IS.
“Returning to where we started, have you ever seen a state—other than the Islamic State—whose enemies declare their elimination once or twice a year, then neither repent nor remember?!” Al-Naba asks rhetorically. Baghuz was declared to be the end, yet the battle of Ghwayran, combining as it did the “breaking of the walls” (hadm al-aswar) and the “war of attrition” (harb al-istinzaf) in a “heroic epic”, proved in blood that the Islamic State is alive and remains loyal to its ideology.
IS concludes with an “address [to] the Muslim prisoners everywhere”, claiming that “the Battle of Ghwayran is a page from a book of revenge and a record of victory, the chapters of which have not yet been completed!” IS says jihadist prisoners should rejoice and be hopeful, then ends with a quotation from the last speech of Ibrahim al-Badri (Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi), the “caliph” killed in October 2019:
“By Allah, we have not forgotten you, O our imprisoned brothers and sisters. You have a tremendous right upon us, and we will not spare any effort to rescue you, so be patient and steadfast, turn to your Lord and Creator with much du’a, be urging with what you request, and ask Him to grant your brothers victory and facilitate relief for you that comes quickly.”
Al-Naba 323’s report on events at Sinaa is on pages four and five. IS claims that it had “once again … surprised everyone” and shown it can strike the enemy “even in its most fortified areas … breaking new walls, targeting the largest prison [which is] run by the apostate PKK and is under the direct supervision of the American forces.”
Framed as being reported by a “security source”, Al-Naba says this “complex” and much-planned operation began with two suicide bombings against the outer walls, carried out by killers named as Abu Abd al-Rahman al-Muhajir and Abu al-Faruq al-Muhajir. “Al-Muhajir” means “the emigrant”, which is to say foreign fighters.
With the wall breached, says Al-Naba, the inghimasiyeen moved in. Al-Naba claims that this assault team consisted of just twelve jihadists, albeit coordinated with jihadists inside the wire, contrary to the “false claims” from the PKK that “hundreds” of IS operatives had swarmed the prison. According to Al-Naba, the dozen jihadists split into four groups: the first team attacked the prison tower and adjacent fuel depot; the second attacked a nearby PKK headquarters; and the other two detachments cut off the remaining supply routes.
Al-Naba says that the initial aim of the attack was simply to break out as many jihadist prisoners as possible, in accordance with the obligation on IS to do so, but “after the rapid collapse of the apostates’ defences and the mujahideen’s [seizing] control over weapons depots and their capture of various weapons, they decided to expand the scope of the operation to deplete the enemy forces”, both to attrite the PKK and to provide a distraction so the “liberators” could be evacuated. This resulted in a three-front battle: at the prison, in the neighbourhood of Ghwayran, and in Al-Zuhur.
In terms of how many jihadists escaped, Al-Naba says that “several groups” managed to get away, but their “source declined to give more details about the number of prisoners.” This is notable because during the fighting, IS released a message through Amaq News Agency claiming that 800 jihadists had escaped.
The Naba report claims that IS “fought on those [three] blazing fronts for seven consecutive days, until they ran out of ammunition and the barbaric bombardment [by American warplanes] intensified against them.
Even so, claims Al-Naba, IS was not defeated by force: “the apostates were forced to start negotiations with the mujahideen holed up inside the prison”; these negotiations collapsed, but after two more days of PKK attacks supported by the U.S. failed to break IS’s resistance, “the apostates renewed their request for negotiation” and these took place over two days. Al-Naba claims that IS’s demands were met—though apparently its “source” refused to tell what these demands were—and IS then started releasing its hostages in batches. This might seem an unusual admission, but it is not unique: IS has previously explained its justifications for releasing hostages alive, and even capturing hostages specifically so they can be traded for jihadist prisoners.
IS claims that the pictures and videos distributed by the PKK showing the recapture of hundreds of jihadists were misleading: it was only the unarmed prisoners who did not participate in the revolt, the elderly and the sick, who were surrendered to the PKK; those who took up arms fought—or are fighting, since “some of them continue to clash [with the PKK] at the moment this report is being written”—to the death.
260 PKK militiamen were killed, according to Al-Naba, and twenty-seven vehicles burned. The “material and human losses” are only part of the story, Al-Naba argues: the “confusion and panic” that was so evident during these events has severely damaged the morale of the PKK and “raised the morale of the Muslims and their prisoners”.
“The attack represented a major challenge for the American forces and the apostates”, Al-Naba contends: the city is under heavy guard by the PKK and closely monitored and patrolled by the Americans, and the failure is all the starker since a planned IS attack similar to this one on the same prison was thwarted in November. IS also mocks the PKK for having “tried to cover up its failure through repeated statements … that this attack was orchestrated by ‘states and external parties’,” i.e. Turkey, when the PKK “know for certain that these external parties are a target for the mujahideen”.
The Naba report concludes by saying that its “source” has said “many details will remain secret based on the recommendations of the mujahideen leaders, indicating that the chapters of this battle are not over yet”. Al-Naba says many jihadist cells remain Ghwayran and its environs, and they will “launch attacks against the apostates from time to time”, with the most recent being two attacks on 27 January, one that attacked “two gatherings of PKK members in the vicinity of the prison, killing and wounding eight” and one earlier that day, in the morning, which Al-Naba is very pleased about because it occurred at a time when foreign journalists had been brought by the PKK to the prison to show everything was under control.
Al-Naba gives a roundup on page six of its attacks outside the prison, in Deir Ezzor, or Al-Khayr, as IS calls it. IS claims to have carried out sixteen attacks on PKK outposts and checkpoints that killed “about” ten militiamen and destroyed a vehicle in an ambush on the Kharafi road, south of Shaddadi. A number of the attacks were around Theban, with others in Diban, Al-Kibar, Al-Shuhayl, Al-Busayra, and elsewhere.
Evidently trying to portray this latest flare-up as a widespread resumption of insurgent activity, rather than a single attack, Al-Naba 323 has a brief notice on page eleven of seven attacks in Raqqa.
Al-Naba says the first attack was on a PKK checkpoint near the White Garden (Al-Hadiqa al-Bayda) in the centre of Raqqa city on 20 January, the day the Sinaa prison attack began, which killed one PKK soldier and wounded several others. Another attack later in the day, in the same area, near the Dalla roundabout, allegedly killed and wounded “a number” of PKK operatives.
IS claims there were three attacks near Al-Karma, east of Raqqa, on 21 January, and an improvised explosive device (IED) was used against a police checkpoint on 23 January. The final attack was a vehicle ambush by an IS “security detachment” (mafariz amniya) south of Raqqa on 26 January that led to the capture of a PKK member, who was then beheaded.