Forces from a Kurdish-led militia traded fire from rooftops with dozens of Islamic State fighters still holed up in an embattled prison in northeastern Syria on Thursday, despite claims by the US-backed militia a day earlier that it had regained full control of the entire complex.
The Syrian Democratic Forces militia announced Wednesday that it had retaken Sinaa prison in the city of al-Hasaka, which held thousands of former Islamic State fighters, nearly a week after their fellow militants attacked the prison to try to free them.
But when New York Times journalists arrived Thursday, the first international reporters on the scene, the fight was still on.
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The Kurdish-led forces fired rocket-propelled grenades at the partly destroyed prison complex, and the sound of truck-mounted anti-aircraft guns rang out as they confronted up to 90 Islamic State militants still fighting from inside. An official with one of the Syrian-Kurdish paramilitary groups battling the Islamic State group said most of the holdouts were among those who stormed the prison, but some were prisoners who had joined forces with them.
The prison attack was the starkest evidence yet of a resurgence of the Islamic State group across parts of Syria and Iraq, nearly three years after the group lost control of its so-called caliphate, a vast stretch of territory in both countries. The extremists have also mounted a series of attacks on military forces in neighboring Iraq in recent months.
The prison battle drew the U.S. military into the fray in support of the Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF, providing airstrikes, intelligence and armored vehicles to cordon off the prison. It was the biggest confrontation between US forces and the Islamic State group in three years.
Fighting on Thursday also raged in areas surrounding the prison complex.
At a nearby traffic circle in the center of al-Hasaka, a New York Times team took cover along with local journalists and civilians caught in the middle as SDF forces traded fire with Islamic State gunmen. The firefight broke out close to a small US Army base housing some of the roughly 700 US troops in northeastern Syria.
SDF officials did not respond to queries about their assertion on Wednesday that the force had fully retaken the prison. On Thursday, an official said that the remaining Islamic State fighters were holed up in different sections of one of the prison’s three buildings.
