Fighters affiliated with the Islamic State are escaping from prisons in northeastern Syria amid ongoing clashes between the Damascus regime and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). The U.S.-backed SDF has autonomously governed northeastern Syria since they played a key role in defeating ISIS during the first Trump administration. Now, with America’s blessing, the former jihadis in Damascus are trying to extend their sway over the entire country.

On Monday, more than 100 Islamic State warriors broke out of a prison near Al-Shaddadi, a town deep in SDF territory near the Iraqi border. Accounts differ as to both who was responsible for the jailbreak and how many prisoners were released. The SDF claims they lost control of the prison after government-backed forces attacked. Some Kurdish sources estimate the number of escaped prisoners at the improbably high figure of 1,500.

For their part, the Syrian government in Damascus accuses the Kurds of freeing the prisoners before they left — an unlikely story — and low-balls the number of escapees at 120. Damascus said it imposed a curfew on the region and successfully recaptured 81 of the detainees.

The truth probably lies somewhere in between. American officials estimate that some 200 “low-level” ISIS fighters were freed, as many had already been moved to a safer prison. Fox News quoted sources who claimed that, in the chaos between SDF forces departing and regime forces arriving, local residents sympathetic to the Islamic State freed the prisoners.

But what prompted the chaotic incident in the first place? And why was there apparent fighting over the transfer of responsibility for a prison?

The answer lies in the breakdown of efforts to unify Syria after the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024. In March 2025, the Trump administration pressured SDF General Mazloum Abdi to agree to integrate the northeastern administration into the Syrian government by the end of the year. But differences over implementation ground progress to a halt; by year’s end, Damascus was no closer to asserting sovereignty over northeastern Syria than it had been in August.

In early January, Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa tried a new tactic: military force. Last week, Syrian forces opened fire on two Kurdish neighborhoods in Aleppo, which constituted the SDF’s westernmost outpost. After four days of fighting, a ceasefire allowed Kurdish soldiers and residents to retreat eastward across the Euphrates River.

However, the ceasefire did not last long. Damascus pressed its advantage, advancing steadily east along the southern bank of the Euphrates River on the road from Aleppo to Raqqa, capturing SDF positions at Deir Hafer, Maskanah, and Tabqa in turn. Meanwhile, the SDF defense collapsed, as Arab (that is, non-Kurdish) soldiers retreated or defected, and local Sunni Arab tribes revolted across the Raqqa and Deir Ezzour provinces — or most of the territory controlled by the SDF.

The background for this fighting is the bitter hatred Sunni Arabs harbor for the Kurds. This hatred manifests in Sunni militias’ barbaric treatment of Kurdish fighters, both alive and dead, even extending to desecration of the graves of soldiers who died fighting ISIS.

On top of the usual ethnic rivalries, the more extremist Sunnis resent the SDF for the role it played in toppling ISIS and detest it for tolerating religious freedom and gender equality (with units of women in combat roles). Animosity for the Kurds is also stoked by Turkey, a major sponsor of both the new Syrian regime and Islamist militias in northern Syria; Turkey views the SDF as an extension of the PKK, the Kurdish separatist group inside Turkey.

For the past decade, the Syrian Kurds relied on American support to defend themselves against hostile powers on nearly every side. They provided the majority of boots on the ground for the U.S.-led push that helped destroy ISIS in 2017-2018. After the Islamic State’s territorial ambitions were demolished, the SDF acted as prison warden for more than a dozen prisons holding an estimated 9,000 ISIS fighters, plus tens of thousands of their family members. Many of these fighters came from other countries, and their home countries refused to repatriate them, meaning the SDF was doing both the U.S. and much of the world a favor.

However, the Trump administration’s new friendship with Damascus has left the Kurds feeling betrayed. The SDF hoped that their cooperation with the U.S. and sound administration of northeastern Syria would eventually lead to a pathway for the creation of their own independent nation (Kurds dwell in regions of Syria, Turkey, Iraq, and Iran). Instead, the Trump administration has decided to force them under the authority of Damascus.

“Historically, the US military presence in northeastern Syria was justified primarily as a counter-ISIS partnership,” explained U.S. ambassador to Turkey Tom Barrack. “Today, the situation has fundamentally changed. … The original purpose of the SDF as the primary anti-ISIS force on the ground has largely expired, as Damascus is now both willing and positioned to take over security responsibilities, including control of ISIS detention facilities and camps.”

In other words, just like the Biden administration in Afghanistan, the Trump administration is prepared to abandon our longtime ally as soon as America’s perceived interests in the country change. “Ten years of effort, capturing all those ISIS members, all gone to waste,” complained a Kurdish official.

This new American posture led U.S. officials to pressure the SDF into a disadvantageous agreement last March, and its negotiating position has only grown worse since then. Al-Sharaa pursued a “combined strategy” of “coercion and conciliation,” described in an analysis by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), recognizing Kurdish rights at the same time that it pummeled the Kurdish armed forces. The goal, according to FDD, was to weaken the SDF’s standing among its own base so that it would crumble from within.

Meanwhile, al-Sharaa “extracted sweeping concessions from a chastened SDF,” said FDD, forcing it to accept a new framework that expanded the government’s reach into SDF-held areas of the Raqqa and Deir Ezzour provinces. Syria allows Kurdish fighters to join its armed forces, but only as individuals; its insistence on breaking up SDF combat units ensures these Kurds will provide no further opposition. The most striking feature of this new deal is that the U.S. endorsed Damascus’s position over that of its former Kurdish allies.

The new framework led to a new ceasefire on Sunday, but that ceasefire has fractured in many places. The SDF expressed their “commitment to the ceasefire agreement reached with the government in Damascus” and affirmed “that we will not initiate any military action unless our forces are subjected to attacks in the future.” However, the forces of the Syrian regime continue to advance, and not always peacefully.

These tense conditions are what led to the Al-Shaddadi jailbreak, as Syrian government forces approached the prison, deep in Kurdish territory, to take control.

And ominous reports suggest that, given that these conditions prevail across the region, the Al-Shaddadi incident may not be an isolated event. The SDF complained that they suffered nine killed and 20 wounded in fighting with government-backed forces at the al-Aqtan prison, northeast of Raqqa, before the SDF withdrew. Similar armed clashes were reported near the maximum-security prison outside Hassakeh, the capital of the northeast Syrian administration. At the al-Hol camp, where wives of ISIS fighters were held, an unknown number of residents pulled down fences and escaped after realizing that the SDF guards had left. A Kurdish news outlet claims to document “at least six sites in which detainees were released,” including four that were confirmed to house ISIS members.

The jailbreaks could have been worse. On Wednesday, U.S. Central Command launched an initiative to transfer ISIS detainees to safer prisons in Iraq. It moved a number of detainees from Al-Shaddadi before the remaining prisoners escaped, and it also transferred 150 fighters from Hassakeh to a more secure location. The mission could ultimately transfer up to 7,000 ISIS prisoners from Syria to Iraq.

Needless to say, the U.S. initiative to relocate ISIS prisoners is not a vote of confidence in the ability of the SDF to facilitate a secure transfer of prison management, nor of Damascus’s ability to retain the prisoners.

Nor would such confidence be warranted. The current Syrian regime is largely comprised of former Islamist jihadi terrorists backed by Turkey. Because this faction toppled the horrendous Assad regime, the Trump administration has magnanimously given it the benefit of the doubt, giving al-Sharaa a chance to prove that he can lead Syria forward into a bright and peaceful future.

Others, however, fear that this relationship simply grants legitimacy to a group that is and will always be Islamist extremists at heart. Thus far, Syria’s campaign of assimilation against the SDF’s northeastern autonomous zone has done little to disprove these fears.

Nowhere is this more evident than in what appears to be a second siege of Kobane, the main Kurdish-held town in the Aleppo province, but east of the Euphrates. The town’s population swelled as refugees fled the advance of the Syrian army. Government-backed forces encircled the town — which was easy to do as it lies up against the (closed) border with Turkey — and they have now cut Kobane off from outside food, water, fuel, and electricity in a frigid midwinter. The Syrian army and affiliated forces have bombarded the town and refused to allow civilians to leave.

The Middle East Forum (MEF) predicts that, if Syria should capture Kobane, there will be an ethnically motivated slaughter like the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of 8,000 Bosnians.

Kobane endured a siege once before, when “the Kurdish resistance to break the Islamic State’s siege of Kobane was the turning point of the war and marked the beginning of the Islamic State’s territorial collapse,” explained MEF. “Islamists will view the fall of Kobane’s Kurds as avenging the Islamic State’s defeat and signaling its rebirth.”

Combined with the escape of so many Islamic State fighters, Damascus’s chaotic campaign against northeastern Syria may result in a resurrected Islamic State, with all the incumbent dangers to Christians, other minorities, Israel, and even the United States.