Children detained in a Syrian prison that has been the target of several attacks by Daesh in recent weeks are in a precarious situation, the United Nations warned on Sunday.
International rights groups, including Save the Children and Human Rights Watch (HRW), have previously said that 700 boys were being held in Gweiran Prison before the Jan. 20 operation.
Aged between 12 and 18, they include many who had adult relatives inside the prison and were transferred from nearby displacement camps housing thousands of children of terrorists.
"UNICEF met with some of the children still detained in the Ghwayran detention center," the U.N.'s child agency said in a statement, using an alternate spelling for the Gweiran Prison.
"Despite some of the basic services now in place, the situation of these children is incredibly precarious," it added, without specifying how many minors were still detained.
The Daesh prison break attempt from the Gweiran jail in Hassakeh triggered a week of clashes inside and around the facility run by the Syrian wing of the PKK, the YPG, resulting in hundreds of deaths before the YPG recaptured the jail.
The YPG has banned journalists from freely accessing the Gweiran neighborhood or approaching the prison since the attacks began.
The violence prompted 45,000 people to flee Hassakeh, the United Nations said. Many took refuge in relatives’ homes, while hundreds more have been sleeping in the city’s mosques and wedding halls.
The YPG is known to frequently use the prisons and on occasion, free Daesh militants. In late 2021, reports said that former Daesh terrorists were being released from prisons controlled by the YPG in the country’s northeast in exchange for money under a "reconciliation" scheme.
The Guardian reported that prisoners jailed without trial can pay an $8,000 fine to be freed, citing interviews with two men who had been released and official documents.
Since the reconciliation scheme’s implementation in 2019, it is unclear how many people have been able to buy their freedom in this way. The releases pose a significant security risk inside and outside Syria and raise the prospect that individuals who committed grave crimes will not face true justice.
Jail visit
UNICEF said it was working to immediately provide care for the minors and confirmed that it "is ready to help support a new safe place in the northeast of Syria to take care of the most vulnerable children."
On Sunday, the YPG said in a statement that UNICEF was the first U.N. agency granted permission to visit the jail since the attack.
Video footage of the visit posted on social media networks showed around a dozen boys, many covered in blankets, in a prison cell.
Gweiran Prison housed at least 3,500 Daesh suspects before last month's attack.
The YPG claims that no prisoners escaped but the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights on Sunday said that hundreds of terrorists had gotten away.
The PKK is a designated terrorist organization in the United States, Turkey and the European Union, and Washington's support for its Syrian affiliate has been a major strain on bilateral relations with Ankara. The U.S. primarily partnered with the YPG in northeastern Syria in its fight against the Daesh terrorist group. On the other hand, Turkey strongly opposed the YPG's presence in northern Syria. Ankara has long objected to the U.S.' support for the YPG, a group that poses a threat to Turkey and that terrorizes local people, destroying their homes and forcing them to flee.
Under the pretext of fighting Daesh, the U.S. has provided military training and given truckloads of military support to the YPG, despite its NATO ally's security concerns. Underlining that one cannot support one terrorist group to defeat another, Turkey conducted its own counterterrorism operations, over the course of which it has managed to remove a significant number of terrorists from the region.