...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that they were al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're really very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling
Allaharound with every other sentence, but to hear western pols talk they're not
reallyMoslems....
[ISIS] captives, are believed to be held in a prison under the control of Syrian rebel forces, according to a rights activist.
Araz Jalal, a representative from the Egypt-based International Organization for Development and Human Rights, told Rudaw’s Nasir Ali this week that al-Nusra
...formally Jabhat an-Nusrah li-Ahli al-Sham (Support Front for the People of the Levant), also known as al-Qaeda in the Levant. They aim to establish a pan-Arab caliphate. Not the same one as the Islamic State, though .. ...
Front (Jabhat al-Nusra), which has been rebranded as the Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, formerly al-Nusra, before that it was called something else
...al-Qaeda's Syrian affiliate, from which sprang the Islamic State...(HTS), is still "holding 800 Yazidi women and girls who had been held hostage by the Islamic State (ISIS)" when the group attacked their hometown of Shingal in 2014.
Syria’s civil war dramatically reignited late last month when a coalition of rebels led by the jihadist HTS launched a blistering offensive against the Syrian army, seizing the northern cities of Aleppo, Hama, Homs, and ultimately capturing the capital Damascus as Assad fled the country, ending over five decades of Baathist rule.
Celebrations across Syria, sparked by the fall of the regime, were abruptly halted as stories about the inmates of the Sednaya prison in the Damascus suburbs began to emerge.
Hundreds of prisoners who were freed from the notorious prison, following the fall of the regime, have been admitted to hospitals across Syria to receive treatment following years of abuse. Families have flooded the hospitals looking for their long-lost loved ones.
Rudaw’s cameras inside the prison on Wednesday captured workers digging through walls and the ground, following social media rumors suggesting that more inmates might be in hidden sections of the prison.
Jalal also said that after the fall of ISIS in Iraq, nearly 60 Peshmerga fighters were held hostage by the holy warriors who were taken to Syria but have not been found yet. He believes that they were kept alive because they needed them for hostage exchange deals.
He added that after ISIS lost most of its territory in Syria, the Peshmerga hostages must have been transferred to the HTS or Syrian regime prisons.
"According to our information, about 60,000 prisoners have been released from Syrian prisons, but hundreds more have not yet been released," Jalal said.