An Islamic State Jailbreak
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 28 January 2022
⏱️ 38 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Late last week and early this week saw fighting between Islamic State fighters and Syrian democratic forces after the Islamic State attempted a jailbreak of a Kurdish prison containing significant numbers of alleged Islamic State fighters. The makeshift jail housed Syrians, Iraqis, and also alleged fighters from Western Europe and North Africa. It's the most significant jailbreak since ISIS’s territorial defeat—and a major national security story that's gone under the radar.
To talk it all through and to think about the scale of the damage and all of the things that led to this point, Jacob Schulz talked with Leah West, assistant professor of international affairs at Carleton University, and Louisa Loveluck, the Baghdad bureau chief at the Washington Post. They broke down what's happened so far and what to make of it all.
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Transcript
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| 0:29.0 | The youngest we met was 10 years old. |
| 0:35.0 | We spoke to them, it was very unclear, as I say, why they were there. |
| 0:41.0 | Because when the battle cleared, of course, some people went to camps |
| 0:44.0 | and some people went to prisons, no one appeared to know why. |
| 0:47.0 | And they were certainly in a state of distress. |
| 0:51.0 | One of them asked us privately if we could help them be moved to a child-only self. |
| 0:56.0 | There were rumors at the time that there was sexual violence against the young boys. |
| 1:01.0 | Subsequently, that did happen. |
| 1:03.0 | The boys in the North Wing, the miners in the North Wing that were standing for being, |
| 1:06.0 | have been moved there, kind of out of sight from the media, |
| 1:09.0 | precisely because there was an outcry after this, that there were kids in the general population. |
| 1:14.0 | But yeah, as I say, it's a pretty decent place, |
| 1:18.0 | and one where you really feel that the world has turned its back. |
| 1:22.0 | I'm Jacob Schultz, and this is the Lawfare Podcast, January 28th, 2022. |
| 1:31.0 | Late last week and early this week, saw a fighting between Islamic State fighters |
| 1:35.0 | and Syrian Democratic forces after the Islamic State attempted a jailbreak |
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