ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - The US Central Command (CENTCOM) on Monday announced that its forces had partnered with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) to capture an Islamic State (ISIS) “leader,” accused of aiding suspected members of the group who had escaped from a detention facility in Raqqa days earlier.
“During the early morning hours of Sept. 1, CENTCOM forces and SDF captured Khaled Ahmed al-Dandal, an ISIS facilitator assessed to be aiding efforts of detained ISIS fighters to include recently escaped fighters,” read the statement.
The suspect was allegedly involved in the escape of five non-Syrian nationals detained in Raqqa on terror charges on Thursday.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), a UK-based war monitor, on Saturday reported that five prisoners of different nationalities had escaped from a vehicle that was transporting them from one prison to another.
CENTCOM said that two of the escapees were recaptured by the SDF, while the other three remain at-large.
“A primary objective of ISIS remains to free their fighters currently held in detention and subsequently fuel an ISIS revival. CENTCOM forces, in coordination with SDF, will continue to mitigate threats of future escapes and to ensure the enduring defeat of ISIS,” the statement from the US forces added.
ISIS rose to power and seized swathes of Iraqi and Syrian land in a brazen offensive in 2014, declaring a so-called “caliphate.”
While the group was declared territorially defeated in 2017 and 2019 respectively, it still continues to pose serious security risks through hit-and-run attacks, bombings, and abductions, especially across the vast expanses of the Syrian desert as well as several Iraqi provinces.
Successive leaders of the group have been targeted in their hideouts in Syria.
The US-backed SDF, who control northeast Syria (Rojava), played a key role in defeating ISIS, capturing thousands of fighters and their families when the group's last stronghold fell in 2019. The SDF operates alongside hundreds of US troops as part of the international coalition against ISIS.
