Coronavirus fears expose tenuous security in Kurd-controlled northeast Syria
HASAKAH, Syria—The hospital closest to Yazer’s home is only about seven kilometers away, but it isn’t much use. There aren’t enough beds there to guarantee him a place if he does get sick, and anyway, there isn’t enough equipment to treat everyone. Right now, he and his family live carefully, essentially quarantined in a region that was already isolated before anyone had heard of COVID-19.
“The quarantine is boring, but the fear of the virus’ arrival makes it less difficult” to comply with the restrictions, Yazer tells Rudaw English. Yazer’s father and mother are elderly, so the family tries to keep them away from everyone else. They do their best to sterilize everything, while noticing the scarcity of sanitation products. Everything has become more expensive.
After nearly a decade of conflict in the country, compounded by the threats on both sides, from a resurgent Islamic State and an invasion led by Turkey that has displaced more than 200,000 people from their homes.
Officially, there are only a handful of COVID-19 cases and two deaths in the entire country, but none reported in the northeast so far. The Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, which is the de-facto power in Qamishli, where Yazer lives, and controls most of Hasakah governorate, has implemented a curfew and mandatory isolation for people in the area to try to prevent coronavirus from taking root.
But the autonomous administration doesn’t have the capability, medical equipment or personnel to test for COVID-19 on its own. The World Health Organization (WHO) only recognizes Assad’s government – so Rojava is dependent on Assad’s regime to receive testing kits from WHO, and the samples it collects to test for COVID-19 must be sent to a single laboratory 700 km away in the capital, Damascus.
A re-emerging threat
It’s against this backdrop that ISIS detainees at an SDF-run prison in Hasakah city, about an hour south, have twice rioted and attempted to escape last week, prompting fears that the deadly COVID-19 infection will run rampant through the crowded prison.
Before his death at the hands of American forces in September, ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had called on the group’s remaining faithful members to break out of prisons, a command echoed in a recent op-ed in the group’s al-Naba newsletter earlier this month as the coronavirus took hold worldwide.
“So the obligation on the Muslims today with their efforts to protect themselves and their people from the spreading disease is to strive also to free the Muslim prisoners in the prisons of the idolaters and the camps of humiliation in which they are threatened by disease,” the op-ed said, according to an English translation by British researcher Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi.
The breakout attempt is the culmination of problems faced by the autonomous administration that controls northeastern Syria. It has no legal recognition and is hampered by international sanctions against Syria, incursions by Turkey, tense relations with the government in Damascus, and now the partial closure of the border from the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. Its best shot at keeping the deadly COVID-19 disease out is by shutting down, but with tens of thousands of people packed into prisons, IDP camps, and collective shelters, and almost no medical capabilities, it’s a race against time.
The Sanaa prison in Hasakah’s Geweran neighborhood currently houses about 5,000 suspected ISIS members, many who were captured during the caliphate’s last stand in Baghouz, a year ago this March. Ever since, they have lingered precariously in detention centers, with little medical care and in a legal grey zone, with no sign of a tribunal in Syria or their home countries.
Even imprisoned, the former ISIS militants remain dangerous. Riots, even breakout attempts are not new. Last October, detainees in the same prison attacked the guards and tried to escape, guards said. Days later, a car bomb exploded nearby, and the following day, at least 785 suspected militants fled a displacement camp in Ain Issa, some 180km west of Hasakah.
Detainees in these prisons live in extremely close quarters, especially in the sick ward. Morose, emaciated figures that once belonged to the men of the caliphate crowd over each other, sleeping head to foot, sardined in columns on the floor. Cots are reserved, mercifully, for those who are missing limbs or severely ill.
Before, they were fearsome terrorists — but here, they are vulnerable and needy. According to the prison’s warden, guards have bought food for prisoners with their own money. But their meekness can also be a deception. Last November, a riot broke out when one man pretended to be dead, while others called the guards for help. When they entered the cell to check his vital signs, the crowd rushed the guards. Ten men managed to escape their cell for a few brief moments, but were not able to escape the prison. Guards say that such tricks are a regular occurrence.
It’s not clear what the detainees know about the COVID-19 pandemic that is terrorizing the world outside their prison walls. In theory, the facility officially is quarantined to news from the outside world since the death of ISIS leader Baghdadi. However, guards concede that the detainees still manage to get information.
In late March, the prisoners managed to take control of entire sections of the prison in a riot that lasted for two days. Video released by prison authorities shows an unruly mob of more than 50 men in a common cell, pacing as if ready to riot. The concrete wall appears to buckle under the force of the sheer mass of bodies throwing their weight against it. Some batter at the door, some don masks to conceal their faces and attempt to cover the cell’s surveillance. Others hold up an improvised banner reading: “We call upon the coalition and international organizations that human rights be respected.” Others stand by motionless, crouching in the corner.
This time, their rebellion did make the news. Some were reported to have escaped during the two-day ordeal, making it as far as the prison courtyard, which the warden had once hoped to turn into a football pitch for the restless men. A SWAT unit was mobilized to quell the unrest, and reporters outside the prison witnessed ambulances and gunfire in a frenzy of activity that continued until the top commander of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), Mazloum Abdi, declared that guards managed to secure control of the facility.
The riots were just the latest incidents amid ongoing unrest in some 20 detention centers holding ISIS suspects in the northeast, a senior Coalition military officer who works on Syria issues told Rudaw. “The prisoners really, fundamentally don’t want to be there and their conditions are very, very bad,” the officer said, speaking on the condition that their name and rank not be disclosed as they were not authorized to speak on the matter. The possibility of the COVID-19 outbreak reaching the prison is on everyone’s minds. “Even professional prison guards wouldn’t have been ready for a pandemic no one expected, the officer stressed. “We’re all learning this from scratch.”
The multi-national Coalition against ISIS has provided the SDF crowd control weapons and 100 sets of riot gear, and are now working with the prison guards to prepare for the possibility of an outbreak, preparing sanitation advice and education. Countries have also provided $1.2 million worth of medical equipment to the SDF to support its prisons in Hasakah and Shaddadi, leaning on experience medics learned from the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. The purchase was planned earlier with the International Committee of the Red Cross over concerns of tuberculosis taking hold in Hasakah, but was accelerated because of the COVID-19 outbreak, the Coalition officer told Rudaw.
But the aid is only a bandage on a bullet wound, considering that the problem only exists because foreign countries refuse to repatriate these detainees to their home countries so that they may stand trial for the heinous accusations against them. Victims of ISIS’ crimes in Syria and Iraq have repeatedly called for the perpetrators to face justice. The SDF’s leadership has called on the countries of citizenship of detainees it is holding in limbo to take back their fighters, or otherwise set up an international criminal court. Both options are political non-starters, as no country has agreed to publicly endorse such a court, although Germany has begun proceedings on a small handful of Syrian cases on the principle of universal jurisdiction, which allows a foreign country to prosecute crimes against humanity.
“Quite frankly, it’s difficult for the SDF to work out what to do with these people without trials,” said a Coalition official, speaking to Rudaw English on the condition of anonymity.
A war on two sides
Beyond the prison walls, the lands under the SDF’s control are in a dormant state of permanent crisis. There is an uneasy ceasefire of sorts with Turkey and its allied rebel groups, which invaded parts of Hasakah governorate in early October. But attacks are still reported nearly every day. Rarely making their way into the news, these quotidien attacks are mostly lost in the chronicle of a war that continues after nine years on multiple fronts across the country.
The October operation sent around 200,000 people fleeing from areas near the Turkish border. Most have now returned home, but the United Nations estimates around 74,000 are still displaced, mostly living with relatives or friends, in rented homes, in informal shelters or open-air tent camps. Aid agencies working in Syria and the UN have warned that it’s here that the pandemic could be most dangerous, particularly among refugee populations who live in conditions where the highly-contagious COVID-19 could spread quickly.
"There is little water, and there is very bad sanitation, so as difficult as it is to contain the virus under the best conditions on Earth, imagine what kind of a disaster we would face, catastrophic conditions we would face in Syria or Iraq,” said Jan Egeland, secretary-general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, which works in Syria.
“In my country people are asked to wash hands every hour, many times more a day than we would normally do – how can people who are in much more crowded conditions than us do that?” he said.
Making matters worse, UNICEF has accused rebel groups under Turkey’s wing of cutting off water from a pumping station that supplies more than 460,000 people in Hasakah governorate at a time when strict hygiene is critical to stave off infection. Service from the Allouk Water Station in Sari Kani (Ras al-Ayn) has been disrupted multiple times since October, forcing the SDF to tanker in water to its overcrowded IDP camps and detention facilities, crossing complex geopolitical highways patrolled by the Americans and Russians, and sometimes monitored by Turkish drones overhead.
Until now, all suspected cases of COVID-19 in Rojava have tested negative, health officials told Rudaw English. But if the pandemic comes, the region is woefully unprepared.
According to UN data, the entire northeast is estimated to have only 18 ICU beds available. Out of 11 hospitals, only two are fully functioning. Within Hasakah governorate, there are few beds at the hospitals and no isolation units yet, and staff don’t have N-95 face masks – the type that actually filter out airborne particles rather than just cover the user’s face – or even gloves.
But Rojava’s hospitals are “not 100% ready for the situation,” according Raparin Hassan, co-chair of the self-administration’s health board. Of ventilators – which can make the difference between life and death when a patient develops the tell-tale respiratory difficulty – “… we have just seven or eight,” says Hassan.
“That means if we have more than this number, everybody is going to die. That’s why we’re trying to protect ourselves from this virus and not make it come in, because it’s going to be a very big disaster,” Hassan told Rudaw English in an interview.
Only two hospitals in Hasakah and Derik are equipped to handle the kind of intensive care the infection demands, and about 2,000 doctors and nurses serve a population of about five million people, she said. The administration also claims that it possessed a machine capable of diagnosing COVID-19 using "polymerase chain reaction test" — but that it was left in a hospital in Sari Kani (Ras al-Ayn), which was overtaken by Turkish-backed rebel forces the October invasion.
For now, Rojava has seemingly escaped the pandemic. The blockade which has kept out other vitally-needed aid is also keeping out the spread of the virus. The administration has limited crossings at the border with Iraq’s Kurdistan region to once day a week, and only for emergency cases, and imposed a nighttime curfew and mandatory quarantine.
But for these same reasons, the population is vulnerable to all of the risks that the war brought with it, before the pandemic.
As the spring offensive launched by Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (SNA) continues, entire villages sit depopulated, keeping people in less-sanitary temporary housing from their homes at a time they should be staying in their homes like the rest of the world.
Those remaining are mostly elderly and therefore especially vulnerable to dying of COVID-19. They won’t be able to schedule food deliveries, and there aren’t enough medical supplies for anyone.
Providing aid to the AANES is outside the Coalition’s mandate, and international aid organizations’ hands are tied in reaching the region due to international sanctions that block funds from going to the Assad regime.
“None of the domestic airlines can be used according to US and EU sanctions rules. So how do you go from Damascus to Hasakah, for example, to help support conditions there?” Egeland said in an interview with Rudaw English.
“The WHO doesn’t work with us. They are not allowed to because we are not an official government. The UN is the same. They just work with the Syrian government and the Syrian government won’t help us at all,” Raparin Hassan, the Hasakah health official, told Rudaw English.
“We have been at war for nine years. Our medical staff is always working on all situations. They have to do it, it is their responsibility. But it’s really going to affect our work here and it’s going to be a disaster for us again.”
Additional reporting by Shawn Carrié