‘Isis is taking huge advantage of the current situation in Syria,’ Ilham Ahmed told me, when we met in the north Syrian city of Hasakeh in mid January. ‘In the recent time, there have been many attacks on checkpoints of the SDF (Syrian Democratic Forces). They are most active in the al Badiya area. There’s no security control there, and we have confirmed intelligence information of plans for an attack on the Al Hol camp to liberate the families there.’
Ahmed chairs the foreign relations department of the Autonomous Administration of North East Syria (AANES). This is the Kurdish-dominated de facto government with which the US and its allies aligned during the war against Isis’s self-declared ‘Caliphate’ between 2014 and 2019. That war was successfully prosecuted and ended with the fall of the town of Baghouz in the summer of 2019.
The security vacuum in Syria is an ideal environment for the return of Sunni jihadis
The fall of Baghouz brought to a close the five-year period in which Islamic State presided over a de facto sovereign area.
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