The decision to move IS prisoners from Syria to Iraq came at the request of Baghdad, officials say

BAGHDAD -- The decision to move prisoners of the Islamic State group from northeast Syria to detention centers in Iraq came after a request by officials in Baghdad that was welcomed by the U.S.-led coalition and the Syrian government, officials said Thursday.

American and Iraqi officials told The Associated Press about the Iraqi request, a day after the U.S. military said that it started transferring some of the 9,000 IS detainees held in more than a dozen detention centers in northeast Syria controlled by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF, in northeast Syria.

The move to start transferring the detainees came after Syrian government forces took control of the sprawling al-Hol camp — which houses thousands of mostly women and children — from the SDF, which withdrew as part of a ceasefire. Troops on Monday seized a prison in the northeastern town of Shaddadeh, where some IS detainees escaped and many were recaptured, state media reported.

The SDF said on Thursday that government forces shelled al-Aqtan prison near the northern Syrian city of Raqqa with heavy weapons, while simultaneously imposing a siege around the prison using tanks and deploying fighters.

Al-Aqtan prison, where some IS prisoners are held, was surrounded by government forces earlier this week and negotiations were ongoing on the future of the detention facility.

With the push by government forces into northeast Syria along the border with Iraq, Bagdad became concerned that some of the detainees might become a danger to Iraq’s security, if they managed to flee from the detention centers amid the chaos.

An Iraqi security official said that the decision to transfer the prisoners from Syria to Iraq was an Iraqi decision, welcomed by the U.S.-led coalition and the Syrian government. The official said that it was in Iraq’s security interest to detain them in Iraqi prisons rather than leaving them in Syria.

Also Thursday, a senior U.S. military official confirmed to the AP that Iraq “offered proactively” to take the IS prisoners rather than the U.S. requesting it of them.

A Syrian foreign ministry official said that the plan to transfer IS prisoners from Syria to Iraq had been under discussion for months before the recent clashes with the SDF.

All three officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to comment publicly.

Over the past several years, the SDF has handed over to Iraqi authorities foreign fighters, including French citizens, who were put on trial and received sentences.

The SDF still controls more than a dozen detention facilities holding around 9,000 IS members, but is slated to hand the prisons over to government control under a peace process that also is supposed to eventually merge the SDF with government forces.

U.S. Central Command said that the first transfer on Wednesday involved 150 IS members, who were taken from Syria’s northeastern province of Hassakeh to “secure locations” in Iraq. The statement said that up to 7,000 detainees could be transferred to Iraqi-controlled facilities.

Iraq has beefed up patrols along its border with Syria. On Thursday, tanks lined up along the frontier in the northern province of Sinjar.

Members of the Yazidi minority in Sinjar have been particularly fearful of a repeat of 2014 when IS militants overran the area and launched particularly brutal attacks on Yazidis, considered by the extremist group to be heretics. Militants killed Yazidi men and boys and sold women into sexual slavery or forced them to convert and marry militants.

IS declared a caliphate in 2014 in large parts of Syria and Iraq, attracting large numbers of fighters from around the world.

The militant group was defeated in Iraq in 2017, and in Syria two years later, but IS sleeper cells still carry out deadly attacks in both countries. As a key U.S. ally in the region, the SDF played a major role in defeating IS.

Also Thursday, the SDF accused the government of violating a four-day truce declared on Tuesday. It said Syrian government forces pounded the southern outskirts of the northern town of Kobani, which recently became besieged after the government’s push in the northeast over the past two weeks.

A commander with the Kurdish women’s militia in Syria, speaking from inside Kobani, told reporters during an online news conference that living conditions there are deteriorating.

Nesrin Abdullah of the Women’s Protection Units, or YPJ, said that if the fighting around Kobani continues, thousands of people “will be massacred.”

She said that there was no electricity or running water in the town, which a decade ago became the symbol of resistance against IS. The militants at the time besieged it for months before being pushed back.

“The people here are facing a genocide,” she said. “We have many people in hospitals, and hospitals cannot continue if there is no electricity.”

U.N. Assistant Secretary-General Khaled Khiari told the U.N. Security Council Thursday that clashes were taking place in parts of Hassakeh province and also on the outskirts of Kobani, an enclave controlled by the SDF, and that the situation on the ground elsewhere was “very tense."

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Abby Sewell reported from Beirut. Omar Sanadiki in Damascus, Syria, Bassem Mroue in Beirut, and Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations, contributed to this report.