BAGHDAD (NYTIMES) - An United States-backed militia that has waged four days of deadly battles to dislodge Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) fighters from a prison in north-east Syria warned Sunday (Jan 23) that the terrorists were using more than 600 boys detained in the complex as human shields.
The fight to retake the prison, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) said, was constrained by the militants use of the young detainees as human shields.
It said the children were in a special rehabilitation section inside the detention centre, which was built as a training college.
"The Syrian Democratic Forces holds ISIS terrorists responsible for causing any harm to these children in prison," the militia said in a statement.
The United States has dispatched attack helicopters and carried out airstrikes on the prison to help the Kurdish-led SDF reassert control. Some of the prisoners were killed in the strikes, US officials said.
US officials defended the attacks.
"The coalition has taken great measures to ensure the humane treatment of detainees, but when ISIS detainees took up arms, they became an active threat, and were subsequently engaged and killed by the SDF and coalition airstrikes," said Major General John Brennan, commander of the anti-ISIS coalition in Iraq and Syria.
The SDF are a US partner in the autonomous Rojava region of north-eastern Syria.
The coalition said in a statement that it had launched airstrikes and provided intelligence to the SDF, which it said had "conducted sustained operations" since the jihadis attacked the prison Thursday night in a bid to free the ISIS members held there.
It said the prisoners had used the prison guards' own guns to kill some of them after the siege began.
The coalition described the current threat as "contained".
To try to quell the uprising, a US military official said, Apache helicopter gunships launched airstrikes and conducted low-altitude flights in a show of force.
The siege of the Ghweran prison in Hasaka, where thousands of ISIS fighters and their family members were detained after the collapse of ISIS' so-called caliphate, was well planned.
SDF commander Mazlum Kobani, said ISIS had mobilised sleeper cells and used suicide bombers to organise the breakout.
