ISIS warlords have posted a chilling photo of a gun-toting fighter staking out the Eiffel Tower alongside the bloodthirsty warning ‘Jihad everywhere’, it’s been reported. The mocked-up image emerged as it was revealed floods of ISIS prisoners are escaping from camps in northern Syria amid the ongoing Turkish offensive. More than 850 ISIS detainees broke […]
ISIS warlords have posted a chilling photo of a gun-toting fighter staking out the Eiffel Tower alongside the bloodthirsty warning ‘Jihad everywhere’, it’s been reported.
The mocked-up image emerged as it was revealed floods of ISIS prisoners are escaping from camps in northern Syria amid the ongoing Turkish offensive.
More than 850 ISIS detainees broke out of the Ayn Issa camp in northern Syria on Sunday, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) claimed in a statement.
A spokesman for the jail told local media they “successfully escaped” from the section holding mainly foreign nationals.
He also said attacks were already being carried out in Syria by die-hard “sleeper cells” that had emerged from inside the camp.
There are now genuine fears many of the escaped terrorists may head home to Europe to cause even more bloodshed.
The Eiffel Tower image – exposed by the SITE Intelligence Group – emerged four years after ISIS carried out suicide bombings and mass shootings in the French capital.
The heartless attacks – in November 2015 – claimed the lives of 130 people and left 352 more seriously injured.
There are believed to be 70,000 die-hard jihadis locked up following the collapse of the ISIS caliphate in Syria and Iraq last year.
Kurdish officials have long warned d ISIS jihadists could break out of prisons in northeast Syria as fighting intensifies between Kurdish-led forces and Turkey.
Badran Jia Kurd told Reuters the number of security forces guarding the militants will dwindle as Turkish forces step up an offensive they launched at the border on Wednesday.
US officials have worried Islamic State detainees would seize on such an opportunity for a prison break.
The SDF hold thousands of the militants in prisons and tens of thousands of their relatives in camps, many of them foreigners.
With the Kurdish YPG militia at its forefront, the SDF defeated jihadists across much of north and east Syria with US air and ground support.
“This attack will definitely reduce and weaken the guarding system for those Daesh militants in the prisons,” Jia Kurd said, using the Arabic acronym for IISIS
“This could lead to their escape or to behaviours that may get out of the control of the security forces,” added Jia Kurd, adviser to the Kurdish-led authority in the SDF region.
“The number of forces guarding the prisons is reduced the more the battles intensify. This poses a grave danger.”
Meanwhile a Four-Star US general Joesph Votel, who led the war on terror in the region, fears thousands of jihadi prisoners will eventually break out of SDF jails to take up arms again.
Votel wrote in The Atlantic there’s now a genuine threat to “rapidly destabilise” Syria’s northeast where “ISIS’s physical caliphate was only recently defeated.”
He added: “Nearly 2,000 foreign fighters, about 9,000 Iraqi and Syrian fighters, and tens of thousands of ISIS family members are being held in detention facilities…in areas under SDF (Syrian Democratic Forces) control.
“The SDF has already stated that it will have to fortify defence mechanisms along the Syrian-Turkish border, leaving ISIS detention facilities and encampments with little to no security.
“This is particularly troubling, given that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-proclaimed caliph of ISIS, recently called on supporters to break fighters out of these facilities.”
