ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) on Sunday announced that they had arrested two suicide bombers affiliated with the Islamic State (ISIS) group in the town of Diban in Syria’s eastern Deir ez-Zor province. The Kurdish-led force has been dealing with an influx of terrorist activity recently, particularly as the group attempts to recover from ISIS’s massive prison siege in Hasaka, northeast Syria (Rojava). "Our forces arrested two foreign suicide bombers affiliated with Daesh [ISIS] in Diban, Deir Ezzor. One of them comes from Iraq and the other from the Turkistan Region," said SDF media head Farhad Shami. Shami added that the SDF had "confiscated documents proving that they had come from the Turkish-occupied areas in northern Syria." ISIS attempted to break thousands of its affiliates and members out of al-Sina'a prison, known to locals as Ghweran prison. The SDF arrested 26 people who were "active in smuggling and transferring detainees out of Ghweran prison," it said in a tweet on January 30. The force also announced the further capture of 27 ISIS suspects in Raqqa toward the end of the month. US President Joe Biden delivered a devastating setback to the terror group on Thursday, as he declared that US special operations forces had permanently compromised ISIS leader Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi in the town of Atmeh, northern Idlib. Mazloum Abdi, general commander on the SDF on Saturday said "the killings of al-Qurayshi and al-Baghdadi in Idlib show that ISIS enjoys support and protection outside SDF-held areas." By Julian Bechocha
