PARIS, France - An attack on a Kurdish-controlled prison in Syria by the Islamic State group underscores the dangers around overcrowded, difficult to guard jails, seen as breeding grounds for jihadists fighting a struggling international coalition.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said "dozens" of IS fighters were freed in the late Thursday attack on the prison in a long-feared scenario.
Kurdish fighters from the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) "have warned for quite a while they could not continue for a long time" to guard the captured jihadists, said Salman Shaikh, founder of a Middle East conflict resolution group.
At least 23 Kurdish security forces were killed in the fighting, which the Observatory said continued into Friday.
And the prospect of a repeat of the attack remains very real, said Colin Clarke, research director at the New York-based Soufan Center think-tank.
"The SDF needs a comprehensive strategy to deal with this threat. To date, it's been a strategy of kicking the can down the road" by Western powers, he added.
It was not immediately clear Friday whether the prison break was part of a centrally coordinated operation -- timed to coincide with an attack on a military base in neighbouring Iraq -- or the action of a local IS cell.
Jerome Drevon of the Crisis Group think-tank suggested the attack was "to send a sign that IS is back".
But "that might be on a much more local level, of an IS cell that wanted to free its members from this prison in particular."
Analysts, military officials and civilian authorities have since the 2019 fall of IS' so-called "caliphate" warned that jails could incubate future jihadist fighters, as they stir together locals with foreign militants.
Being shut up together helps keep up their determination to return to the fight once they get out, as well as create opportunity to train younger members.
- 'Breaking the walls' -
"IS will continue to return to this tactic simply because it works," Clarke said of prison breaks.
"This is 'Breaking the Walls' all over again," he added, recalling that then-IS chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi invoked the idea in a 2012 speech.
In the following years, IS' control spread over a massive swathe of Iraq and Syria, lasting from 2014 to 2019.
Damien Ferre of private company Jihad Analytics said that IS had carried out 22 attacks on prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Philippines, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Libya, Niger, Saudi Arabia and Tajikistan since 2013.
"This operation shows the group still has the capacity to carry out major attacks, and the freeing of dozens of prisoners -- some of them potentially leaders -- will allow it to strengthen its ranks," he added.
Official speeches by US, European and Arab officials have all recognised that the fight against IS and other international jihadist groups like Al-Qaeda is far from over, as is clear from continuing activity by the umbrella organisations' branches.
But the words cannot make up for continuing inaction on the ground.
Most nations have been reluctant to repatriate their IS suspects from northeast Syria, preferring to leave them in the custody of Kurdish authorities who have long warned they do not have the capacity to hold them.
Shaikh said the authorities in northeast Syria "need international recognition and financial help".
Suspected IS members are among the roughly 56,000 people displaced by the collapse of the caliphate who now live in the Al-Hol camp in northeastern Syria, run by the Kurdish authorities.
Thousands more live in another camp known as Roj.
Just this week, the Observatory said that a jihadist cell was behind the murder of a Red Crescent aid worker in Al-Hol.
Since the beginning of 2021, the monitoring group has recorded 91 murders by IS there, with most of the victims Iraqi refugees.
Reporting by Didier Lauras
