The Times and AFP Report: ISIS Fighters Held In Syrian Prison Ask If They Can Just Go Home

These major media outlets are really exposing their hands here.

First the WaPo wrote a glowing obituary from the #1 terrorist, Al Baghdadi.

And now this.

A video piece that wants you to feel sorry for these terrorists.

Are you kidding me?

It's not just the video.

The AFP also reported this:

Behind the steel door, the cell is as packed as their eyes are empty -- haggard, scrawny prisoners in orange jumpsuits lying head-to-toe cover every inch of floor space.

An AFP team was given rare access to one of the crowded detention facilities in northeastern Syria where Kurdish forces are holding Islamic State group (IS) suspects.

As a Turkish offensive launched against Kurdish forces earlier this month wreaks chaos in the area, just how solid such doors will be is a question keeping the world on edge.

The men crammed into poorly fortified jails such as this one in Hasakeh hail from dozens of countries that don't want them free -- but don't want them back either.

With 5,000 inmates -- Syrian, Iraqi, but also British, French, German -- the prison is bursting with the flotsam of the international jihadist army IS raised five years ago.

The group is accused of carrying out widespread atrocities in territory it once controlled across Iraq and Syria, including mass executions, rape, enslavement and torture, much of it filmed for propaganda.

Some of the detainees are teenagers, and none of them have been under the sun even once in months or more.

Their grey foam mattresses overlap to carpet the cold floor, with only one corner of the cell taken by a basic, half walled-off pit latrine.

The stench is overwhelming in the nearby medical ward, where visitors are given surgical masks at the door.

They have virtually no knowledge of what is happening outside, their days measured only by the absent-minded thumbing of beads and the five daily Muslim prayers.

The prisoners have not heard that on Sunday US President Donald Trump announced the death of IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in a US raid in northwest Syria.

"They have absolutely no contact with the outside world," says the prison governor, who gave his name as Serhat and asked that the exact location of the facility be withheld.

- Stench -

Many of the prisoners there are all skin and bones. The most fortunate have a bed to lie on, but most of them just sit directly on the floor, exposing amputation stumps and bandaged wounds.

The prison clinic is as crowded as the other cells. A greying man with axillary crutches painstakingly picks his way through the ghostly crowd.

The condition of the wounded speaks of the intensity of the fighting that led to IS's final territorial defeat at the hands of the Kurdish-led fighters of the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in March.

It also reveals the dire conditions experienced by the final denizens of the jihadist "caliphate" when it made its last stand in Baghouz district, 200 kilometres (125 miles) to the south.

Most of the men who have been crammed into this Hasakeh province detention centre and at least six others across Kurdish-held territory are those who were seen limping to surrender just months ago, starved and mutilated.

"I want to leave the prison and go back home to my family," says Aseel Mathan, 22.

The lank young man left his native Wales when he was still 17, to join his brother in Mosul, the northern Iraqi city where the IS "caliphate" was born.

When his brother was killed, he moved across the Syrian border to Raqa, the other main hub of the now-defunct jihadist proto-state.

- Fugitive jihadists -

"I want to go back to Britain," Mathan said, adding he wished he hadn't answered the call to arms issued in 2014 by Baghdadi, who according to the US was killed hours after the young Welshman spoke to AFP.

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The Kurdish authorities say more than 50 nationalities are represented in the Kurdish-run prisons where more than 12,000 IS suspects are now held.

Not all IS fighters were caught by Kurdish and US-led coalition forces in the dying days of the "caliphate" and the jihadist group has continued to attack its enemies through clandestine cells roaming the region.

Some days, governor Serhat says, fugitive jihadists "come near the prison and open fire, just as a way of telling the detainees that they are still there."

From France to Tunisia, many of the IS prisoners' countries of origins have been reluctant to repatriate them, fearing a public backlash at home.

With support from their main US ally more unpredictable than ever, and under constant pressure from their archfoe Turkey, the Syrian Kurds' autonomous administration can barely protect itself, let alone foreign detainees.