Thousands of suspected jihadists have been detained by Kurdish forces in Syria since the fall of ISIS.
Brut. gained rare access into the prisons where ISIS fighters are held — this is what they told us.
Brut. gained rare access into the prisons where ISIS fighters are held — this is what they told us.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00Trump fights fire with fire.
00:03Islamic State, they made it very clear, they fire eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth.
00:07What do you think of the terrorist attacks that happened in Europe?
00:11Bullshit question.
00:12Do you feel sorry for the French, for the Germans?
00:17You think you don't kill so many people and you think the Islamic State is just going
00:21to give you, when they see you, they're just going to give you a box of chocolate?
00:25Jihadists who regret nothing.
00:27We interviewed several of them in Syria in December 2019.
00:30One of our reporters gained exclusive access to a prison run by Kurdish special forces
00:35where some 5,000 alleged members of the Islamic State were being held.
00:44In March 2019, the Islamic State lost the Battle of Baghouz.
00:48This defeat ended their territorial presence in Syria, but it raised a serious question.
00:54What to do with the militants and their family members who were captured in battle?
00:57I was ISIS.
00:58I had the ideology.
00:59I was in the movie thinking I'm going to take over the world.
01:03Of course I regret it.
01:04I get really brainwashed.
01:17The footage and interviews that you are going to see were filmed by Brut's lead foreign
01:21correspondent Charles Vila, a French journalist.
01:24To get inside this heavily guarded and overpopulated prison, Brut had to agree to two conditions.
01:29First, no filming the exterior of the prison for security reasons.
01:33And second, no discussing the news with the prisoners.
01:36To avoid the possibility of a revolt, they still had not been told that the United States
01:40had killed the head of the Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
02:11Every room was packed, with almost no space to move around.
02:18Barely any daylight either.
02:20The only light that managed to get in was from this window.
02:28Some of the prisoners who had been captured in the Battle of Baghouz in March 2019 hadn't
02:33left this room since then.
02:39The toilets were there, at the back of the room.
02:43Just to the right was where they could wash, which they seemed to do with water cans.
02:49There was a very strong smell coming out of the room.
02:55A reporter said it was almost unbearable.
03:03One of the prisoners in this room was a young British jihadist who agreed to be interviewed.
03:17What do you think of the terrorist attacks that happened in Europe?
03:20And what do you think, when the coalition, they bomb, they just bomb fighters?
03:24When you're constantly bombarding a group of people, don't expect like, you know, no
03:29retaliation.
03:30It's going to happen.
03:31Have you seen the killings of Western journalists that were beheaded on video by British fighters?
03:38As I said, for me, killing or beheading is something gruesome to me.
03:43I don't like it, OK?
03:45But if it's a judgment that's passed by one of the judges of the Islamic State, I might
03:50not like it, but who am I to go and challenge the Islamic State?
03:53I can tell you a lot of stuff, but at the same time, I'm risking my health and my safety
03:59here because I cannot express myself fully.
04:03If I start saying certain things, there's a translator here, he will start telling the
04:07Kurds, he said this, he said that.
04:09Once you're gone, they're going to come and beat the f**k out of me.
04:11I can tell you more, but I don't want to get in trouble.
04:17Our reporter was not alone with the British jihadist.
04:19The head of the prison, along with several members of the Kurdish special forces, were
04:23in the room with him during the entire interview.
04:25Despite that, the man was quick to criticize his captors, as well as the conditions inside
04:30the prison.
04:31I've been sitting in this whole prison for a very long time.
04:35Everybody in this room is desperate to get out of this prison because this prison is
04:39not what they claim to be.
04:44It's very severe.
04:45People are dying here every day, lack of medication.
04:47One guy died here yesterday.
04:49Everybody just wants to get far away from these people because you're not really getting
04:53your basic human rights.
04:55Nobody wants to be a captive like this, the way they're treating the prisoners here.
04:59It's not good.
05:16The head of the prison is a member of the Kurdish special forces and obviously had a
05:20very different take on conditions inside the prison.
05:24The British ISIS member that I interviewed told me that he would get beaten if he was
05:30telling the truth about this prison.
05:54There have been several attempted prison breaks.
06:06In this video, you can see one of the techniques that the prisoners used several times.
06:11One of the jihadists pretends to be dying in order to distract the guards.
06:15When the doors open, the prisoners attack.
06:22As a result, our reporter had to be extremely careful wherever he went, especially when
06:27visiting the prison hospital where some 300 people were crammed together.
06:35This is the hospital.
06:43Our reporter had to let a guard walk ahead of him at all times.
06:49This is as far as he was able to go.
06:53The guards explained that if he went any further, it would be impossible to get out if something
06:57went wrong.
07:19Many of the prisoners were extremely thin and very weak and looked to be suffering from
07:33malnutrition.
07:38Many had bullet wounds, bone pins and external fixations, battle wounds on their arms and
07:44legs, like this man for instance.
07:47A bullet must have hit him in the leg.
07:51There was also a very strong, almost putrid smell and our reporter had to wear a face
07:55mask.
07:58It looked like the people in the hospital had nowhere to wash and there was only one
08:01toilet for the nearly 300 of them.
08:08In the middle of these sick and injured prisoners, our reporter interviewed Abdallah, a 24-year-old
08:13Belgian jihadist who had been there for nine months and had joined the Islamic State originally
08:18in 2014.
08:19Do you have any regret coming to Syria?
08:23I don't regret coming to Syria because I came to help.
08:26Like for example the coalition came to help the Kurds.
08:29Everywhere people want to help me, bad guys, good guys.
08:33Of course in the beginning I was ISIS, I had the ideology.
08:36I was in the movie thinking I'm going to take over the world.
08:39ISIS propaganda is very beautiful, calm and you can live and everything is okay.
08:46And then when you come, if you don't fight, for example, they're going to kill you or
08:50put you in prison.
08:51If you don't do this, you cannot argue with them.
08:53If they have a rule, for example, the attacks in Belgium, if you argue with them, it's not
08:57good or it's bad, you cannot speak.
08:59What do you think of the terrorist attacks that happened in Europe and they were targeting
09:04innocents?
09:05In Beirut I buried four or five babies.
09:07I saw with my own eyes hundreds of women with no legs, with no arms, with no heads
09:12killing innocent people from both sides.
09:15I'm against it, it's bad.
09:17Of course it's very bad what happened to the Belgians in the airport, to the French.
09:22I regret coming to the war and fight and destroy my body, my life.
09:27I left my mother.
09:28Of course I regret.
09:29I was just young, naive.
09:32Being ISIS I was just dumb, believing anything.
09:37This is Al-Hol, a giant camp where the families of Islamic State militants now live.
10:0670,000 people live here, mostly women and children, in extremely difficult conditions.
10:18This is the market for women and children from countries outside Syria, where they can
10:23buy food and clothes.
10:25There's also a store where they can withdraw money that people send them from abroad.
10:56We are surrounded by a piece of fabric, they don't give us food, or they give us diarrhea
11:00for weeks.
11:01There are not many humanitarian associations.
11:02There are no associations at all.
11:03We have no doctors, no hospitals.
11:04What did you do in the Islamic State?
11:05Did you have a job?
11:06I was at home.
11:07Women in the home.
11:08Taking care of the children, cleaning, eating.
11:09I had a life of a woman in the home.
11:10Frankly, it was good, we lived well.
11:11We had our houses, we had our children.
11:12We lived with our husbands, with our children, there were parks, there were hospitals, there
11:19were schools.
11:20It was normal life, like in France, except that we could live our Islam in peace.
11:25It was only when they started to attack Raqqa that people started to flee, and that's
11:31when we started to live in peace.
11:33We were able to live in peace.
11:37Like many jihadists, these women from France continued to defend their decision to live
11:42under the Islamic State, but they were ready to criticize IS too.
11:46I don't want to be affiliated with them at all.
11:49They don't represent me, I don't represent them.
11:52I don't want to be affiliated with their ideology, because for me, that's not Islam.
11:57I am a Muslim, and I will remain so until my death.
12:00What was not their duty?
12:03What was not their duty?
12:05The suicide bombings, they legislated them, even though it's forbidden.
12:08The conditions of the war, it's not like that.
12:10The beheadings, they made a lot of propaganda about it.
12:13To behead someone, it's not natural.
12:17It's not natural.
12:19Obviously, it does something.
12:21Of course.
12:22When you see that, it's shocking.
12:24Of course, our speech is not very credible, given the situation, thinking that everyone
12:29thinks we have the same ideology.
12:32In fact, in life, we do things that are not good, and things that are good.
12:36And here, we did things that were not very...
12:39The only bad thing we did...
12:41Do you regret coming here?
12:43When I look at my son, no, I don't regret coming here, because it's destiny.
12:47But yes, I regret believing them.
12:49I regret believing them.
12:51I blame them.
12:52I'm not a repentant, I regret what I did.
12:54No, I admit it.
12:55And I'm happy with the path I took, because I learned a lot.
12:58Did you try to leave the Islamic State?
13:00Yes, we tried.
13:01Who didn't try?
13:02The truth is that they didn't try.
13:03Last year, we tried.
13:05Even without that, we tried to leave, because it was no longer possible.
13:07It was no longer possible, it was not a choice.
13:09It was no longer like at the beginning, where they guaranteed our security, where we lived in peace.
13:12It had become...
13:13Even they had become completely unfair in their way of doing things.
13:15With us, they were...
13:17Even they had become our oppressors more than the coalition.
13:22We were finally...
13:24We no longer had allies, so we really didn't want to leave their homes.
13:28But unfortunately, they blocked our way, they prevented us from leaving.
13:30If we tried to leave, they would put us in prison.
13:32I was in prison with them, because we wanted to leave.
13:35Until we found ourselves here.
13:46For now, only a handful of members of the Islamic State
13:49have returned to their home countries in Europe and North America.
13:52What will happen to them when they get there
13:54is sure to pose serious legal and ethical complications.