In September 2025, the Express was issuing dire warnings that “tens of thousands of ISIS extremists could be unleashed on Britain and the West if the camps holding them in Syria are taken over by a new regime”, meaning the Al Jolani/Al Qaeda regime brought to power by London, Washington, Ankara, and Tel Aviv. At the same time, CENTCOM was urging countries to repatriate their ISIS citizens to reduce the pressure on the overcrowded and sordid camps overflowing with unrepentant fighters and their families.
Fast-forward to February 2026, and that is exactly what has been allowed to happen. The ‘New Syria’ forces, comprising ISIS, Al Qaeda, Muslim Brotherhood factions, some Syrian, the majority foreigners, have seized the ISIS holding camps in north-east Syria from the former caretakers — the US/Israeli-backed Kurdish Separatists.
Suddenly, Washington’s support for the Kurdish autonomous region appeared to collapse in favour of an HTS/Al Qaeda centralised regime. The former promises of Kurdish independence and privilege within Syrian borders seemed to dissipate rapidly as Al Jolani’s murderous militias released their own relatives and former ISIS comrades from some of the biggest prison camps in this oil-rich corner of Syrian territory.
A 2019 map showing the location of ISIS holding camps in north-east Syria and the number of inmates.
According to CENTCOM 2026 estimates:
Al Hol Camp holds around 54,000, roughly 27,000 Iraqis, 18,000 Syrians, and 8,500 foreign nationals, including British. The United Nations has reported that the foreign families come from 60 countries, including 3,177 women, and the rest are children. Older children are being held in the Ahdath prison in the village of Til Mahrouf in the north-east. US forces operated the high-security Al Roj Camp near the town of Al Malikyah. This camp is reserved for the wives and children of ISIS leaders. Other ISIS fighters were being held in the Kurdish controlled prison camps in Al Hasakah — the Ghweran and Sina’a prisons and the Kamba Al Bulghour prison. The latter holds an estimated 5000 ISIS fighters.
Since 2019, when the prisons were officially established in north-east Syria, under management of the Kurds/Washington and during the Assad presidency, there were multiple orchestrated break-outs. The US regularly ferried ISIS fighters to Iraq, Afghanistan, and central Syria to carry out attacks against the Iraqi resistance or Iraqi infrastructure and against the Syrian Arab Army that defended Syria against the regime change alliance for 14 long and bloody years.
In 2019, according to The New York Times, citing US officials, the US military provided about $1.6 million to help “increase the security” of seven prisons where ISIS fighters were held, the locations of which have not been determined. In January 2025, President Trump called a temporary but abrupt halt to the foreign assistance aid that would affect the Kurdish factions responsible for the ISIS camps in Syria. Top US military and counter-terrorism officials at the time saw this as a potential terrorist army in waiting, if they ever broke free.
In 2021, the UK funded a “dramatic expansion of a large detention facility in northeastern Syria, a move that might reduce the chance of breakouts but which signals that no better way is in sight to deal with captured foreign and local militants”. According to British Army Maj. Gen. Kevin Copsey, the coalition’s Deputy Commander for Strategy, the campaign would double the size of the Hasakah prison, holding an estimated 5,000 prisoners in ramshackle converted school buildings. Copsey also acknowledged that the regional ISIS fighters were contained within this overcrowded and internally controlled facility.
Copsey also raised the alarm on the estimated 65,000 women and children held in Al Hol camp. He claimed that the ISIS wives were building networks to spread the ISIS violent ideology, and expressed concern about the potential for the radicalisation of children trapped in the camp. Apparently the children, or ISIS ‘cubs’, were being exported through rat lines out of Al Hol and sent to the central Badia (Syrian Desert) area for additional training — conveniently close to the US military base at Al Tanf on the border with Iraq and Jordan.
Copsey does not mention the fact that the British regime had abandoned British citizens and children to a life of radicalisation, child trafficking, abuse, and exploitation in these squalid and violence-ridden prison camps, nor does Copsey mention the British hand in the radicalisation programmes that ensured no escape from the ISIS fanaticism for any of the inmates.
Investigative journalist Kit Klarenberg introduces us to a British intelligence cut-out operation known as Global Strategy. Its declared aim was to deradicalise the Al Hol camp prisoners with a focus on women and children. Klarenberg argues that Global Strategy actively assisted ISIS to maintain Al Hol as a human reservoir for Islamic State’s ‘Cubs of the Caliphate’ programme, which trained children of all ages to kill, and indoctrinated them with the group’s violent ideology.
This author has previously covered, in detail, the British intelligence operation driving Jolani to power in December 2024 with its origins in the Bush/Blair era. That the British had a role in ensuring ISIS remains as a simmering threat for the regional anti-Imperialist resistance factions should come as no surprise. Neither should people be surprised by the abject child exploitation and abuse that this strategy necessarily entails. It should be remembered that US and UK intelligence agencies are accused of actually enabling the trafficking of British or American future ISIS teenage brides to Syria. Then they abandon them and their offspring to a fate often worse than death.
Reports from the beginning of the ISIS insurgence in Syria have talked about “medical schools” in northern Syria where organs are extracted. The Iraqi News reported that IS has kidnapped and sold many children in Syria to Turkish organ traffickers in order to finance its operations.
So, not only is the UK FCDO not showing any enthusiasm for repatriation of British nationals caught up in a terrorist proxy war against the Syrian people that the British regime is facilitating, it is also callously condemning the children of ISIS brides to a lifetime of incarceration with a high risk of abuse, exploitation, trafficking, rape and extremist indoctrination.
Now, with the rapid advance of Al Jolani’s ISIS infested forces and the withdrawal of Russian and American forces from the area and the prisons, ISIS is witnessing a dramatic and dangerous resurgence. According to the UK’s The Telegraph, the UK has repatriated a “small number of nationals from Roj, over the past year”, but the majority of detainees now see the Jolani presence as a chance to fulfil their rapacious Caliphatist visions. As The Telegraph reports, “the women say, ‘we won’t go back to infidel countries’. They’re not leaving, because their husbands are with al-Sharaa [emphasis added]” (Al Jolani).
So, British intelligence led the ground war against the former Syrian Government and the Syrian Arab Army. It helped build and maintain the ISIS holding camp structures in northern Syria, and it ensured the radicalisation of the prisoners, many of whom are British nationals. If there is a threat of blowback from these operations and the return of British national ISIS fanatics to British soil, the blame lies entirely at the feet of successive British regimes that signed off on the criminal intelligence operations inside the sovereign territory of an independent nation.
Britain Is Also Contributing to the Long War against Iran
The US empowerment of HTS and the release of ISIS fighters comes at a time when the Long War against Iran is reaching peak escalation. The US has not only withdrawn troops from north-east Syria, leaving the ISIS camps in the hands of Al Jolani’s hybrid ISIS forces, but Washington has also withdrawn from its main base in Al Tanf, leaving a familiar vacuum in the HTS-ravaged country. For more than a decade, Western populations were told that the US cartel, including the UK, were in Syria to fight ISIS. Guess what? Now they are nowhere to be seen, and ISIS will flourish again. Of course, in a closed UN session in 2016, Secretary of State John Kerry admitted on leaked audio recordings that the US had allowed ISIS to expand in the hopes that it would overthrow the government in Damascus. More can be read on the US involvement in the creation and arming of ISIS.
So, what is the reason that ISIS should be allowed to recover and extend its reach at this juncture in the regional war where all roads lead to Iran?
The release of ISIS elements by Washington, Turkey, and Al Jolani threatens to further destabilise the region, and Iraq in particular. There have been credible reports of ISIS planning attacks on Iraqi detention centres holding ISIS terrorists: Al Rasafa in Baghdad, and Nasiryah Central Prison. This is combined with the US transfer of 5000 ISIS prisoners from Syria to Baghdad in Iraq where they will be interrogated and put on trial. Iraqi Judge Ali Hussein Jafat, who is heading the committee interrogating ISIS detainees brought from Syria, says it's not easy because of the sheer numbers of prisoners involved. It's “complicated and not easy at all”, he said, adding that the detainees are from 14 Arab and 46 other countries. A prison breakout is a very high risk factor in this scenario, and it is not as if it has not happened before when the US needs a proxy terrorist force to conduct deadly operations against Israel’s enemies in the region.
In response, Iraq’s Popular Mobilisation Forces have intensified operations across northern Iraq. Recent combing missions have uncovered and targeted ISIS hideouts, including tunnels and underground operational bases. Several of these sites were bombed, resulting in significant casualties and disrupting a portion of ISIS’ logistical networks.
In a 2015 interview, the Al Qaeda Al Jolani threatened Iran with external and internal destabilisation at the hands of the ISIS/Al Qaeda forces that Al Jolani considered to be under his control in the region. Jolani talks about vast forces of ISIS-style extremists that will rise up on Iran’s borders and inside Iran. We always have to remember that Al Jolani does not stand alone; he has been coached and cultivated by the CIA and MI6 since his emergence within the ranks of ISIS and then Al Qaeda in Syria, which is also known as Nusra Front.
There are currently an estimated seven million Syrian refugees in Europe and Turkey facing an increased threat of forced deportation back to Syria since Al Jolani took power in the war-drained country and began the horrific ethnic cleansing campaigns that have targeted all minorities in Syria from the Christians to the Druze, the Alawites, and now the Kurdish civilians in the northern regions. If even a modest percentage of these refugees are sympathetic towards the Takfiri sectarian ideology and supremacist project, the demographic in Syria and even beyond the Syrian borders into Iraq will be changed irreversibly. Then, add to this the 400,000 Syrians who have returned to Syria from Lebanon in 2025, many of whom adhere to the HTS extremist policies. Jolani is currently negotiating with Lebanon to repatriate over 2,500 Syrian prisoners in Lebanese jails, many of whom are hardcore extremists who committed heinous crimes against the Lebanese people during the early years of the regime change war in Syria. Three hundred have already been despatched back to Syria by the Lebanese authorities.
All this, combined with the existing Takfiri forces in Syria and the newly released ISIS members, paints a horrifying picture of Syria becoming a terrorist hub in the heartland of the region, ready to be despatched wherever they are needed in the upcoming war against Iran and the entire remaining resistance axis in Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, and, finally, Iran.
The map below was drawn by a Col. Ralph Peters in 2006. While I believe there are flaws in all these maps of Greater Israel or the so-called New Middle East because they don’t account for the developments in the region since they were created, there are elements of the maps that perhaps give a clue as to the potential threat to the regional demographics and show how new blood borders may be carved out of the Western-engineered conflicts, all for the security and expansion of ‘Israel’ and the regime change endgame in Iran.
Note, on this map, Iraq is carved up to include a nominally Sunni Muslim state on the borders with Syria, Jordan, and a reduced Saudi Arabia. With the influx of possible extremist factions from the EU, Turkey, Lebanon, and elsewhere, and the release of ISIS fighters in Syria itself, are MI6 and the CIA realising the vision of a violent ISIS enclave in the midst of the already weakened region with easy access to the borders of Iran? For sure, this would serve the malevolent agendas of the Zionist bloc, and would be instrumental in containing any resistance to Washington’s potential aggression against Iran from within the West Asian nations, should a regional war begin.
As the dreadful Lindsey Graham said at the Munich Security Conference this week, “if we start [a war against Iran], we are not stopping”. Trump is playing for time with the negotiation track that is intended to trap Iran into turning down unacceptable concessions; this will be presented as Iranian intractability and used as a pretext for war. The region is bracing for what comes next. What is certain is that Britain, the US, and Israel see this as their greatest opportunity to remove the perceived head of the Resistance Axis, but a snake has the tendency to bite long before you can reach the head.
One final thought: if ISIS is allowed to ‘flourish’ in order to attack Iraq and/or Iran, what happens after that? Do you think ISIS will settle, or is the very real risk that it will expand beyond the borders of West Asia and Persia? Western regimes have created a Frankenstein monster that will eventually turn on their handlers and the populations of the countries whose regimes sustain the terror group if they are not contained and defeated by what remains of the regional resistance against the Axis of Terror.
