In Syria, units of the multi-ethnic military alliance SDF have arrested a senior networker of the “Islamic State“. Mohammed Ahmed Karz is said to have supplied the remaining IS cells with money, the SDF announced on Sunday: The jihadist also managed funds from Turkey and Islamist-controlled Idlib in Syria.
The SDF, whose main force is the Kurdish People’s Defense Units YPG, liberated the former “IS capital” Raqqa in northern Syria from IS in 2017. But to this day, the jihadists in Syria and Iraq control individual locations and are active underground across the board. Tens of thousands of IS supporters also live largely undisturbed in prison camps in the northern Syrian autonomous region; these tent cities must be fed and powered by the Autonomous Government and guarded at high risk.
Karz, who has now been arrested, is said to have collected the usual “taxes” for jihad in Raqqa. The IS official comes from near Aleppo and, according to those familiar with the situation, could have contributed to the devastating attack by IS men and captured jihadists in January: IS had raided a prisoner camp near Hasaka to free imprisoned jihadists. At least 300 men and women died in the days of fighting.
After the major IS attack on the prison camp in January, northern Syria’s autonomous government called for international help, if only because thousands of IS supporters and their children who are not originally from Syria live there. Among them is a two-digit number of Islamists who have traveled from Germany to the IS.
The Federal Foreign Office (AA) had brought IS supporters and their children back to Germany in recent years. However, the AA is only holding unofficial talks with the regional government. A coalition led by the secular Kurdish party PYD has governed the region, also known as Rojava, since 2012. Germany is distancing itself from her out of consideration for the Turkish head of state Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Turkey also attacks Syria’s Kurds
Erdogan sees the PYD as a sister organization to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party PKK, which is also banned in Germany and has been fighting for Kurdish autonomy in Turkey for decades. Ankara’s army has therefore repeatedly attacked the military alliance SDF in northern Syria, which includes Kurdish, Arab and Assyrian units.
The German government, on the other hand, repeatedly points out that it has had no diplomatic relations with Syria since the embassy in Damascus was closed because of the war. Belgium, Sweden and France, on the other hand, are also officially seeking contact with the autonomous government in northern Syria.
For several years, Turkey and its Islamist allies have occupied cities in northern Syria that were once controlled by the SDF. An SDF member was said to have been killed by a grenade fired by Turkish troops north of Raqqa on Sunday. Turkey also regularly bombs suspected PKK positions in neighboring northern Iraq. The SDF accuse Turkey of also strengthening IS in this way.
Syria’s central government under Bashar al-Assad also rejects the autonomous administration in Rojava. Not only the USA recognizes the Syrian-Kurdish self-government. US troops are stationed in the east of the region, the mostly Kurdish SDF were supported by the Americans. A few weeks ago, US special forces killed the acting IS boss Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Kuraishi in Idlib.
