U.S.-backed Syrian forces on edge amid concern ISIS could try to stage a comeback on heels of Assad’s ouster

Eastern Syria — CBS News was among the first news outlets to speak on Thursday with Travis Timmerman, an American who was feared dead by family and friends, days after he was freed from a notorious prison in Syria. He said he had spent seven months jailed by the regime of now-ousted dictator Bashar al-Assad before rebels broke down his cell door.

But he was just one of the many thousands of people locked up over half a century of iron-fisted rule by Assad, and his father before him. Many remain missing, and the rebel forces, along with the families of those who’ve disappeared without a trace, have mounted a herculean effort since Assad fled to Russia on Sunday to find those who vanished.

But there’s one group of prisoners that Syria’s still-evolving, rebel-led leadership wants to keep behind bars. Five years ago, as U.S.-backed forces wrested control of land held for years by ISIS, CBS News visited a prison where the members of the terrorist group were being held. This week, CBS News returned to the prison in eastern Syria. Guards said it was still holding thousands of ISIS militants, but they wouldn’t say exactly how many.

The inmates came to join the so-called Islamic State from all over the world, but for years they’ve been locked up — apparently indefinitely — with 20 or more inmates to a cell.

Prisoner Hadi Alamelhud told us through a small hatch in his cell door that he was a doctor in Windsor, Canada, before he came to live in ISIS’ self-declared Islamic “caliphate.” He said he was captured six years ago, and believed he should be allowed to go back home to Canada.

“We all make mistakes, right?” he told CBS News. “I regret the mistake that I made. Of course.”

Alamelhud said he never fought for ISIS and that he only came as a doctor, “for the people who were in the place. But I am considered as part of the terrorist group.” 

He said that, like most of his cellmates, he regretted coming to live under the group, which he accepted was a terrorist organization, and voiced optimism that he could one day make it back home.

He said his message for the Canadian government would be: “Why haven’t they come? Why haven’t they asked about me?”

The prison is located in part of eastern Syria that’s been held by U.S.-backed forces for years. Those largely Kurdish forces currently control around a quarter of Syria, and the warden told CBS News the inmates haven’t been told about the collapse of the Assad regime, which was based further south in the capital Damascus, because it could be dangerous.

“There would be disobedience,” he said. “ISIS has been on the move recently, and this prison is important for them.”

It was only about five years ago that ISIS was defeated in Syria, with U.S. help, and CBS News was there to witness the capture of Raqqa, the de-facto capital of the Islamic State, several years before that in 2017.

But ISIS is still lurking in the Syrian desert. It’s still a threat. In 2022, ISIS fighters attacked the prison, sparking a jailbreak and a bloody 10-day battle to regain control.

At a camp not far from the prison, American-backed forces are holding family members — around 6,000 women and children — of ISIS fighters who were killed or captured. Guards took CBS News inside the al-Hol camp in an armored vehicle. They said the security situation was deteriorating, because unlike in the prison holding the male militants, word did spread in the camp for families about the fall of the Syrian regime. The guards said that had given the women hope they could be rescued.

One woman there told us her husband was dead and that she’d been held at the camp for six years. Like so many at the facility, she was unrepentant about ISIS’ reign of brutality, and said she still loved the group.

The U.S. military has pummeled ISIS hideouts in Syria with airstrikes since Assad’s fall, determined to stop the terrorists from using the collapse of the regime to stage a comeback.