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Turkey: Syrian Kurds Releasing Captured ISIS Personnel

Turkey’s defense minister says Islamic State prisoners were “abducted” after being released by Kurds overseeing the jail in a northeastern Syrian town. “When we went there, we saw that it had been emptied by the YPG, and the Islamic State militants there had been abducted. We determined this through photographs and film,” Defense Minister Hulusi Akar told media representatives Monday in Ankara. Turkey is in the seventh day of an incursion into a border strip just inside Syria aimed at driving out the Kurdish YPG militia and a provisional government set up there by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces after they played an instrumental role in stripping ISIS of territory it controlled. Leaders of the YPG, whose members were abruptly abandoned by the United States earlier last week, had warned that if faced by a Turkish onslaught, they could not promise to retain control of jails holding ISIS prisoners, and detention camps hold some of their families.