Kurdish forces put the figure much higher, at 1,500.
Syria’s ministry of interior [Jolani’s Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham terrorists] said Tuesday that 120 Islamic State members escaped from a prison in northeast Syria a day earlier, amid clashes between government forces and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, which guards the prison.
Security forces recaptured 81 of the escapees, “while intensive security efforts continue to pursue the remaining fugitives and take the necessary legal measures against them,” the statement said.
The SDF and the government have traded blame over the escape at a prison in the town of Shaddadeh, amid the breakdown of a ceasefire deal between the two sides.
Also Tuesday, the SDF accused “Damascus-affiliated factions” of cutting off water supplies to the al-Aqtan prison near the city of Raqqa, which it called a “blatant violation of humanitarian standards.”
The SDF, the main U.S.-backed force that fought IS in Syria, controls more than a dozen prisons in the northeast where some 9,000 IS members have been held for years without trial. Many of the detained extremists are believed to have carried out atrocities in Syria and Iraq after IS declared a caliphate in June 2014 over large parts of Syria and Iraq.

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