Inside Syria’s teeming Isis prisons: broken men, child inmates and orders to break free

They are the remains of Islamic State, a once sprawling kingdom built by foot soldiers from around the world to terrorise and enslave those they conquered.

Hollow-eyed and gaunt, the men and boys look broken. Days are spent in halting conversation with cell mates who still have the energy, or staring blankly across the teeming, fetid cells. Many have lost limbs in the battles that led them here. Others have lost eyes and ears, a result, they said, of air strikes.

As Islamist militants fought in March for their last square mile in eastern Syria, fighters and families from more than 60 countries streamed out of their stronghold to surrender into the custody of the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, a Kurdish-led force.

Eight months on, more than 10,000 men and children are still crammed into at least 25 makeshift prisons, lingering in legal twilight. The Kurdish-led force that holds them does not have the capacity to investigate or try them, and their home governments are mostly unwilling to take them back to face trials there.

Amid the abrupt withdrawal of US troops and advancing Turkish and Syrian government forces, the shifting local landscape is posing an increasingly urgent question: what will become of these men and the potential threat they pose for the world outside their prison walls?

“Can you tell us anything?” a rail-thin German man, Zakaria Mohammed Ismail, 53, asked a reporter, craning his head through a window in his cell’s iron door.