Reports from different news agencies all reported radical jihadists were released from Syria prisons at the start of the war.
https://www.newsweek.com/how-syrias-assad-helped-forge-isis-255631
Syrian Tarek Alghorani was sentenced to seven years in jail for the contents of his blog. Since his amnesty in 2011, he has been an active opponent of the Damascus regime. "There were around 1,500 people in there," he recalls, outside a sleepy midtown café in Tunis. "There were about ten of us bloggers, around one hundred Kurds and the rest were just normal people. I'd say that, when they went in, around 90 percent were simply normal Muslims."
"The situation in there was like the middle ages. There were too many people and not enough space. There wasn't enough water to drink. There wasn't enough food to eat and what there was would have been ignored by dogs in the street. Torture was an everyday reality. After years in there, all of those people became Salafists and in a bad, bad way."
His fellow prisoners were members of ISIS. "Abu Muhammad al-Joulani, (founder of the Jihadist group, Jabhat al-Jabhat al-Nusra) was rumored to be there. Mohammed Haydar Zammar, (one of the organisers of the 9/11 attacks) was there. This is where the Syrian part of ISIS was born," he said.
Alghorani is convinced that members of ISIS were released strategically by Assad. "From the first days of the revolution (in March 2011), Assad denounced the organisation as being the work of radical Salafists, so he released the Salafists he had created in his prisons to justify the claim ... If you do not have an enemy, you create an enemy."
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https://www.independent.co.uk/voice...esponsible-for-more-deaths-than-a6762361.html
when Syrians tired of corruption and repression rose up against Assad, the government’s strategy seems to have been to crush moderates and foster militants to win outside support by appearing the lesser evil. This strategy is now paying off - and not just with Russia, which came to the rescue of Assad by bombing moderate rebel forces as well as Isis. Once again, jihadists were released from jails, the cells then stuffed with dissidents and students held in horrific conditions.
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https://www.thenational.ae/world/as...ng-says-former-intelligence-official-1.319620
according to the former security officer it was the regime that intentionally exacerbated radicalism shortly after the uprising began in March 2011 in order to make itself the least bad choice for the international community and Syrians alike.
"The regime did not just open the door to the prisons and let these extremists out, it facilitated them in their work, in their creation of armed brigades," said the former member of Syria's Military Intelligence Directorate, one of more than a dozen of Syria's secretive intelligence agencies.
The former officer said most of the releases happened over a period of four months up until October 2011 and that the project was overseen by the General Security Directorate, another of Syria's widely feared security organisations and one of the most important.
Under pressure from opposition groups and the international community, the regime set free hundreds of detainees from jail in the first few months of the uprising as part of an amnesty.
But many political prisoners and protesters backing the peaceful uprising were kept in prison, while others, including known Islamist radicals and violent offenders, were quietly released.
