At least 20 Daesh inmates escaped a prison in Syria on Monday amid a mutiny following the deadly earthquake in Türkiye, a source at the facility told Agence France-Presse (AFP).

The military police prison in the town of Rajo near the Turkish border holds about 2,000 inmates, with about 1,300 of them suspected to be Daesh fighters, said the source.

The prison also holds fighters from the PKK terrorist group's Syrian offshoot, the YPG.

"After the earthquake struck, Rajo was affected, and inmates started to mutiny and took control of parts of the prison," said the official at Rajo jail, which is controlled by Turkish-backed opposition forces.

"About 20 prisoners fled ... who are believed to be IS militants," the source said, using an alternative acronym for Daesh.

The 7.7 magnitude quake, followed by dozens of aftershocks in the region scaling as high as 6.6 magnitudes, caused damage to the prison, with walls and doors cracking, the source added.

The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor said it could not verify whether prisoners had escaped but confirmed there was a mutiny.

At least 1,444 people died Monday across Syria after the devastating earthquake that had its epicenter in southwestern Türkiye, the government and rescuers said.

In opposition-held parts of the country's northwest, at least 733 people were killed and more than 2,100 injured, according to the White Helmets rescue group.

The incident in Rajo comes on the heels of a Daesh attack in December on a security complex in their former de facto Syrian capital of Raqa, which aimed to free fellow militants from prison there.

Six members of the YPG elements that control the area were killed in the foiled assault.

Rajo was liberated from PKK/YPG terrorists in a Turkish operation in 2018 as part of Türkiye’s efforts to rid northeastern Syria of terrorist elements and establish a security strip along its border. The PKK and YPG have controlled much of the region since Syrian regime leader Bashar Assad's forces withdrew in 2012, a year after the civil war broke out in the country with the brutal repression of peaceful protests and escalated to pull in foreign powers and global militants.

Nearly half a million people have been killed, and the conflict has forced around half of the country's prewar population from their homes, with many seeking refuge in Türkiye.

Since its formal defeat in Iraq in 2017 and significant loss of territory in Syria since 2015, Daesh fighters have been leading their operations underground and losing their leaders to military operations one after the other. The group’s last three leaders, all Iraqis, were killed in Syria in recent years outside the areas it once purported to rule.

The last Daesh leader Abu al-Hassan al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi, succeeding Abu Ibrahim al-Hashemi al-Qurayshi, who committed suicide during a U.S. raid earlier in 2022, was killed mid-October by the Free Syrian Army in southern Syria, as confirmed by the U.S. Central Command. The group’s founder Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was hunted down by the Americans in a raid in Idlib in October 2019.

Remaining Daesh militants, whose numbers reach thousands, mostly hide in remote territory across the region but are still able to carry out significant insurgent-style attacks.