Besieged Daesh refuses to surrender

More than 300 Daesh militants surrounded in a tiny area in eastern Syria are refusing to surrender to U.S.-backed Syrian forces and are trying to negotiate an exit, Syrian activists and a person close to the negotiations said Monday.

The development comes amid Daesh’s last stand in the village of Baghouz, where militants are hiding among hundreds of civilians and preventing them from leaving.

It also will likely further delay a declaration on Daesh’s territorial defeat that U.S.-backed Syrian forces were hoping to make last week.

A person familiar with the negotiations said the militants are asking for a corridor to the rebel-held northwestern province of Idlib, and demand that they be allowed to leave along with the evacuated civilians. It was not clear how the current standoff would be resolved.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an activist group that monitors the civil war in Syria, said another request by Daesh to be evacuated to neighbouring Iraq was also rejected.

From a self-proclaimed caliphate that once spread across much of Syria and Iraq, Daesh, also known as ISIS or ISIL, has been knocked back to a speck of land in Baghouz in Deir el-Zour province, on the countries’ shared border.

The SDF and the coalition have battled to uproot the militants from villages and towns on the eastern banks of the Euphrates since September. The capture of the last pocket of Daesh territory in Syria or Iraq would mark the end of a fouryear global campaign to crush the extremist group’s caliphate.