ISIS faces final territorial defeat in Syria battle

HANOI: North Korean leader Kim Jong-un left Hanoi on Saturday for Pyongyang by train, after concluding a historic state visit to Vietnam, following his failed summit with US President Donald Trump earlier in the week.

Before leaving for his country, he visited the mausoleum of Vietnamese national hero Ho Chi Minh, with whom his grandfather Kim Il-sung met in Hanoi in 1964. That marked the last official visit by a North Korean leader to Vietnam, reports Efe news.

After the short stop, he travelled by car to the Dong Dang station on the border with China and boarded a high-security train to return to his country.

A crowd waving Vietnamese and North Korean flags had gathered at the gates of the railway station to bid farewell to the leader of North Korea.

Kim Jong-un waved to the gathered crowd and boarded the train, flanked by his security personnel.

On Friday, Hanoi hosted a grand dinner for Kim Jongun. Earlier in the day, he met Vietnamese President Nguyen Phu Trong. Islamic State faces final territorial defeat as the Usbacked Syrian force battling the jihadists said on Saturday it was closing in on the jihadists’ last bastion near the Iraqi border, capping four years of efforts to roll back the group.

While the fall of Baghouz, an eastern Syrian village on the bank of the Euphrates River, would mark a milestone in a global campaign against Islamic State (IS), they remain a threat, using guerrilla tactics and holding some desolate land further west. An array of enemies, both local and international, confronted IS after it declared a modern-day “caliphate” in 2014 across large swathes of territory it had seized in lightning offensives in Syria and neighbouring Iraq.

Thousands of IS fighters, followers and civilians, who had retreated to Baghouz as the group was gradually driven out of those lands, have poured out of the tiny cluster of hamlets and farmlands in Deir al-zor province over the last few weeks.

Their evacuation held up the final assault until Friday evening when the SDF said it had advanced and would not stop until the jihadists were defeated.

“We expect it to be over soon,” Mustafa Bali, a spokesman for the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), told Reuters shortly after sunrise. He said the SDF were advancing on two fronts using medium and heavy weaponry.

IS responded with drones and rockets, and seven SDF fighters have been wounded so far, said commander Adnan Afrin.

The SDF has previously estimated several hundred IS insurgents—believed mostly to be foreigners—to be still in Baghouz, and the Us-led international coalition has described them as the “most hardened” militants.

The SDF’S final advance was slowed for weeks by the jihadists’ extensive use of tunnels and human shields. It has not ruled out the possibility that some militants have crept out, hidden among civilians. When reporters arrived at the village outskirts around midday, columns of smoke could be seen rising from inside but the scene appeared calm. Warplanes hovered in the sky, but no air strikes were observed. A spokesman for the coalition, which supports the Kurdishled SDF, said it was too early to assess the battle’s progress “as it is a complicated situation with many variables”.

The SDF commander-inchief said on Thursday that his force would declare victory within a week. He was later contradicted by US President Donald Trump, who said the SDF had retaken 100 percent of the territory once held by IS.

Washington has about 2,000 troops in Syria, mainly to support the SDF in fighting IS. Trump announced in December he would withdraw all of them, but the White House partially reversed itself last month, saying some 400 troops would stay.

Some 40,000 people bearing various nationalities have left the jihadists’ diminishing territory in the last three months as the SDF sought to oust the militants from remaining pockets.

The number of evacuees streaming out of Baghouz surpassed initial estimates of how many were inside. Afrin told Reuters on Thursday that many of the people leaving the enclave had been sheltering underground in caves and tunnels.

An 27-year-old Indonesian widow who emerged on Friday said she would have liked to stay in IS territory but conceded that conditions had become untenable. “I have no money, I have no food for my baby, no medicine, nothing for my baby, so I must go out,” she said. KABUL: A At least 20 people including children were killed in southern Afghanistan by flash floods that engulfed up to 2,000 homes and swept away cars, the UN agency coordinating relief efforts said on Saturday.

Heavy rains struck Kandahar city and six districts on Friday, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said in a statement. Afghan government officials said hundreds of houses in Herat province were destroyed in flash floods. Flood-affected families have been evacuated to secure areas in the districts and Kandahar city, including schools, mosques and government buildings.

The OCHA statement said a large number of nomadic families, about 500 people, were stranded on the river bank and there was an urgent need for air support to rescue them.