Fleeing offensives, where are the IS militants going?

BEIRUT: The Islamic State group is under attack across the remaining parts of its self-proclaimed caliphate, but what happens to its thousands of fighters as their group loses grip on territory? Facing multiple offensives, the jihadist group has lost the Libyan city of Sirte, Iraq’s Mosul and Ramadi, and is now on the verge of being ousted from its former Syrian stronghold Raqa. At its peak IS counted tens of thousands of fighters among its ranks, with US officials estimating as many as 40,000 foreign fighters travelled to join the jihadists over the years.

How many have been killed, arrested? Forces attacking IS have regularly reported the deaths and arrests of large numbers of jihadists, but their figures are often vague and cannot be independently verified. “We can’t give an exact number of those arrested but we can say that there are a good number of them being detained by our forces,” said Mustafa Bali, spokesman for the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces currently battling IS in Syria. In Iraq’s Mosul, journalists saw the bodies of jihadists killed in fighting on the streets, but they numbered no more than a few dozen at any time, far less than the hundreds authorities often said had died in combat.

Other IS fighters may have been arrested and then executed. In July, the Human Rights Watch group accused a unit of Iraq’s army of carrying out summary executions of suspected jihadist prisoners. —AFP