Syria force launches assault on IS group’s last bastion
NEAR BAGHOUZ, Syria: Kurdish-led forces on Friday launched a final assault against diehard jihadist fighters clinging to the last sliver of their “caliphate” in eastern Syria.
The US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) said they resumed their advance after plucking a last batch of civilians from the tiny riverside hamlet of Baghouz where jihadists are holed up.
The offensive on a redoubt barely half a square kilometre in size will cap a nearly six-month operation against the Islamic State group’s last bastions in the Euphrates Valley.
The “operation to clear the last remaining pocket of ISIS has just started” at 6pm (1600 GMT), SDF spokesman Mustefa Bali announced on social media, using another acronym for the jihadists.
An unknown number of holdout IS fighters are hunkered down in a small area on the edge of Baghouz for a desperate final stand against the SDF.
Bali said the decision to resume the push came after the evacuation of the last civilians willing to leave the enclave and following the release of captured SDF fighters.
“The people we evacuated today told us that no civilians were inside and that those still inside did not want to leave.v If during the advance we discover that there are still civilians we will isolate them from the fighting but we are forced to push ahead,” he told AFP in the nearby base of Al-Omar.
He declined to comment on how long the last phase of the offensive might take but the SDF’s general commander Mazloum Kobani said Thursday he expected final victory to be achieved within a week.
An SDF commander told AFP that his force is advancing slowly and with caution because of the threat of underground tunnels and improvised explosive devices.
A few dozen people – mostly women, children and elderly men – were evacuated from Baghouz on Friday and trucked to a screening centre.
Their number was in sharp decline from the thousands who had been pouring out of the ISheld pocket in recent days.
At an SDF screening point 20 kilometres (12 miles) north of Baghouz, an Egyptian woman told AFP that IS was preventing men under 40 from quitting the redoubt, including her 27-year-old husband, ahead of a final battle.
Nearby, the SDF patted men down and searched their belongings.
With aerial backing from the US-led coalition, IS fighters who have been besieged for weeks are unlikely to resist very long.
The offensive will deal a final death blow to the “caliphate” which IS supremo Abu Bakr alBaghdadi proclaimed in mid-2014 and once covered territory the size of Britain.