Isis driven from its one-time capital
SYRIA: United States-backed forces in Syria claimed yesterday they had full control of the Islamic State’s one-time capital of Raqqa, heralding an end to the militants’ presence in their most symbolically important stronghold and raising new questions about the US future role in Syria.
Mustafa Abdi, a spokesman for the Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF, said military operations had halted and the joint Kurdish-Arab force were clearing the city of explosive devices and hunting for sleeper cells.
‘‘There is an air of jubilation in the city. People are overjoyed that they are finally rid of this scourge.’’
The US military said a formal victory announcement will come after SDF forces are sure no pockets of Islamic State resistance remain in the city.
Kurdish and Arab fighters took to the streets to celebrate the end of the battle they have fought for four months, parading around the deserted, destroyed city, according to photographs posted on social media. One showed the offensive’s commander, Rojda Felat, waving a large yellow-and-red SDF flag in Naim Square, where the Islamic State carried out its beheadings.
By the time the battle was over, Raqqa had lost all strategic significance to the group that had once used the city to showcase its brutality and plot attacks against the West. The fall of the Iraqi city of Mosul in July and the loss of large areas of territory in east Syria to Syrian government forces leave the militants in control of only one sizeable stretch of territory, spanning the Iraqi-Syrian border.
But the capture of Raqqa by the SDF, backed by US airstrikes and American advisers on the ground, nonetheless marks a milestone in the US-led war against the Islamic State.
In Washington, a US military spokesman, Colonel Ryan Dillon, called it ‘‘momentous’’. He said Islamic State has now lost 87 per cent of the territory it once controlled and that 6500 fighters remain, out of tens of thousands at the peak of its prowess.
The victory also intensifies growing questions about what comes next. The remaining Islamic State strongholds in Syria lie to the south in the province of Deir al-Zour, where the Syrian government and its Iranianbacked and Russian allies are making fast progress.
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