Daesh defeated in Raqqa
US military: 90% of the city retaken; SDF clearing stadium of mines UK spy chief: Terrorists can execute deadly attack plans in just days
The fighting was over and the alliance of Kurdish and Arab militias was clearing the city’s stadium of mines and any remaining militants, said Rojda Felat, commander of the Raqqa campaign for the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).
A formal declaration of victory in Raqqa will soon be made, once the city has been cleared of mines and any possible Daesh sleeper cells, said SDF spokesman Talal Selo.
In Washington, the US military said that about 90 percent of Raqqa had been retaken from Daesh but it expected the SDF to face pockets of resistance.
Col. Ryan Dillon, a spokesman for the anti-Daesh coalition, speaking from his headquarters in Baghdad, said that even after Raqqa is fully liberated, more fighting will be required to achieve the military defeat of Daesh. He said there are still about 100 Daesh fighters in Raqqa and an estimated 6,500 in Syria and Iraq combined.
The fall of Raqqa, where Daesh staged euphoric parades after its string of lightning victories in 2014, is a potent symbol of the terrorist movement’s collapsing fortunes.
Daesh has lost much of its territory in Syria and Iraq this year, including its most prized possession, Mosul. In Syria, it has been forced back into a strip of the Euphrates valley and surrounding desert.
The SDF, backed by a US-led international alliance, has been fighting since June to take the city which Daesh used to plan attacks abroad.
A Reuters witness said militia fighters celebrated in the streets, chanting slogans from their vehicles. The fighters and commanders clasped their arms round each other, smiling, in a battle-scarred landscape of rubble and ruined buildings around the main square.
The flags in the stadium and others waved in the city streets were of the SDF, its strongest militia the Kurdish YPG (People’s Protection Units), and the YPG’s female counterpart, the YPJ (Women’s Protection Units).
Fighters hauled down the black flag of Daesh, the last still flying over the city, from the National Hospital near the stadium.
“We do still know there are still IEDs (improvised explosive devices) and booby traps in and among the areas that ISIS (Daesh) once held, so the SDF will continue to clear deliberately through areas,” said Dillon.
In a sign that the four-month battle for Raqqa had been in its last stages, Dillon said there were no coalition airstrikes there on Monday.
Meanwhile, the head of the MI5 domestic intelligence agency said that Britain faces the most acute threat ever from radical militants seeking to inflict mass attacks, often with spontaneous plots that take just days to bring to execution.
After four militant attacks this year that killed 36 people in Britain — the deadliest spate since the London “7/7” bombings of July 2005, MI5 chief Andrew Parker said the threat was at the highest tempo he had seen in 34 years of espionage.
“The threat is more diverse than I have ever known: Plots developed here in the UK, but plots directed from overseas as well, plots online, complex scheming and also crude stabbings, lengthy planning but also spontaneous attacks,” said Parker.
“Attacks can sometimes accelerate from inception, through planning, to action in just a handful of days,” he said in a speech in central London. The director general of MI5 rarely gives public speeches. The last was in 2015.
RAQQA/LONDON: US-backed militias in Syria declared victory over Daesh in its capital Raqqa on Tuesday, raising flags over the last militant footholds after a fourmonth battle.