IS makes last-ditch stand

Syria says extremists are clinging to an area of less than a square kilometre

THE US-backed Syrian militia fighting the Islamic State in its last toehold in Syria says there are more than 1 000 civilians trapped in the tiny area and that the militant group is preventing them from leaving.

Mustafa Bali, a spokesperson for the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), said yesterday that IS had closed all the roads in and out. SDF officials have said the extremists were hiding among civilians in a tented village and using a network of caves and tunnels.

IS, which once ruled a proto-state in large parts of Syria and Iraq, is clinging to an area of less than a square kilometre in the village of Baghouz, in eastern Syria.

US-backed fighters were poised to capture Islamic State’s last, tiny enclave on the Euphrates, bringing its self-declared caliphate to the brink of total defeat as US President Donald Trump spoke of “100% victory”.

Trump said the caliphate was “ready to fall” and that the US was asking European allies to take back more than 800 Islamic State fighters captured in Syria and put them on trial.

“The US is asking Britain, France, Germany and other European allies to take back over 800 ISIS fighters that we captured in Syria and put them on trial,” he said in a tweet. “The caliphate is ready to fall.

“The US does not want to watch as these ISIS fighters permeate Europe, which is where they are expected to go. We do so much, and spend so much. Time for others to step up and do the job that they are so capable of doing. We are pulling back after 100% caliphate victory.”

Trump has sworn to pull US forces from Syria after Islamic State’s territorial defeat, raising questions over the fate of Washington’s Kurdish allies and Turkish involvement in northeast Syria.

As the SDF advanced under heavy US airstrikes in recent days, a stream of civilians fled the few square miles of hamlets and farmland that remain within Islamic State’s caliphate, along with defeated jihadists trying to escape unnoticed.

Though Islamic State fighters still hold out in a pocket of central Syria’s remote desert, and have gone underground as sleeper cells in Iraqi cities, able to launch new attacks, their territorial rule is, for now, almost over.

It ends a project launched from the great mediaeval mosque of Mosul in northern Iraq in 2014, when Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi seized advantage of regional chaos to proclaim himself caliph, suzerain over all Muslim people and land.

He set up a governing system with courts, a currency and flag that at its height stretched from north-west Syria almost to Baghdad, encompassing some two million inhabitants.

But its reign of terror over minorities and other perceived enemies, marked by massacres, sexual slavery and the beheading of hostages, drew a forceful international military response that pushed it steadily back from 2015.

Most of the fighters left in Baghouz were foreigners, the SDF has said.

The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the SDF had taken control of all of Baghouz after the jihadists there surrendered. SDF officials denied this.

Spokesperson Mustafa Bali said the SDF had caught several militants trying to flee among the civilians. Others had handed themselves over.

Their fate, and that of their families, has befuddled foreign governments, with few ready to repatriate citizens who pledged allegiance to a group sworn to their destruction, but who might be hard to legally prosecute. The SDF does not want to hold them indefinitely.

The fate of Baghdadi is also a mystery. He has led the group since 2010, when it was still an underground al-Qaeda offshoot in Iraq.