Air strikes kill 23 civilians in Daesh-controlled territory
US says the days of Daesh controlling territory in Syria ‘are coming to an end’
Air strikes killed at least 23 civilians yesterday in one of the last pockets of Daesh-controlled territory in Syria, according to Syrian regime media and an opposition-linked monitoring group, as US-backed forces in the area announced they have resumed their campaign against the extremists.
The US said the days of Daesh controlling territory in Syria “are coming to an end.”
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said it was not clear if the air strikes in the Hassakeh province were carried out by the US-led coalition or the Iraqi air force. It said the strikes killed 10 children, six women and seven elderly people. The regime-run Syrian News Agency said 25 civilians were killed in the air strikes south of the town of Shadadi, blaming the US-led coalition.
The strikes took place in an area where the US-backed and Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) are battling Daesh.
Lelwa Abdullah, an SDF spokeswoman in the adjacent Deir Al Zor province, said yesterday the final phase of a large operation against Daesh in eastern Syria has begun. She said the SDF will “liberate those areas and secure the Syrian-Iraqi border and end the Daesh presence in eastern Syria once and for all.”
The SDF had redeployed hundreds of its forces to western Syria after Turkish troops attacked the Kurdish-held Afrin enclave earlier this year, effectively putting operations against Daesh on hold.
Abdullah said Daesh attacks have increased in recent weeks in parts of eastern Syria near the border with Iraq as the extremist group seeks to regroup. She said the clearing operations will take place with the help of the US-led coalition and Iraqi forces across the border.
A series of evacuation deals for areas around the capital have been criticised by the UN and rights groups, which say they amount to forced displacement.
‘Forced displacement’
Elsewhere in Syria yesterday, more than three dozen Syrians held for years by Al Qaidalinked insurgents in the country’s northwest were released as part of a deal to hand over areas around Damascus to the regime, the regime media reported.
It is the latest in a series of evacuation deals for areas around the capital that have been besieged for years and subjected to heavy bombardment by regime forces. The UN and rights groups have criticised the deals, saying they amount to forced displacement. The latest deal concerns Yarmouk, a Palestinian refugee camp. Daesh militants still control parts of the camp and a neighbouring area, where they are battling regime forces.
The 42 people freed yesterday are the first batch of more than 80 to be released. Under the deal, fighters from the Al Qaida-linked Hayat Tahrir Al Sham group will withdraw from Yarmouk, while about 5,000 people in Foua and Kfraya, two northwestern villages besieged by insurgents, will be allowed to relocate to regimeheld areas.
Al Ikhbariya said nearly 20 wounded or ill from the two besieged villages were evacuated yesterday. But the evacuation has apparently stalled amid security concerns, with the residents asking that they all be evacuated together instead of in batches.
The Observatory said five buses carrying around 200 insurgents from Yarmouk arrived at the handover area south of Aleppo. The UN has warned of “catastrophic consequences” for the remaining inhabitants of Yarmouk as the fighting continues.
The camp was established in 1957 for Palestinians who fled the 1948 war with Israel, and later evolved into a densely populated urban neighbourhood that was home to tens of thousands of Palestinians and Syrians. It has seen heavy fighting since the early days of the seven-year-old civil war, and Daesh pushed into the district in 2015.
“Yarmouk and its inhabitants have endured indescribable pain and suffering over years of conflict,” Pierre Krdhenbhl, the head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, said last week.
The latest fighting has displaced around 5,000 civilians from Yarmouk.