IS surrenders rest of Damascus Russia: U.S. honored red lines

Pro-government forces to regain Syrian capital

BEIRUT — Islamic State militants agreed to give up their last pocket in Damascus on Friday, state media reported, as the government seeks to retake the entire Syrian capital and its surrounding areas for the first time since 2011.

The capitulation followed a week of escalations by pro-government forces against the Is-held Hajar al-aswad neighborhood and Yarmouk Palestinian camp in Damascus.

Pro-government forces bombed the two areas and blanketed them with artillery fire in a crescendo of violence captured by the state-affiliated Central Military Media outlet on Friday.

The U.N.’S refugee agency warned that the spiraling violence was a threat to 12,000 Palestinian refugees still there — Palestinians who came to Syria since 1948, and their descendants.

Militants were given the option to stay and reconcile with the government or leave on buses to Is-held territory in the eastern Syrian desert, the SANA state news agency said. It did not say when the relocations would begin.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group reported the militants had accepted the deal.

But government airstrikes on Yarmouk resumed Friday evening, putting the fate of the agreement in question.

In 2012, Syrian rebels and army defectors pushed pro-government forces out of Yarmouk in response to a spiraling crackdown by state security services against anti-government protests.

Pro-government forces, including Palestinian factions, responded by putting the camp under siege, eventually cutting off food and water by 2014, and bombing and shelling it continuously.

Residents trickled out to neighboring areas, and the camp’s population dwindled from an estimated 200,000 people to a few thousand today, not including the IS militants, who took

MOSCOW — Russia’s foreign minister said Friday that the U.S. sought out and respected Moscow’s positions in Syria when it launched its airstrikes last week.

Lavrov noted that despite the escalating tensions between Moscow and Washington, the U.S. made sure it didn’t harm any Russian personnel and positions during the strikes against the regime of President Bashar Assad after a suspected chemical attack on the town of Douma.

“We told them where our red lines were, including the geographical red lines,” Lavrov told Russian state television. “The results have shown that they haven’t crossed those lines.” over the camp following a battle with rebels in 2015.

Also Friday, the U.s.-led international coalition against the Islamic State group announced the capture of a Syrian-born German IS operative previously tied to a 9/11-linked jihadist cell.

U.S. Col. Ryan Dillon said the coalition’s local allies in Syria captured Mohammed Haydar Zammar in northeast Syria about four weeks ago.