Militants are handed over to Iraq forces
OUTSIDE BAGHOUZ, Syria — U.S.-backed Syrian forces fighting the Islamic State handed over more than 150 Iraqi members of the group to Iraq, an Iraqi security official said Thursday, marking the biggest repatriation from Syria of captured militants so far.
The official said the Islamic State militants were handed over to the Iraqi side late Wednesday, and that they were now in a “safe place” under investigation.
The transfer comes as the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces is involved in a standoff over the final sliver of land held by Islamic State in eastern Syria, close to the Iraqi border.
Many believe the Islamic State threat would not end with the pocket’s recapture and that an insurgency by the group is under way. And in a foreboding sign, twin suicide attacks hit a village miles away from the Islamic State pocket, leaving more than a dozen people dead in a rare targeting of civilians.
A few hundred people — many of them women and terrified-looking children — were evacuated Wednesday from the group’s tiny tent camp on the banks of the Euphrates River, signaling an imminent end to the territorial rule of the militants’ self-declared “caliphate” that once stretched across a third of both Syria and Iraq.
Some 300 militants, along with hundreds of civilians believed to be mostly their families, have been under siege for more than a week in the tent camp in the village of Baghouz. It wasn’t clear how many civilians remain holed up inside, along with the militants.
More trucks were sent in Thursday to the tip of a corridor leading to the camp to evacuate more people, but journalists on the ground outside Baghouz said no civilians emerged.
“We thought more civilians will come out today and we sent 50 trucks over,” said an SDF commander who goes by his nom de guerre, Aram. “We don’t know why they are not coming out.”
Earlier this month, Iraqi Prime Minister Abdul-Mahdi said Iraq will take back all Iraqi Islamic State militants in Syria, as well as thousands of their family members.
The Iraqi security official, who spoke Thursday on condition of anonymity, said the SDF are holding more than 20,000 Iraqis suspected of being Islamic State members as well as their families in prisons and camps in northern Syria.
An intelligence official, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, said the first group of 150 have been moved to the capital Baghdad for interrogation.