Us-allied force celebrates victory over IS in Syria

BAGHOUZ, Syria — U.s.-backed forces declared military victory over the Islamic State group in Syria on Saturday after liberating the last pocket of territory held by the militants, marking the end of a brutal selfstyled caliphate that the group carved out in large parts of Iraq and Syria in 2014.

The nearly five-year war that has devastated cities and towns across northern Syria and Iraq ended in Baghouz, a minor border village where the cornered militants made their last stand under a grueling siege for weeks.

On Saturday, the Syrian Democratic Forces raised their bright yellow banner from a shell-pocked house where the militants once flew their notorious black flag. Below it stretched a field shattered by the battle, pitted by trenches and bomb craters and littered with scorched tents, twisted wreckage of burnedout vehicles, unspent explosives and few remaining corpses.

“Baghouz is free, and the military victory against Daesh has been achieved,” tweeted Mustafa Bali, a spokesman for the Kurdish-led SDF, referring to IS by its Arabic acronym.

The fall of Baghouz brings to a close a global campaign against the Islamic State group that raged in two countries, spanned two U.S. presidencies and saw a U.s.-led coalition unleash more than 100,000 airstrikes.

The campaign put an end to the militants’ proto-state, which at its height four years ago was the size of Britain and home to about 8 million people. But the extremist group still maintains a scattered presence and sleeper cells across Syria and Iraq. It’s not known whether the group’s leader, Abu Bakr al-baghdadi, is alive or where he might be hiding.

IS affiliates in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, Afghanistan and other countries continue to pose a threat, and the group’s ideology has inspired so-called lonewolf attacks that had little if any connection to its leadership.

The end of the “caliphate” also marks a new phase in Syria’s civil war, now in its ninth year. The country is carved up, with the Iranian- and Russianbacked government of President Bashar Assad controlling the west, center and south, the U.s.-backed Kurdishled forces holding the north and east, and Turkish allies controlling a pocket in the north. The fear now is of new conflict among those players.