SDF launches final assault against IS in Syria’s Manbij

The Syria Democratic Forces, with air support from a USled coalition, said they had taken almost complete control of Manbij, where a small number of IS militants have been holed up

BEIRUT: US-backed forces battling IS near the Turkish border in northern Syria said on Friday they had launched a final assault to flush the remaining militants out of the city of Manbij.

The Syria Democratic Forces (SDF), with air support from a US-led coalition, said last week they had taken almost complete control of Manbij, where a small number of IS militants have been holed up.

Friday’s attack is “the last operation and the last assault,” said Sharfan Darwish, a spokesman for the Syrian Arab and Kurdish forces. Darwish said roughly 100 IS militants were left in the centre of the city, and that they were using civilians as human shields. Several civilians were killed trying to flee, he said.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors Syria’s five-year conflict, said around 500 cars had left Manbij carrying IS members and civilians. They are heading northeast towards Jarablus, a town under IS control on the Turkish border, the Observatory said. The convoy carried the final IS members leaving the city, under an agreement between the fighting parties that would not be announced officially, the Observatory said. The SDF could not immediately be reached for comment. The SDF’s offensive, which began at the end of May, quickly captured the countryside surrounding Manbij, but slowed once fighting entered the city. The SDF said it had been avoiding a largescale assault inside Manbij out of concern for civilians.

Dozens of people were killed in suspected US coalition air strikes last month, residents and monitors said. The campaign aims to flush IS out of areas it controls along the Turkish border, which was for years a route through which the group moved fighters and weapons.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia said on Friday it had prevented three Saudi women and seven children from travelling through Lebanon to join the conflict in neighbouring Syria, the Saudi state news agency SPA reported.

The three sisters and their children were detained by Lebanese authorities in Beirut and flown back to Saudi Arabia on Thursday after the husband of one of the women told police they planned to join the war, SPA quoted an interior ministry spokesman as saying.

— Reuters A woman holds a Palestinian flag as she sits in front of Israeli border policemen during a protest in solidarity with Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails, in the occupied West Bank village of Nabi Saleh, near Ramallah on Friday.

– Reuters RESCUED: Civilians gather after they were evacuated by the Syria Democratic Forces (SDF) fighters from an IS-controlled neighbourhood of Manbij, in Aleppo, Syria, on Friday.