America blocks IS evacuation
Warplanes bomb convoy freed by Hezbollah-backed deal
US WARPLANES have blocked a convoy of hundreds of Islamic State (IS) fighters who were heading to eastern Syria under the terms of a deal brokered by Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement.
The fighters were travelling to the Iraqi-Syrian border in buses after Hezbollah and the Syrian government permitted them to withdraw from a besieged enclave on the Lebanese-Syrian border.
The deal triggered a rare outburst of public anger against Hezbollah even among some of its closest allies, notably in Iraq, which is gearing up for an offensive to reclaim Iraqi territory adjoining the area to which the fighters were relocating.
Negotiated withdrawals have been a common tactic in Syria’s six-year-old war and have enabled the Syrian government to reassert its authority over many of the areas that fell to opposition control.
But this was the first public instance of a deal involving the IS on any battle front in Syria or Iraq since the war against the group geared up three years ago.
The criticisms laid bare a widening rift between the US-led coalition battling the IS and the rival coalition fighting the extremists that includes the Shia Hezbollah movement, Syria and the Iranian-backed Shia militias in Iraq.
On Wednesday morning, the US-led coalition moved to prevent the convoy from reaching its destination, cratering the road and blowing up a bridge leading to the IS-controlled town of Bukamal on the Syrian border with Iraq, according to a US military spokesman, Colonel Ryan Dillon. The strikes took place near a desert town called Hamaymah, and though front lines are fluid and shifting, it is the US military’s understanding that the convoy is now stuck in Syrian government-held territory, Dillon said.
“IS is a global threat, and to relocate terrorists from one place to another for someone else to deal with is not acceptable to the coalition,” he said.
The US military said airstrikes targeted a number of individual vehicles and fighters that were “clearly identified as IS”.
The strikes and the criticisms triggered a defensive response from Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, who called the deal a “great victory”. “The number of those transferred was not big: 310 tired, broken, militants who had surrendered and lost the willpower to fight will not change the course of the battle in Deir al-Zour, where there are tens of thousands of fighters.”