US prevents evacuation of IS fighters
Convoy bombed despite pact
US WARPLANES on Wednesday blocked a convoy of hundreds of Islamic State fighters who were heading to eastern Syria under the terms of a deal brokered by Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement.
The 310 fighters were travelling to the Iraqi-Syrian border in a convoy of 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 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 publicly announced 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 Islamic State-controlled town of Bukamal on the Syrian border with Iraq, according to a US military spokesman, Colonel Ryan Dillon.
The strikes took place in the vicinity of a desert town called Hamaymah, and though front lines are fluid and shifting in that part of Syria, it is the US military’s understanding that the convoy is now stuck in Syrian government-held territory, Dillon said.
“Isis (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, using an alternative acronym for the Islamic State.
The US military said airstrikes targeted a number of individual vehicles and fighters that were “clearly identified as Isis”.
The strikes and the criticisms triggered a defensive response from Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, who called the deal a “great victory” in a televised speech on Monday.
“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,” Nasrallah said on Wednesday, referring to the province where the IS fighters were headed.
He pointed out that the fighters were being transferred from one border region of Syria to another, not to Iraq.
But the planned relocation of the fighters to a town right on the Iraqi border, where they would have easily been able to reinforce militants in Iraq, infuriated many Iraqis.
In addition to sending thousands of fighters to help Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Hezbollah has provided training and advice to some of the Iranian-backed Shia militias fighting the IS in Iraq.
Anger erupted after photographs showing the armed IS fighters travelling across Syria in air-conditioned buses one of them marked with the words “Happy Journey” began circulating on social media.
But the leader of one of the Hezbollah-allied Iraqi militias countered the criticisms.
Hadi al-Amiri, who heads the Badr Organisation, said that negotiating with the IS could save lives, and that he wished there had been a similar deal to avert the high death toll in the battle for the Iraqi city of Mosul.
Under the arrangement negotiated over the weekend, the fighters and their relatives were allowed to leave in return for the bodies of nine captured Lebanese soldiers, the bodies of three Hezbollah fighters and the body of an Iranian military adviser.