Daesh defends last Syria redoubt
near baghouz — Militant fighters made a desperate last stand in eastern Syria on Wednesday, while their wives and children fled the final, blood-soaked implosion of the Daesh group’s “caliphate”.
The US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces launched a final push to expel Daesh fighters from the sole remaining morsel of the protostate they declared in 2014 across parts of Syria and Iraq.
Thousands of people have flooded out of the so-called “Baghouz pocket” near the Iraqi border in recent days — mostly women and children, but also suspected militants.
On Wednesday, about 300 women and children, almost all of them Iraqi, sat in small groups in an open field serving as the main civilian reception location. They fled Baghouz by foot on Tuesday afternoon,
walking four kilometres to a first SDF-held position, before being shuttled on trucks and military vehicles to the main spot at dusk. Most had spent the night out in the open.
“I tried to go get a blanket for my kids but there weren’t enough,” said Umm Ayham, a young Syrian
woman from the northern province of Raqa.
“Some people had lit a fire, burning plastic they found on the ground and baby diapers, so I went by it to get warm.”
Hundreds of people fled the Daesh holdout in the night of Tuesday to Wednesday, SDF spokesman Mustefa Bali said. Inside on Wednesday, the Kurdish-led SDF were advancing slowly against hundreds of militants.
“We have retaken positions lost in a counterattack launched two days ago by Daesh. We have progressed and taken new positions,” Bali said.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights also said the SDF fighters were making painstaking progress. “There are mines throughout the sector,” said Rami Abdel Rahman, the head of the Britain-based war monitor.
“The SDF are firing rockets,” he said, and both sides were locked in heavy clashes on the edges of Baghouz village. Since December, more than 38,000 people, mostly wives and children of Daesh fighters, have fled into SDF-held areas, the Observatory says. —