Baghdadi’s whereabouts still a mystery
baghouz — US-backed forces said they had captured Daesh’s last shred of territory in eastern Syria at Baghouz on Saturday, ending the group’s self-proclaimed caliphate after years of fighting.
“Baghouz has been liberated. The military victory against Daesh has been accomplished,” Mustafa Bali, a Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) spokesman, wrote on Twitter, declaring the “total elimination of (the) so-called caliphate”.
However, a Reuters journalist at Baghouz said there were still some sounds of shooting and mortar fire.
The final battle lasted weeks as huge numbers of civilians poured out, and for many Kurdish fighters in the SDF, victory was sweeter as it coincided with their “Now Ruz” new year.
Though the defeat of Daesh in Baghouz ends the group’s grip over the militant quasi-state straddling Syria and Iraq that it declared in 2014, it remains a threat.
Some of its fighters still hold out in Syria’s remote central desert and in Iraqi cities they have slipped into the shadows, staging sudden shootings or kidnappings and awaiting a chance to rise again.
The United States believes the group’s leader, Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi, is in Iraq. He stood at the pulpit of the great medieval mosque in Mosul in 2014 to declare himself caliph.
Further afield, militants in Afghanistan, Nigeria and elsewhere have shown no sign of recanting their allegiance to Daesh, and intelligence services say its devotees in the West might plot new attacks.
Still, the fall of Baghouz is a big milestone in a fight against the militant group waged by numerous local and global forces — some of them sworn enemies — over more than four years.
It also marks a big moment in Syria’s eight-year war, wiping out the territory of one of the main contestants, with the rest split between President Bashar Al Assad, Turkey-backed rebels and the Kurdish-led SDF.
Assad and his Iranian allies have sworn to recapture all Syria, and Turkey has threatened to drive out the SDF, which it sees as a terrorist group, by force. The continued presence of US troops in northeast Syria might avert this. Daesh originated as an Al Qaeda faction in Iraq, but it took advantage of Syria’s civil war to seize land there and split from the global militant organisation.
In 2014, it suddenly grabbed Iraq’s Mosul, one of the region’s great historic cities, as well as Syria’s Raqa.
Oil production, extortion and stolen antiquities financed its agenda,.
Those excesses brought an array of forces against it, forcing it from
Baghouz has been liberated. The military victory against Daesh has been accomplished. Mustafa Bali, Spokesman of Syrian Democratic
Mosul and Raqqa in a year of heavy defeats in 2017
Over the past two months some 60,000 people poured out of that dwindling enclave, fleeing SDF bombardment and a shortage of food.
Thousands of the group’s unbending supporters also abandoned the enclave while still vowing their allegiance to a ruined caliphate and showing no remorse for its victims.
At displacement camps in northeast Syria where they were sent by the SDF, the hardliners, including many foreign women who came to Syria and Iraq to marry militants, had to be kept away from other traumatised residents. —