Besieged IS militants refuse to surrender, ask for an exit

More than 300 Islamic State militants surrounded in a tiny area in eastern Syria are refusing to surrender to U.S.-backed forces and are trying to negotiate an exit, Syrian activists and a person close to the negotiations said Monday.

The extremists are bottled up in the village of Baghouz, where they are hiding among hundreds of civilians and preventing them from leaving. The stalling tactics are likely to delay a declaration of the end of the IS group’s self-proclaimed caliphate, which the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces were hoping to make last week.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an activist group that monitors the civil war in Syria, said another request by IS to be evacuated to neighboring Iraq was also rejected. IS released 10 SDF fighters it had been holding on Sunday, but it was not clear what, if anything, the extremists would get in return, the Observatory said.