U.S.-supported force in Syria turns attention back to ISIS

An earlier push stalled as group targeted Turkey

BEIRUT — A U.S.backed force in Syria announced Tuesday that it was resuming operations against the Islamic State after an earlier push stalled as fighters left for other battlefronts.

The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) is a Kurdishdominated military alliance that with U.S. support has defeated the Islamic State across swaths of the country. The group in October ousted the Islamic State from Raqqa, the Islamists de facto Syrian capital, but the fight for ISIS’s last stronghold, the oil-rich Deir al-Zour province, foundered earlier this year when thousands of SDF fighters left to fight another foe, Turkey, which seized much of a Kurdish-dominated enclave in northern Syria.

The Deir al-Zour offensive suspended in March, allowing the Islamic State to embed across a swath of desert along Syria’s border with Iraq. Estimates for the number of militants remaining across the two countries range from between 1,000 and 3,000.

The SDF is now turning its attention back to battling the Islamic State.

“We have rearranged our forces,” said Kino Gabriel, a spokesman for the group, on Tuesday.

U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said last week that he expected a “re-energized” effort against remnants of the Islamic State in eastern Syria. A U.S.-led military coalition has backed the ground operation with airstrikes since June 2014, forcing the ISIS’s near-defeat.

The United States’ role in Syria remains uncertain, however, as President Donald Trump pushes for a speedy withdrawal while Mattis and other administration officials encourage a slower drawdown.

According to the SDF, Islamic State fighters have stepped up their attacks in recent weeks, targeting the U.S.-backed force repeatedly.

“They are in their last strongholds now and these contain a big number of jihadis. We know there will be a higher number of suicide attacks, of car bombs, and of the explosives that they have planted,” said Gabriel.

Also Tuesday, airstrikes killed at least 23 civilians in one of the last pockets of Islamic Statecontrolled territory in Syria, according to Syrian state media and an opposition-linked monitoring group, according to the Associated Press.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said it was not clear if the airstrikes in the Hassakeh province were carried out by the U.S.-led coalition or the Iraqi air force. It said the strikes killed 10 children, six women and seven elderly people. The staterun Syrian News Agency said 25 civilians were killed in the airstrikes south of the town of Shadadi, blaming the U.S-led coalition.

The strikes took place in an area where the SDF is battling ISIS.

In an email to the AP, the U.S-led coalition said initial reports suggest there were no coalition airstrikes in the area where the deadly airstrikes are said to have taken place.

Elsewhere in Syria on Tuesday, more than three dozen Syrians held for years by al-Qaida-linked insurgents in the country’s northwest were released as part of a deal to hand over areas around Damascus to the government, state media reported.

State-run Al-Ikhbariya TV broadcast images of the released men, women and children, who arrived by bus at a governmentcontrolled checkpoint in Aleppo province.