ISIS ousted from Syria, Iraq border cities
DAMASCUS, Syria — Syrian troops ousted Islamic State extremists Friday from Deir el-Zour, a major city in eastern Syria, while Iraqi forces retook Qaim, the group’s last big town across the border in Iraq, in simultaneous assaults that dealt further territorial losses to the retreating militants.
With their self-proclaimed “caliphate” crumbling, the extremists have lost almost all their urban strongholds in Syria and Iraq.
The defeats left the Syrian town of Boukamal as the only urban area still completely under Islamic State control, along with scattered pockets of territory along the Syria-Iraq border.
Syrian troops backed by Russia and Kurdish-led forces supported by the United States are now racing toward Boukamal from opposite sides of the Euphrates River, triggering concerns that a proxy showdown could ensue between the two sides.
Both the U.S. and Russia have embedded special forces with their respective partners and are supporting their advances with airstrikes. Maj. Gen. Igor
Konashenkov, a spokesman for the Russian Defense Ministry, said six Tu-22M bombers struck Islamic State targets near Boukamal, while two Russian submarines in the Mediterranean also launched six cruise missiles at Islamic State targets.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that shelling from the Iraqi side of the border hit the small Syrian town of Abughaz, near Boukamal. Civilians were forced to flee, but no casualties from the shelling were reported, the Britain-based group said.
“With the loss of Deir el-Zour, Daesh loses its ability to lead terrorist operations by its militants who are now isolated and
encircled eastern countryside of the city,” said Gen. Ali Mayhoub, declaring victory in a statement read on Syrian TV. He used an Arabic name for the Islamic State in the broadcast.
The recapture of Deir el-Zour on the west bank of the Euphrates is another victory for President Bashar Assad’s forces and his Russian and Iranian allies. Deir el-Zour, which had been divided into a government-held and an Islamic State-held part for nearly three years, is the largest city in eastern Syria and the capital of the oil-rich province of the same name. It is also the largest city to be recaptured by the Syrian government from ISIS.
Mayhoub described it as the “last phase” of the military’s campaign toward the annihilation of the Islamic State in Syria.
In Iraq, troops recaptured the town of Qaim across the border from Boukamal, the government said.
Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abdi congratulated Iraqi forces on retaking Qaim just over a week after the operation began. In a statement from his office, al-Abadi described the victory as taking place in “record time.”
Earlier in the day, Iraqi forces also retook the nearby Husaybah border crossing with Syria, according to the prime minister’s office.
Qaim, about 200 miles west of Baghdad in the Euphrates River Valley, has been used by Islamic State militants to move fighters and supplies between the two countries at the height of the caliphate, when the Islamic State held nearly a third of both Iraq and Syria.
The extremist group has lost more than 96 percent of the territory it once held across both countries in 2014 and 2015, the height of the caliphate. Those losses include Iraq’s second-largest city of Mosul, which it lost in July, and Raqqa, the group’s onetime de facto capital in northern Syria, which it lost last month.