More than 150 IS militants are handed over to Iraq

OUTSIDE BAGHOUZ, Syria — U.S.-backed Syrian forces fighting the Islamic State group handed over more than 150 Iraqi members of the group to Iraq, an Iraqi security official said Thursday, marking the biggest repatriation from Syria of captured militants so far.

The official said the IS militants were handed over to the Iraqi side late Wednesday, and that they were now in a “safe place” under investigation.

The transfer comes as the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces is involved in a standoff over the final sliver of land held by IS in eastern Syria, close to the Iraqi border.

Many believe the IS threat won't end with the pocket's recapture and that an insurgency is underway. In a foreboding sign Thursday, the IS claimed responsibility for back-to-back suicide attacks that hit a village miles away, leaving more than a dozen people dead in a rare targeting of civilians.

A few hundred people — many of them women and terrified-looking children — were evacuated Wednesday from the group's tiny tent camp on the banks of the Euphrates River, signaling an imminent end to the territorial rule of the militants' self-declared “caliphate” that once stretched across a third of both Syria and Iraq.

Some 300 IS militants, along with hundreds of civilians believed to be mostly their families, have been under siege for more than a week in the tent camp in the village of Baghouz. It wasn't clear how many civilians remain holed up inside, along with the militants.

More trucks were sent in Thursday to the tip of a corridor leading to the camp to evacuate more people, but Associated Press journalists on the ground outside Baghouz said no civilians emerged.

“We thought more civilians will come out today and we sent 50 trucks over,” said an SDF commander who goes by his nom de guerre, Aram. “We don't know why they are not coming out.”

Another SDF official said IS militants closed the roads so the civilians could not come out, citing an absence of military pressure on the group as a possible reason.

Nearly 20,000 people left through a humanitarian corridor on foot from the IS holdout earlier this month but the militants closed the passage and no civilians left for a week until Wednesday. The presence of civilians and possibly senior members of the militant group in Baghouz have slowed the group's defeat.

Hundreds of women and children from Wednesday's evacuation could be seen in the middle of the desert on the way out of Baghouz, in what appeared to be a screening area in an open field. SDF fighters could be seen among them but journalists were not allowed to approach or film them. A large convoy of coalition vehicles, armored and vans, headed in their direction.

The U.S.-led coalition declined to comment on the evacuation.