The Islamic State faces final territorial defeat as the US-backed Syrian force battling the terror group said on Saturday it was closing in on the militants’ last bastion near the Iraqi border, capping four years of efforts to roll back the outfit.
While the fall of Baghouz, an eastern Syrian village on the bank of the Euphrates, would mark a milestone in a global campaign against the IS, they remain a threat, using guerrilla tactics and holding some desolate land further west.
An array of enemies, both local and international, confronted the IS after it declared a modern-day “caliphate” in 2014 across large swathes of territory it had seized in lightning offensives in Syria and neighbouring Iraq.
Thousands of IS fighters, followers and civilians, who had retreated to Baghouz as the group was gradually driven out of those lands, have poured out of the tiny cluster of hamlets and farmland in Deir al-Zor province over the past few weeks.
Their evacuation held up the final assault until Friday evening when the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) said it had advanced and would not stop until the militants were defeated.
“We expect it to be over soon,” Mustafa Bali, a spokesman for the SDF, told Reuters shortly after sunrise. He said the SDF was advancing on two fronts using medium and heavy weaponry.
The IS responded with drones and rockets, and seven SDF fighters have been wounded so far, said commander Adnan Afrin.
The SDF has previously estimated several hundred IS insurgents — believed mostly to be foreigners — to be still in Baghouz, and the US-led international coalition has described them as the “most hardened” militants.
The SDF’s final advance was slowed for weeks by the extremists’ extensive use of tunnels and human shields. It has not ruled out the possibility that some militants have crept out, hidden among civilians.
When reporters arrived at the village outskirts around midday, columns of smoke could be seen rising from inside but the scene appeared calm. Warplanes hovered in the sky, but no air strikes were observed.
A spokesman for the coalition, which supports the Kurdish-led SDF, said it was too early to assess the battle’s progress “as it is a complicated situation with many variables”.
The SDF commander-in-chief said on Thursday that his force would declare victory within a week. He was later contradicted by US President Donald Trump, who said the SDF had retaken 100 per cent of the territory once held by the IS.
Washington has about 2,000 troops in Syria, mainly to support the SDF in fighting the IS. Trump announced in December he would withdraw all of them, but the White House partially reversed itself last month, saying some 400 troops would stay.
Some 40,000 people bearing various nationalities have left the militants’ diminishing territory in the last three months as the SDF sought to oust the militants from remaining pockets.
The number of evacuees streaming out of Baghouz surpassed initial estimates of how many were inside. Afrin told Reuters on Thursday that many of the people leaving the enclave had been sheltering underground in caves and tunnels.
A 27-year-old Indonesian widow who emerged on Friday said she would have liked to stay in IS territory but conceded that conditions had become untenable.
“I have no money, I have no food for my baby, no medicine, nothing for my baby, so I must go out,” she said.
