Kurdish-led forces in Syria on Friday extracted more people from the ruins of the Islamic State group’s “caliphate” and geared up for a final assault against jihadists hunkered down for a desperate last stand.
Diehard IS fighters and their families remained holed up in a last pocket, despite US President Donald Trump’s claims that 100 percent of territory was retaken.
The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) evacuated six truckloads of people on Friday from Baghouz, a hamlet by the Euphrates where the “caliphate” looks set to peter out.
It was the lowest number of evacuees in recent days and it was unclear if more were expected soon.
At an SDF screening point 20 kilometres north of Baghouz, the latest arrivals were outnumbered by journalists.
Wearing an orange hoodie and a long beige raincoat, one man knelt on the rocky ground, surrounded by armed SDF fighters.
A fighter pulled a blue beanie off the man’s head and lifted his face off the floor so that a journalist could take photos.
Nearby, more than seven SDF fighters gathered around a tall man, patting him down and inspecting his belongings.
Hundreds of people — fighters and their families — are thought to remain in a makeshift camp on the edge of Baghouz, the last sliver of a jihadist proto-state that was larger than Britain four years ago.
In remarks to US service members delivered in Alaska on his way back from Vietnam, Trump on Thursday again jumped the gun on declaring victory over the jihadists.
“We just took over — you know, you kept hearing it was 90 percent, 92 percent — the caliphate in Syria. Now it’s 100 percent. We just took over,” he said.
– ‘Assault or surrender’ –
That was contradicted by facts on the ground however and by officials from the SDF, which has been the main ground force ally of the anti-IS military coalition led by Washington.
Earlier on Thursday, SDF spokesman, Adnan Afrin, said his force was waiting to complete evacuations from Baghouz before launching a final push to defeat the jihadists.
“We want the evacuation operations to finish as soon as possible so we can move to the next phase: an assault or the surrender” of the jihadists still inside, Afrin said.
Mazloum Kobani, the general commander of the Kurdish-led force, also said the epilogue of the operation against IS’s Euphrates Valley heartland, launched in September last year, could drag on another week.
“In around one week, we will declare complete victory over IS,” he said.
Kobani was speaking in a video released by the SDF’s media office on Thursday of his visit to SDF fighters who were released after being held hostage for three weeks by IS.
The commander said that their safe release and that of other SDF force members apparently still held was a factor in slowing down operations against Baghouz.
The exodus from IS’s last redoubt, where people have been besieged and starving for weeks, continued to generate scenes of mass displacement.
Almost every day, women veiled from head to toe, their arms loaded with children and bags containing their scant belongings, can be seen trudging through the countryside towards an SDF assembly point.
– Urgent action –
There are also some men among the evacuees, who get trucked to a screening centre and dispatched to camps or prisons.
The Kurdish-run camp of Al-Hol, which has received most new arrivals in recent days is completely overwhelmed.
Its population has soared past 50,000 and aid organisations fear dysentery and other diseases could break out.
The United Nations issued a statement on Thursday calling for urgent funding to help scale up the emergency response.
“More tents, food, non-food items, water and sanitation, health and protection services, as well as other emergency supplies are urgently needed,” it said.
The US-led coalition on Thursday confirmed that notorious French jihadist Fabien Clain was killed in an air strike on Baghouz last week.
Clain gained notoriety after voicing an audio recording claiming responsibility for the November 2015 attacks in Paris, when IS gunmen slaughtered 129 people in coordinated attacks at restaurants and bars around the French capital.
The fate of the group’s top leader, Iraq-born Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, remains unknown however.
While the last remains of IS’s statehood experiment are about to disappear, the group remains a potent force in both Syria and Iraq.
Since it lost major cities such as Mosul and Raqa to successive operations in 2017, IS has resumed the guerrilla warfare it waged before the “caliphate”.
It carries out frequent attacks in areas from which it was expelled and the Pentagon has warned a major resurgence is likely if insufficient pressure is applied on the group in the coming months.