Syria evacuates women, children from IS holdout

US-backed fighters trucked out civilians from the last speck of the Islamic State group’s dying “caliphate” in Syria yesterday, eager to press on with the dragging battle to crush the jihadists. More than four years after IS overran large parts of Syria and neighbouring Iraq, and declared a “caliphate”, they have lost all of it but a tiny patch in the village of Baghouz near the Iraqi border. Almost 30 trucks carrying men, women and children left the enclave on Friday, AFP correspondents at a position of the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces outside the village reported.

Most were women and children, their clothes caked in dust, but the passengers also included men with their faces wrapped in chequered scarves. Women clung to the railings of the trucks, while the hair of younger girls flew in the wind, as they left enclave in the second such large-scale evacuation in three days. Earlier on Friday, SDF spokesman Mustefa Bali said he hoped civilian evacuations could be completed by Saturday. Fellow SDF spokesman Adnan Afrin said once the evacuations had ended, his forces would expel the last jihadists from the less than half a square kilometre (a fifth of a square mile) they still hold.

“When the civilians leave, we will see how many civilians and IS fighters remain inside and what they want to do,” he said. “They will be faced w i t h a choice: war or surrender.” The SDF evacuated 3,000 people from the IS pocket on Wednesday -- mostly women and children -- but trucks left near empty on Thursday. Bali said that screening had determined that most of those evacuated on Wednesday were foreigners. “The majority are Iraqi and from countries of the former Soviet Union, but there are also Europeans among them,” he said.

David Eubank, the leader of the Free Burma Rangers volunteer aid group, said the women and children trucked out were “very hungry and dirty”. They included “many French women”, as well as others from Australia, Austria, Germany and Russia, and one woman from Brita i n , he told AFP. Human Rights Watch urged the SDF and the US-led coalition supporting it to make protecting civilians a priority. “Civilians leaving Baghouz is a relief but it should not obscure the fact that this battle appears to have been waged without sufficient consideration to their wellbeing,” the New York-based watchdog’s counterterrosim director, Nadim Houry said.

“Just because they may be families of ISIS members or sympathised with them does not take away their protected status,” he said, using an alternative acronym for IS. Beyond Baghouz, IS retains a presence in the vast, virtually unpopulated Syrian Desert and sleeper cells elsewhere, and continues to claim deadly attacks inside SDF- h e l d ter- rito- ry