2,000 more surrender from IS Syria bastion

Kurdish-led forces said around 2,000 people, mostly jihadists, surrendered from the Islamic State group’s last scrap of territory in Syria yesterday, as air raids and shelling resumed after a brief lull. A ragged tent encampment in the eastern Syrian village of Baghouz is all that remains of a once-sprawling IS “caliphate” declared in 2014 across large swathes of Syria and neighbouring Iraq. The US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces has been trying to crush holdout IS fighters for weeks but the mass outpouring of men, women and children from the riverside hamlet has bogged down its advance.

Backed by the US-led coalition, the SDF renewed its assault Sunday after warning remaining IS fighters their time was up. Air strikes and shelling have since pummelled Baghouz three nights in a row, killing scores of fighters and prompting hundreds of jihadists and their relatives to surrender. Thousands handed themselves over Tuesday, after a deluge of fire hit the IS encampment the previous night. “Around 2,000 people, mostly fighters, have handed themselves over today,” SDF spokesman Adnan Afrin told AFP, without adding how many remain inside.

The SDF and the US-led coalition resumed shelling and air strikes on the last IS bastion Tuesday evening, interrupting a brief lull in fighting that had taken hold during the day to allow for people to surrender. A correspondent near the front line heard warplanes rumbling overhead, as the sound of mortar fire and explosions rang from the IS encampment. Dozens of SDF fighters massed at the entrance of the village of Baghouz on Tuesday evening. Sherif, the unit commander, said his force was preparing to storm the jihadist redoubt. “We readied ourselves today and our spirits are high,” he said. “We will enter with full force and we will be at the forefront” of the advance, said the fighter who has been battling jihadists for years.

‘Terrorising IS fighters’

Earlier Tuesday, Ali Cheir, an SDF unit commander, said his force and the coalition were pummelling the IS enclave at night to flush out jihadists. “The objective of our advance is to terrorise IS fighters so they surrender, and for the civilians to come out,” said the 27-yearold. Coalition warplanes Monday pounded the jihadist redoubt with 20 air strikes, destroying armoured vehicles and arms caches, SDF spokesman Mustefa Bali said. He said US-backed forces clashed with jihadists on several fronts, killing nearly 40 IS fighters.

Since December, around 60,000 people have left the last IS redoubt, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, around a tenth of them suspected jihadist fighters. The UN’s food agency said it is concerned about their wellbeing. “On Sunday night more than 3,000 people, mostly women and children in a poor state, reached the camp,” the WFP said.

‘Battles not over’

The group released a video late Monday allegedly showing jihadists in Baghouz, quietly defiant in the face of the advancing SDF. “If we had thousands of kilometres and now we only have some kilometres left, it is said we have lost -- but God’s judging standard is different,” said a man named Abu Abdel Adheem.

“The battles are not over,” he said, sitting on the ground in a circle with two men and a young boy in a hooded jacket. Baghouz is the latest front on Syria’s complex civil war, which has killed more than 360,000 people since 2011.