Daesh positions shrink in Syria

Sousa: US-backed forces consolidated their positions around the Daesh group’s last redoubt in eastern Syria Friday as the country’s devastating conflict entered its ninth year with more than 370,000 dead.

 All that remains of a once sprawling proto-state that the Daesh extremists declared in 2014 is a battered riverside camp in the village of Baghouz near the Iraqi border.

 The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), and warplanes of a US-led coalition backing them, have rained fire on the enclave since Sunday, blitzing thousands of Daesh members into surrender.

 The Kurdish-led force said “1,300 terrorists and their families” gave themselves up on Thursday alone as its fighters slowed their advance to allow them to exit the enclave.

 AFP correspondents on the ground said Thursday night was relatively calm apart from limited air strikes, as the SDF said its fighters were consolidating their positions after extremist counter-attacks and foiled suicide bombings.

 The force was “consolidating and rotating its troops”, an SDF spokesman told AFP.

 “There are still women and children who want to surrender, so we are obliged to slow down operations,” Jiaker Amed said in the neighbouring village of Sousa.

 “Operations risk being slowed again today to allow more departures of Daesh and their families,” Amed said, but he was unable to give an estimate for the number of people left inside Baghouz.

 “Those left are strongly attached to the (extremists’) ideology,” he said. “There are a lot of suicide bombers but there are also families and children.”

 Since the months-old SDF offensive resumed on March 10, 3,000 Daesh suspected members have surrendered, according to the SDF.

 A total of about 60,000 people have streamed out of Daesh-held territory since December, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says, a tenth of them suspected extremists. The exodus has sparked a humanitarian crisis in Kurdish-held camps for the displaced, where women and children have arrived exhausted after weeks of siege.

 These include the wives and children of alleged foreign extremists, hundreds of whom are being held by the Kurdish forces.

Agence France-Presse