Kurd-led Forces Overrun Last IS-held Village In Syria: Monitor

Kurdish-led fighters overran the last village held by the Islamic State group in Syria on Wednesday, confining its once vast cross-border "caliphate" to two small hamlets, a war monitor said

Beirut, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 23rd Jan, 2019 ) :Kurdish-led fighters overran the last village held by the Islamic State group in Syria on Wednesday, confining its once vast cross-border "caliphate" to two small hamlets, a war monitor said.

It is the culmination of a broad offensive launched by the Syrian Democratic Forces last September with US-led coalition support in which they have reduced the militants' last enclave on the north bank of the Euphrates valley near the Iraqi border to a tiny rump.

The capture of the village of Baghouz leaves the few remaining diehard IS fighters holed up in scattered farmhouses among the irrigated fields and orchards on the north bank of the Euphrates River.

"Search operations are continuing in Baghouz to find any IS fighters who are still hiding," the head of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, Rami Abdel Rahman, told AFP.

"The SDF will now have to push on into the farmland around Baghouz." The Observatory said late on Tuesday that around 4,900 people, mostly women and children but including 470 IS fighters, had fled the militants' fast dwindling enclave in two days.

Of those 3,500 surrendered to the advancing SDF on Tuesday alone. They were evacuated on dozens of trucks chartered by the SDF.

The fall of Baghouz follows the SDF's capture of the enclave's sole town of Hajin and the villages of Al-Shaafa and Sousa in recent weeks.

The new wave of departures means that nearly 27,000 people have left former IS areas since early December, including almost 1,800 militants who have surrendered, the Observatory said.