Exhausted families trudged out of the Islamic State group’s last bastion in eastern Syria yesterday, as Kurdish-led forces boxed holdout militants into an ever-shrinking pocket.
Hundreds fled at night but hundreds more during the day as plumes of grey smoke billowed into the sky over Baghouz, where diehard IS fighters are making their last stand.
The extremist group declared a cross-border “caliphate” in Syria and Iraq in 2014, but various military campaigns have chipped it down to a fragment on the Iraqi border.
After a pause of more than a week to allow out civilians, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) declared a last …read more
Source: Gulf times
