OMAR OIL FIELD (Syria), Feb 15 (NNN-AGENCIES) – Daesh group militants using tunnels and suicide bombers were mounting a desperate defence
Thursday of their last square kilometre in eastern Syria.
Kurdish-led forces closed in on the small town of Baghouz where daesh fighters and their relatives were hunkered down and met hundreds of famished and dishevelled people turning themselves in.
“The fighting is fierce,” said Adnan Afrin, a spokesman for the Syrian
Democratic Forces, the Kurdish-Arab outfit that has spearheaded the campaign against Daesh with backing from a US-led coalition.
“There is significant resistance,” he said in Al-Omar oil field, the
main staging base for the SDF’s offensive against the very last shred of the
original IS “caliphate”.
The few hundred fighters of various nationalities holding out in their last
bastion by the Iraqi border have launched bruising counter-attacks in recent days, Afrin said.
The militants are clinging to about one square kilometre in the town’s
built-up area, as well as to an adjacent camp, where a number of civilians
are believed to be gathered.
Afrin said it was impossible to provide accurate figures but he estimated
the total number of fighters, men and women, at around 1,000.
“There are many tunnels in Baghouz now. This is why the operation is
dragging on. There are many suicide bombers attacking our positions, with
explosives-laden cars and motorbikes,” he said.
Afrin said two such suicide attacks were carried out by women on Tuesday
but he would not provide any figures on casualties among SDF ranks.
Hundreds of people continued to trickle out of the last Daesh redoubt every
day, trudging up a dirt road to a collection point where SDF fighters and
volunteers provide first aid and carry out a first screening.
Many of them had to sleep outside in the cold to reach that point, where a
lucky few get tents while the rest were spread out on cheap blankets.
The US-led coalition is carrying out air strikes on the area while its
forces are also present on the ground, sifting through the displaced for
wanted militants.
Afrin said SDF forces tuning their walkie-talkies on the group’s
frequencies “can hear them speak in Arabic but also in Turkish, French and
English.”
Once the adult men have been separated from their families, foreign and SDF officers thumb through pictures on smart phones to ask new arrivals about wanted militant leaders.
Daesh’s elusive Iraqi-born supremo, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is not believed to be among the last leaders holed up in Baghouz.
Several known jihadist figures have emerged from the dregs of the
“caliphate” in recent days however, including German Martin Lemke and
Frenchman Quentin Le Brun.
The “caliphate” Baghdadi proclaimed in mid-2014 once spanned territory the size of the United Kingdom and administered millions of people.
It printed is own schoolbooks, produced oil, collected taxes and minted its
own currency, in a brief but unprecedented experiment in statehood.
Successive offensives in Iraq and Syria have shattered the proto-state,
which lost its key cities one after the other and has since late 2017 been
confined to its traditional stronghold in the Euphrates River valley.
An official declaration of victory against Daesh is expected in the coming
days, a move of mostly symbolic value that will go down as the death
certificate of the “caliphate”.
While surviving Daesh fighters on both sides of the border will no longer hold fixed positions, the group will remain a threat.
The United States is due to pull its troops out of Syria within weeks,
creating a vacuum that risks allowing Daesh to rebuild and project new
ambitions.
The Kurds are also afraid they will have to squander the autonomy they
acquired and be left exposed to a military offensive by their archfoe Turkey. — NNN-AGENCIES
