Members of Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) stand together near Baghouz, Deir Al Zor province, Syria, February 12, 2019. Photo: Reuters
Omar Oil Field, Syria,— The top commander of the Kurdish-led force fighting the Islamic State group in Syria said Thursday that the jihadists’ last bastion would be crushed within about a week.
Mazloum Kobani, the general commander of the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), was speaking to some of his men who had been held hostage by IS for three weeks.
“In around one week, we will declare complete victory over IS,” he told the men, who were among the 24 SDF fighters whose release was announced earlier Thursday.
The Kurdish-led SDF are poised to storm the pocket held by jihadists on the edge of the village of Baghouz, the last patch of the organisation’s once sprawling “caliphate”.
The operation to flush out the jihadists from the Euphrates Valley was launched nearly six months ago but it has been slow moving.
Kobani himself had said on January 25 that IS would be defeated within a month and the epilogue of the battle on the last jihadist redoubt is dragging on.
One reason, according to the SDF, has been the presence of an unexpectedly high number of civilians among the jihadist fighters in Baghouz, some of them used as human shields.
The fate of SDF members captured by IS is another, according to Mazloum, who was speaking in a video released by the SDF’s media office on Thursday.
“We stopped military operations for your safety and now we have stopped the war for the safety of the rest of the comrades,” he told the released hostages.
It remained unclear how their release was secured and how many members of the SDF, an alliance of Kurdish troops and fighters from local Arab tribes, are still held in Baghouz.
The Kurdish-led forces, began the assault on February 10, seeking to wipe out the last remnants of the jihadist group’s “caliphate” in the SDF’s area of operations in eastern and northern Syria.
Washington has for years supported the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in the fight against the Islamic State group in Syria, as part of an international anti-jihadist coalition dominated by the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG). But U.S. President Donald Trump abruptly announced the pullout from Syria.
The Kurdish Democratic Union Party PYD of Syrian Kurdistan (Rojava) and its powerful military wing YPG/YPJ, considered the most effective fighting force against IS in Syria and U.S. has provided them with arms. The YPG, which is the backbone of the SDF forces, has seized swathes of Syria from Islamic State.
Copyright © 2019, respective author or news agency, AFP | Ekurd.net