Hundreds of Islamic State fighters give up in east Syria
NEAR BAGHOUZ, Syria - Hundreds of Islamic State fighters surrendered on Wednesday and hundreds more of their comrades were caught trying to escape the jihadist group’s last, tiny scrap of land in eastern Syria, said a commander in the militia besieging it.
The U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces militia has slowed its attack to allow thousands of civilians to leave Baghouz, continuing an exodus that began when it announced it was launching a final battle for the enclave last month. The fall of Baghouz would mark the end of the rule of Islamic State’s self-proclaimed “caliphate” over populated territory, although some fighters are still hiding out in remote desert or have gone underground to wage a guerrilla insurgency.
After its sudden advance across swathes of Syria and Iraq in 2014, the group held about a third of both countries, but its wholesale slaughter or sexual enslavement of minorities and its grotesque public killings roused global anger. A group of fully veiled women being evacuated from Baghouz on Wednesday shouted “Allahu Akbar” as they gathered near a checkpoint where the SDF were searching them and one hit a journalist with a can of tuna.
Among those who came out on Wednesday were 11 captive children from the Yazidi community. Islamic State subjected the Yazidis to mass slaughter and enslavement in what the United Nations called a genocide, after overrunning the community’s heartland of Sinjar in Iraq in 2014.
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