US-backed fighters capture largest remaining town held by ISIS in Syria after fierce fighting
- US-backed militia took one of ISIS’s last strongholds, Hajin in south eastern Syria
- Pictures on social media showed the aftermath and 900 jihadists were killed
- Donald Trump said this week airstrikes had done ‘a very, very major job on ISIS’
- The news comes after ISIS claimed responsibility for the shooting in Strasbourg
US-backed militia killed at least 900 ISIS fighters in the ferocious capture of the jihadists’ largest remaining fortification on Friday.
Hajin, east of the Euphrates, was the last big town held by the terrorists before 17,000 troops from the Kurdish-Arab Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) alliance began their operation in September.
The SDF, spearheaded by the Kurdish YPG militia, have been battling to eradicate ISIS.
According to Abdel Rahman, head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, at least 900 jihadists and 500 SDF fighters were killed in the battle for Hajin.
Mazloum Kobani, SDF commander in chief, said on Thursday 5,000 ISIS fighters still remained in the last of their diminishing territory, which included Hajin, where 900 were said to have fought to the death
A picture from Twitter purportedly shows an airstrike raining down on the ISIS held town of Hajin before its capture
A map showing the south east of Syria, where ISIS have been pushed into a narrow corridor east of the Euphrates where one of their last strongholds, Hajin, was taken by US-backed militia on Friday; a pocket of desert territory to the west still remains under jihadist control
According to Rahman, more than 320 civilians were also killed, many of them in air strikes by the US-led coalition.
US President Donald Trump this week predicted the jihadist group would be fully defeated within a month.
‘We’ve done a very, very major job on ISIS,’ he said on Tuesday. ‘There are very few of them left in that area of the world. And within another 30 days, there won’t be any of them left.’
According to another Twitter user, this was the aftermath of US-led bombing in Hajin
Western and other officials have repeatedly announced deadlines for a final victory over IS but the group is proving resilient.
The push to retake Hajin was delayed by Turkish threats on the Kurdish heartland further north and deadly counter-attacks by die-hard jihadists making a bloody last stand.
‘ISIS anticipated its battlefield defeat and the loss of the caliphate and prepared accordingly,’ said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University in Washington.
Besides what is left of the pocket near Hajin in the Euphrates valley, IS has a presence in Syria’s vast Badia desert, a front which is managed by Russian-backed government forces.
What is left of the jihadist group also has sleeper cells across Iraq and Syria that regularly carry out attacks.
SDF commander-in-chief Mazloum Kobani said on Thursday that at least 5,000 IS fighters remain holed up in their last Syrian pocket of territory including Hajin and that they had decided to fight to the death.
This includes some 2,000 foreign fighters, mostly Arabs and Europeans along with their families.
Donald Trump speaking on Tuesday; he said: ‘We’ve done a very, very major job on ISIS,’ and claimed they would be utterly routed within the next 30 days
Kobani also said it was possible that Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was in eastern Syria, but the SDF could not be sure because he often disappears.
The loss of Hajin came hours after IS’s propaganda agency Amaq claimed responsibility for a Christmas market shooting in the French city of Strasbourg.
The Amaq statement was posted just after the shooter Cherif Chekatt was gunned down by police but bore the hallmarks of an opportunistic claim by the embattled jihadist group.
Islamic State was driven from nearly all the territory it once held in Syria last year in separate campaigns waged by the U.S.-backed SDF on the one hand, and the Russian-backed Syrian government on the other.