President Donald Trump has said he will pull U.S. forces from Syria after the group’s territorial defeat.
By Linda Givetash
U.S.-backed fighters in Syria declared victory over Islamic State on Saturday, marking the apparent end of a years-long global campaign to break the extremist group’s hold on the region.
The capture of ISIS’ last, tiny enclave in the country’s south brings its self-proclaimed caliphate to territorial defeat.
“Syrian Democratic Forces declare total elimination of so-called caliphate” spokesman Mustafa Bali said on Twitter early Saturday.
The battle for Baghouz, the group’s last holdout and all that remained of the vast territory that it once ruled in Syria and Iraq, had dragged on for more than 10 weeks — far longer than either the U.S. military or their allies on the ground had predicted.
President Donald Trump has been teasing the victory for days.
On Friday, the White House said the Department of Defense had declared that the militant group no longer held any territory in Syria. At around the same time, Trump tweeted that there was “nothing to admire” about ISIS.
The militants, meanwhile, had been putting up a desperate fight, and the American-backed Syrian Democratic Forces supported by U.S.-led coalition airstrikes had held off declaring victory.
At a victory ceremony near Baghouz on Saturday, a brass band in red and gold uniforms played the American national anthem in front of a stars and stripes flag and yellow militia banners. SDF leaders including both men and women sat watching.
The SDF had repeatedly paused its final push to capture the village in order to allow more than 30,000 civilians, many of them the wives and families of foreign fighters, to be evacuated.
Bali said they had caught several militants trying to flee among the civilians. Others had handed themselves over.
Their fate has befuddled foreign governments, with few ready to repatriate citizens who pledged allegiance to a group sworn to their destruction, but who might be hard to legally prosecute.