Kurdish-led and US-backed forces seized the town of Hajin from Islamic State group on Friday, a milestone in a massive and costly operation to drive the jihadists out of eastern Syria.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that the Syrian Democratic Forces had secured Hajin, which is the last big town held by Islamic State group in its remaining pocket of territory east of the Euphrates River near the border with Iraq.
“After a week of heavy fighting and air strikes, the SDF were able to kick IS group out of Hajin,” Rami Abdel Rahman, the head of the Britain-based monitoring organization, said.
The operation was completed at dawn, he said, a day after SDF forces fanned out across the large village in the Euphrates valley.
On Thursday, the last IS fighters were confined to a network of tunnels and the edges of Hajin.
SDF commander-in-chief Mazloum Kobani told Reuters on Thursday that at least 5,000 Islamic State group fighters remain holed up in the 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.
IS fighters pulled back to positions east of Hajin Friday and to Sousa and Al-Shaafa, the other two main villages in their shrinking Euphrates valley enclave.
As recently as Thursday, the group posted pictures of fighting in Hajin on its social media accounts.
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, using another acronym for IS.
“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,” he vowed.
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