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2019-02-23 Syria-Lebanon-Iran
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Syria Force Evacuates Women, Children from IS Holdout
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[AnNahar] US-backed fighters trucked out civilians from the last speck of the Islamic State
...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allah around with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not really Moslems....
group's dying "caliphate" in Syria on Friday, eager to press on with the dragging battle to crush the jihadists.
More than four years after IS overran large parts of Syria and neighbouring Iraq, and declared a "caliphate", they have lost all of it but a tiny patch in the village of Baghouz near the Iraqi border.
Almost 30 trucks carrying men, women and kiddies left the enclave on Friday, AFP correspondents at a position of the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces outside the village reported.
Most were women and kiddies, their clothes caked in dust, but the passengers also included men with their faces wrapped in chequered scarves.
Women clung to the railings of the trucks, while the hair of younger girls flew in the wind, as they left enclave in the second such large-scale evacuation in three days.
Earlier on Friday, SDF front man Mustefa Bali said he hoped civilian evacuations could be completed by Saturday.
Fellow SDF front man Adnan Afrin said once the evacuations had ended, his forces would expel the last jihadists from the less than half a square kilometre (a fifth of a square mile) they still hold.
"When the civilians leave, we will see how many civilians and IS fighters remain inside and what they want to do," he said.
"They will be faced with a choice: war or surrender."
The SDF evacuated 3,000 people from the IS pocket on Wednesday -- mostly women and kiddies -- but trucks left near empty on Thursday.
- 'MANY FRENCH WOMEN' -
Bali said that screening had determined that most of those evacuated on Wednesday were foreigners.
"The majority are Iraqi and from countries of the former Soviet Union, but there are also Europeans among them," he said.
David Eubank, the leader of the Free Burma Rangers volunteer aid group, said the women and kiddies trucked out were "very hungry and dirty".
They included "many French women", as well as others from Australia, Austria, Germany and Russia, and one woman from Britannia, he told AFP.
Beyond Baghouz, IS retains a presence in the vast, virtually unpopulated Syrian Desert and sleeper cells elsewhere, and continues to claim deadly attacks inside SDF-held territory.
On Thursday, they detonated a boom-mobile that killed 20 people -- mostly oil workers -- near Omar oil field, the main base for the SDF operation in Baghouz.
The battle for the village is now the only live front in Syria's complex civil, which has killed 360,000 people and displaced millions since 2011.
- US 'PEACEKEEPERS' -
Any SDF victory in Baghouz would accelerate an expected withdrawal of US troops from Syria announced in December by US President Donald Trump
...New York real estate developer, described by Dems as illiterate, racist, misogynistic, and what ever other unpleasant descriptions they can think of, elected by the rest of us as 45th President of the United States...
Kurdish forces, who have spearheaded the US-backed fight against IS in Syria, have expressed fear that a full pullout would leave them exposed to a long threatened attack by neighbouring The Sick Man of Europe Turkey
...the only place on the face of the earth that misses the Ottoman Empire....
But the White House said Thursday the US military will keep around 200 troops in Syria after the withdrawal.
"A small peacekeeping group of about 200 will remain in Syria for a period of time," White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said.
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Posted by trailing wife 2019-02-23 00:00||
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File under: Islamic State
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