Kurdish-led forces seized the Islamic State's main hub of Hajin Friday, a milestone in a massive and costly US-backed operation to eradicate the jihadists from eastern Syria. The Syrian Democratic Forces secured Hajin, the largest settlement in what is the last pocket of territory controlled by IS, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
"After a week of heavy fighting and air strikes, the SDF were able to kick IS out", Rami Abdel Rahman, the head of the Britain-based monitoring group, 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, which lies in the eastern province of Deir Ezzor, about 30 kilometres (18 miles) from the border with Iraq. The area held by IS is sometimes referred to as the "Hajin pocket", the last rump of a once-sprawling "caliphate" the group proclaimed in 2014 over swathes of Syria and Iraq.
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.
According to Abdel Rahman, a total of 17,000 fighters from the Kurdish-Arab SDF alliance are involved in the operation to flush IS out of its last bastion. The operation was launched on September 10 and has taken a heavy toll, according to figures collected by the Observatory, which has a network of sources on the ground.
At least 900 jihadists and 500 SDF fighters were killed in the fighting, the Observatory said. According to Abdel Rahman, more than 320 civilians were also killed, many of them in air strikes by the US-led coalition. Thousands more civilians who had remained, voluntarily or not, in the Hajin area have fled their homes since the start of the offensive three months ago.
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