Islamic State (IS) group militants yesterday released hundreds of civilians used as human shields while fleeing a crumbling stronghold in northern Syria, but the fate of others remained unknown.
The last remaining IS fighters abandoned Manbij, Syria, near the Turkish border on Friday after a rout that the Pentagon said showed the extremists were “on the ropes.”
The retreat from the city, which the IS group captured in 2014, marked the militants’ worst defeat yet at the hands of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), an Arab-Kurdish alliance supported by US airstrikes.
Fleeing militants took about 2,000 civilians, including women and children, on Friday to ward off airstrikes as they headed to the IS-held frontier town of Jarabulus, Syria, the SDF said.
Some of the civilians were later released or escaped, the alliance said, but the whereabouts of the rest was unknown.
“There are no more IS fighters left in Manbij,” an SDF member said.
Kurdish TV showed footage of jubilant civilians in Manbij, including smiling mothers who had shed their veils and women embracing Kurdish fighters.
A woman burned a black robe that the militants had forced residents to wear, while men who had lived for weeks under a shaving ban cut their beards with scissors.
“The battle was very hard,” a Kurdish source said. “And the militants had laid mines in the city.”
“One SDF fighter entered a house on Friday and saw a shoe placed on a Koran. When he removed it there was an explosion and he was killed,” the source said.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British-based monitor, reported that several hundred of the civilians taken from the city were no longer being held by the IS militants.
“Among the civilians taken by IS there were people used as human shields, but also many who chose voluntarily to leave the town due to fear of reprisals by the SDF,” observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman said.
The SDF in May launched an assault on Manbij, on a key militant supply route between the Turkish border and the IS’ de facto Syrian capital, Raqa.
The militants, who have suffered a string of losses in Syria and Iraq, have often staged mass abductions when they come under pressure to relinquish territory they hold.
The IS has also booby-trapped cars and carried out suicide bombings to slow advances by their opponents.
SDF forces captured Manbij on Aug. 6, but had continued to battle pockets of militants in parts of the town.
The observatory said that 437 civilians, including more than 100 children, were killed in the battle for Manbij and surrounding territory.
About 300 SDF fighters died, along with more than 1,000 militants, it said.
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