Terror group’s withdrawal from Albu Kamal caps series of major defeats and leaves self-styled caliphate virtually wiped out
Syrian troops have declared victory against Islamic State in the eastern town of Albu Kamal, the terror group’s last major stronghold in the country.
The Isis withdrawal caps a series of major defeats in recent months that have virtually eliminated the self-styled caliphate, which it proclaimed in Syria and Iraq in 2014; millions of people have since suffered under its hardline, repressive strictures.
The Syrian military, backed by Shia fighters from Iraq, said it had reclaimed the border town of Albu Kamal from Isis, clearing the militants from their last key redoubt on the Iraqi border.
Albu Kamal had long been crucial to the ferrying of jihadists from Syria into Iraq during the American occupation, and vice versa during the war in Syria.
Its loss heralds the near-complete collapse of Isis in Syria. The group retreated from the eastern cities and into the surrounding desert after losing the provincial capital of the oil-rich province of Deir ez-Zor to the Syrian army, and the group’s de facto capital of Raqqa to Kurdish paramilitaries backed by the United States.
“Forces loyal to the regime … have advanced in the Albu Kamal border city and established complete control after the withdrawal of the remaining [Isis] fighters to areas under their control in the countryside,” the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a war monitor, said on Thursday.
The loss sealed “the fall of the terrorist Daesh organisation’s project in the region”, a Syrian army statement said, using an Arabic term for Islamic State.
Isis now controls minor swaths of the desert in central and eastern Syria, a significant retreat from its position just two years ago, when it controlled half the country’s landmass along with vast stretches of the plains of Nineveh in northern Iraq and Anbar province.
The group has faced concerted campaigns that drove them from one stronghold after another. Kurdish militias backed by the US-led coalition swept through most of Raqqa province, while Turkish-backed Syrian rebels reclaimed northern Syrian towns that were used as waypoints by foreign fighters. Iraqi forces and tribal militias across the border wrested back control of the cities of Mosul, Ramadi and Fallujah in gruelling months-long campaigns that left those strongholds flattened.
The regime’s victory in Deir Ezzor now leaves it with control over a larger portion of the country than its adversaries, and with momentum after six and a half years of civil war, but also cements its divisions with portions controlled by al-Qaida-affiliated jihadists, Kurdish fighters, and Turkish-backed rebels.
Meanwhile, the United Nations warned on Thursday that some 400 civilians were in urgent need of medical evacuation from Syria’s eastern Ghouta region, including 29 who will die if they are not allowed to leave immediately.
The region, near the capital Damascus, is one of the last strongholds of rebels fighting the regime of Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad.
Jan Egeland, head of the UN’s humanitarian taskforce for Syria, said the region was now “the epicentre of suffering” in the war-ravaged country, with some 400,000 civilians stuck in a dozen besieged towns and villages.
The region, where a “de-escalation zone” deal was agreed by regime allies Iran and Russia and rebel backer Turkey in July, is now seeing increasingly dire conditions, he said.
“Since September, it has been completely sealed off,” he said, pointing out that UN convoys were now the only lifeline to the area, and more often than not, those convoys are unable to get through.
“We cannot continue like that. If we get in only a fraction of what is needed, it would be a complete catastrophe,” he said.
More than 330,000 people have been killed in Syria since the conflict began in March 2011 with anti-government protests, before spiralling into a complex, multi-front war that drew in international forces and jihadists.
