US-backed Syria force takes ISIS bastion, declares victory over caliphate

The US-led coalition fighting the Islamic State group has claimed victory over the extremist group but experts warn global terror is far from defeated.

Kurdish-led forces pronounced the death of the Islamic State group’s nearly five-year-old “caliphate” on Saturday after flushing out diehard jihadists from their very last bastion in eastern Syria.

Fighters of the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) raised their yellow flag in Baghouz, the remote riverside village where diehard jihadists of a variety of nationalities made a desperate, dramatic last stand.

The SDF’s victory capped a deadly six-month operation against the final remnants of the caliphate which once stretched across a vast swath of Iraq and Syria, and held seven million people in its sway.

US President Donald Trump show a map which he said indicates the end of ISIS, as he arrives at Palm Beach International Airport in Florida on March 22, 2019. Picture: Nicholas Kamm/AFP

World leaders hailed the victory as a major landmark in the fight against ISIS and its ideology, but warned the group that spurred a spate of global terror attacks was far from defeated.

“Syrian Democratic Forces declare total elimination of so-called caliphate and 100 per cent territorial defeat of ISIS,” spokesman Mustefa Bali said in a statement, using another acronym for ISIS.

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In Al-Omar, an oilfield used as the main SDF staging base for the final phase of the assault, fighters in their best fatigues laid down their weapons and broke into song and dance.

They joined top Kurdish and Arab tribal officials, as well as a leading US envoy, for a ceremony unveiling a monument to their fallen comrades and celebrating the landmark victory.

The state proclaimed in mid-2014 by fugitive ISIS supremo Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi started collapsing in 2017 when parallel offensives in Iraq and Syria wrested back its main hubs Mosul and Raqa.

The nearly five years of fighting against the most brutal jihadist group in modern history left thousand-year-old cities in ruins and populations homeless.

The Kurdish-led and American-backed Syrian Defense Forces (SDF) declared on Saturday the "100% territorial defeat" of the so-called Islamic State. Picture: Chris McGrath/Getty Images

SDF fighters last week expelled the last ISIS fighters who refused to surrender from an encampment on the edge of Baghouz and have since been hunting down a few survivors hiding on the reedy banks of the Euphrates.

“Those who lasted the longest were mostly foreigners … Tunisians, Moroccans, Egyptians,” Hisham Harun, a 21-year-old Kurdish fighter, told AFP.

Around him, the former jihadist encampment was littered with bullet-riddled truck carcasses, discarded suicide belts and the torn tents where the caliphate’s last families sheltered for weeks.

A bike is seen among destroyed vehicles in the final ISIS encampment on March 23, 2019 in Baghouz, Syria. Picture: Chris McGrath/Getty Images

Some bodies of suspected ISIS fighters could also be seen.

According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, the Euphrates offensive has left 630 civilians, 730 SDF fighters and around 1600 jihadists dead.

Kurdish officers and aid groups were flummoxed by the number of people who had remained holed up in the last IS redoubt of Baghouz, a small village even few Syrians had ever heard of until this year.

As SDF forces pummelled ISIS positions and US warplanes dropped huge payloads on the riverside village, tens of thousands of people fled over a rocky hill.

Syrian Defence Force flags are seen flying over the destroyed ISIS encampment on March 23, 2019 in Baghouz, Syria. Picture: Chris McGrath/Getty Images

For weeks, the ghostly figures of the caliphate’s last denizens hobbled out of the besieged village, famished, often wounded but sometimes still defiantly proclaiming their support for ISIS.

The Kurdish-led force and foreign intelligence have screened more than 60,000 people since January, around 10 per cent of them jihadists turning themselves in.

Most of the people evacuated from the smouldering ruins of Baghouz in recent days were relatives of ISIS members who now fill overcrowded camps further north in Syria’s Kurdish-controlled region.

The biggest of them, Al-Hol, is struggling to host 74,000 people, including at least 25,000 school-aged children.

Among them are thousands of foreigners from France, Russia, Belgium and 40-plus countries that are in most cases unwilling to take them back.

“The needs are huge and the camp is overwhelmed,” Peter Maurer, president of the International Committee of the Red Cross said Friday upon returning from a five-day visit to Syria.

ISIS, WHICH controlled vast areas across Syria and Iraq and a population of up to 12 million in an aspired caliphate has been defeated by US-backed Syrian forces. Picture: Getty Images

Speaking at the ceremony in Al Omar, top SDF commander Mazloum Kobane warned that a new phase had begun in anti-ISIS operations.

The US has vowed to draw down its forces in Syria, but Mr Kobane appealed for sustained coalition assistance to help smash sleeper cells “which are a great threat to our region and the whole world.” US coalition envoy William Roebuck spoke after him at the ceremony and agreed “we still have much more to do to achieve an enduring defeat” of ISIS.

French President Emmanuel Macron hailed the fall of Baghouz saying “a significant threat to our country” has been “eliminated” and British Prime Minister Theresa May chimed in, calling Saturday’s victory “a historic milestone”.

The destroyed ISIS encampment in Baghouz, Syria. Kurdish-led and US-backed Syrian forces declared victory on Saturday but experts warn of a global threat. Picture: Getty Images

The jihadists retain a presence in eastern Syria’s vast Badia desert and various other hideouts from which they could wage the kind of deadly guerrilla insurgency that accompanied the rise of the Islamic State group.

John Spencer, a scholar at the Modern War Institute at West Point, warned that while the geographic caliphate had been dismantled, ISIS was far from defeated.

ISIS “is a terrorist organisation, all they have to do is put down their weapons and try to blend in with the population and just escape,” he told AFP. “They’re not gone, and they’re not going to be gone.”