US-backed Kurdish forces retake control of IS hub in Syria

Syrian fighters backed by the United States have seized the town of Hajin in eastern Syria, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitoring group and a source in the militia leading the battle said on Friday.

The fall of Hajin follows days of intense battles in Isis’s last remaining stronghold near the Iraqi border in eastern Syria. The group still holds some villages nearby.

The US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces have been fighting to take Hajin and the surrounding villages in Deir Ez-Zor province for more than three months. The offensive intensified in recent weeks with the arrival of reinforcements from northern Syria.

A YPG source said the SDF was now in control of Hajin, where some small remaining pockets of Islamic State resistance would be finished off in the next day or two.

The capture of Hajin leaves Islamic State in control of a diminishing strip of territory along the eastern bank of the Euphrates River in the area where the U.S.-backed operations are focus.

The jihadists also control some desert terrain west of the river in territory otherwise controlled by the Damascus government and its allies.

SDF commander-in-chief Mazloum Kobani said on Thursday that at least 5,000 Islamic State fighters remain holed up in the pocket of territory including Hajin and that they had decided to fight to the death.

This includes some 2,000 foreign fighters, mostly Arabs and Europeans along with their families.

Kobani also said it was possible that Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was in eastern Syria, but the SDF could not be sure because he often disappears.

Islamic State was driven from nearly all the territory it once held in Syria last year in separate campaigns waged by the U.S.-backed SDF on the one hand, and the Russian-backed Syrian government on the other.

The area is home to about 15,000 people, including 2,000 Isis fighters who have been mounting suicide attacks and counteroffensives against the SDF. Hundreds of civilians have fled the enclave in recent days toward areas controlled by the SDF east of the Euphrates and government-controlled regions on the west bank of the river.