U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces introduced Tuesday that they’d captured the city of Raqqa from Islamic State militants.
“Everything is finished in Raqqa, our forces have taken full control of Raqqa,” SDF spokesman Talal Sello advised AFP. A proper declaration could be introduced after operations to clear any remaining sleeper cells and to take away landmines within the metropolis have been accomplished, Sello added.
The transfer is a significant setback for the Islamic State which thought of Raqqa the de-facto capital of its self-declared caliphate. It comes on the third anniversary of the worldwide effort to defeat ISIS.
Raqqa was the primary provincial capital to fall from authorities management in March 2013 after it was captured by a insurgent military. The military included each Syrian opposition teams and extra exhausting line events together with al-Nusra and the Islamic State.
A civilian authorities that was established within the metropolis divided two months later, and fewer than a yr later ISIS recaptured Raqqa and named the the capital of their caliphate.
About 900 civilians have been killed because the the beginning of the five-month operation, together with 570 individuals in coalition air raids, in line with the Syrian Network for Human Rights. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights put the civilian loss of life toll at 1,130 individuals. American journalist James Foley was beheaded within the mountains south of town.
SDF fighters pulled down the Islamic State’s black flag from town’s National Hospital close to town’s stadium, in line with a Reuters report.
Special presidential envoy for the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS Brett McGurk said in August that the U.S. would try to carry out a “stabilization” in Raqqa — together with demining, eradicating rubble from main pathways to permit vans and tools via, and “basic electricity, sewage, water, the basic essentials to allow populations to come back to their home.”
It shouldn’t be clear when the 300,000 civilians who’ve fled Raqqa since April in the course of the operation will be capable to return.
