Syrians limp out of besieged enclave

BAGHOUZ, Syria: Veiled women carrying babies and wounded men on crutches hobbled out of the last IS village in eastern Syria on Wednesday after US-backed forces pummelled the besieged enclave.

The Syrian Democratic Forces leading the assault expected more fighters to surrender with their families in tow before moving deeper in the Islamic State group’s last redoubt. Bandaged and bedraggled, gaggles of suspected jihadists in long brown robes limped away from the hellscape of Baghouz across fields of yellow flowers to reach an SDF screening centre.

The tiny village on the banks of the Euphrates River where diehard IS fighters have made a bloody last stand has regurgitated unexplained numbers of people. Kurdish officers in the SDF and aid groups have voiced their surprise that the flow of evacuees never seemed to dry up after weeks of evacuations.

On Tuesday alone, "3,500 people were evacuated from Daesh-held territory," said SDF spokesman Mustefa Bali, using an Arabic acronym for IS. Hundreds more filed out of Baghouz on Wednesday, AFP correspondents on the ground reported.

Around 10 percent of the 57,000 people who have fled IS’s last bastion since December were jihadists trying to slip back into civilian life, SDF officers and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights have said.

A senior SDF officer said 400 jihadists were captured on Tuesday night as they attempted to slip out of Baghouz in an escape he said was organised by a network that had planned to smuggle them to remote hideouts.

The operation to smash the last remnant of the "caliphate" that IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi proclaimed in 2014 resumed Friday after a long humanitarian pause. The assumption was that almost no families remained holed up in Baghouz and that those who did were refusing to surrender and choosing to die there.

The deluge of fire unleashed by SDF artillery and coalition air strikes at the weekend appears to have broken the determination of some families. Syrians, Iraqis and jihadists who travelled to the "caliphate" from France, Finland and other countries turned themselves in to Kurdish troops.

"There’s still lots of people inside," said Safia, a 24-year-old Belgian woman who was among those trucked out by the SDF on Tuesday, adding that her French husband was still inside. Western forces from the US-led coalition -- which also includes France, one of the main purveyors of foreign fighters to IS -- could be seen looking for wanted individuals among the new arrivals.