Late on March 6, the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) announced that their fighters had freed ten children and a woman of the Yazidi faith and four children of the Shiite Islamic sect from the last ISIS stronghold in the middle Euphrates River Valley.
The Yazidis were reportedly abducted by the terrorist group during the brutal attack on Sinjar mount in northwestern Iraq in 2014, while the Shiite children were abducted from the Iraqi city of Tal Afar in the same year. Kurdish sources said that ISIS was forcibly training the captives to become suicide bombers.
The SDF resumed its attack on the ISIS-held pocket north of the town of al-Baghuz al-Fawqani on March 1. However, the attack was halted few days later as more and more civilians began to leave the terrorist group’s territory.
“Slowing down the offensive in al-Baghuz yesterday, we managed to evacuate about 3,000 people from ISIS pocket through the corridor we opened. A large number of Daesh [ISIS] jihadists surrendered to our forces among the same group overnight,” Mustafa Bali, a spokesman for the SDF, said on March 3.
According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), the SDF is now preparing to evacuate a new group of civilians and ISIS fighters, who are willing to surrender, from the last terrorist group stronghold. Thousands of other civilians are still trapped within the 600m2 pocket.
The SDF has evacuated more than 17,000 people, including hundreds of ISIS fighters, from the pocket since February 16. The evacuation process will likely continue for few days more.
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