BAGHOUZ:
US-backed forces battled Islamic State group fighters yesterday as the holdout
jihadists clung onto the last dregs of their crumbling "caliphate" in
eastern Syria. For weeks, the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces have battled
to crush IS fighters holed up in a small riverside hamlet in the village of
Baghouz.

The makeshift
encampment of tents and tunnels is all that remains of a once-sprawling
"caliphate" declared in 2014 over large swaths of Syria and
neighboring Iraq. The SDF and coalition warplanes have rained fire on the
enclave since last Sunday, blitzing more than 4,000 IS fighters and family
members into surrender. US-backed forces have reduced daytime airstrikes and
shelling to allow for more exits from the last jihadist bastion.

But AFP
journalists at an SDF post inside Baghouz heard sporadic rounds of mortar fire
Saturday and an SDF spokesman said clashes were ongoing. "Clashes broke
out again last night and have continued since," SDF spokesman Adnan Afrin
said. "There have so far been no surrenders (today) and there's no sign
they are giving up," the spokesman said. An SDF statement said the latest
fighting broke out after the Kurd-led force attacked IS positions inside Baghouz.
Around 32 jihadists, including at least four senior IS figures, were killed in
battle, it said.

Suicide attacks

On Friday, IS
launched three suicide attacks outside Baghouz, killing six people among those
fleeing the village near the Iraqi border. They were the latest casualties in
Syria's devastating civil war as it entered its ninth year with 370,000 dead.
The US-led coalition said the bombers were dressed in women's clothing and had
mixed with others surrendering.

"Daesh has
proven to demonstrate a reckless disregard for human life and continues to be a
global threat,"it said late Friday, using an Arabic acronym for IS.
"We stand by our SDF partners as they fight to liberate that last
Daesh-held territory," it said on Twitter. Die-hard IS fighters have unleashed
a wave of suicide bombings over the past week to impede the SDF advance. It
remains unclear how many fighters and civilians remain inside Baghouz.

More than 61,000
people have streamed out of IS-held territory since December, the Britain-based
Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says, a tenth of them suspected jihadists.
The exodus has sparked a humanitarian crisis in Kurdish-run camps for the
displaced further north where civilians have been transported. These include
the wives and children of alleged foreign jihadists, hundreds of whom are being
held by the Kurdish forces.

Distress,
fatigue, malnutrition

Around 3,000
people arrived at Al-Hol camp from Baghouz over the past two days, pushing the
camp's population to over 69,000, the International Rescue Committee (IRC) said
yesterday. According to the United Nations children's fund, UNICEF, the camp
was designed with a 20,000-person capacity. The UN said most of the new
arrivals "show clear signs of distress, fatigue, malnutrition and require
some form of medical care or attention".

According to the
IRC and UN, around 122 people have died en route to the camp or shortly after
arriving since December, mostly small children, two of them on Thursday.
"There is an urgent requirement for funding to continue health and
nutrition interventions in the camp," the UN said. At the height of its
brutal rule, IS controlled a stretch of land in Syria and Iraq the size of the
United Kingdom.

The total capture
of the Baghouz camp by the SDF would mark the end of the cross-border
"caliphate" it proclaimed more than four years ago. But beyond
Baghouz, IS retains a presence in eastern Syria's vast Badia desert and sleeper
cells in the northeast. The jihadists have continued to claim deadly attacks in
SDF-held territory in recent months. - AFP