The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British-based organization, said hundreds of civilians who fled the town on Friday had escaped while “others were freed”.
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The city was of significant strategic importance to ISIS which used it as a transit station for foreign jihadists travelling into Syria from Europe via Turkey and also for provisions coming into the country across the the border.
The SDF had flushed most of the ISIS militants from Manbij by last week, but on Friday the last of the militants began to flee.
USA -backed fighters seized the key Islamic State stronghold late Friday after two months of heavy fighting that killed more than 1000 people and displaced thousands. But Libyan forces launched an offensive to retake Sirte in June, and earlier this week captured a number of strategic locations with the aid of US airstrikes.
Dozens of civilians, including children and women from Manbij who had fled the city at the height of the aerial strikes, were killed in suspected USA coalition air strikes last month, residents and monitors said.
“They used these civilians as human shields as they withdrew to Jarabulus, thus preventing us from targeting them”, he said, adding that women and children were among those taken.
Groups of women can be seen crying with relief in the street after Syrian Democratic Forces liberated the Syrian town of Manbij.
Some residents lit cigarettes and danced – two activities prohibited under the violent Islamist extremists’ reign – and some men helped each other shave their beards as women set fire to the heavy black burqas, which IS required them to wear. SDF forces captured Manbij on August 6 but had continued to battle pockets of jihadists in parts of the town. Pentagon deputy press secretary Gordon Trowbridge said Friday that IS “is clearly on the ropes”.
A Pentagon statement Friday said that ISIS had lost control of Manbij, while the chief of the USA mission to fight ISIS, Brett McGurk, tweeted that the city center had been liberated.
The jihadists, who have suffered a string of losses in Syria and Iraq, have often staged mass abductions when they come under pressure to relinquish territory they hold.
They were heading northeast toward Jarablus, a town under ISIS control on the Turkish border, the Observatory said.
ISIL has also booby-trapped cars and carried out suicide bombings to slow advances by their opponents.
Earlier the alliance of Kurdish and Arab fighters grouped in the SDF said Friday’s operation was “the last operation and the last assault”. The town lies on a key supply route between the Turkish border and the city of Raqqa, the de facto capital of the IS group’s self-styled caliphate.
IS fighters have left behind hundreds of mines and booby traps in the town.
Meanwhile, Russian and Syrian jets pounded rebel positions in and around Aleppo, killing at least 20 people, a spokesman for the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
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More than 290,000 people have died in the conflict in Syria since March 2011.
