But Washington and other powers hope this year will see the tide turn against Islamic State, which has ruled over millions of people in Iraq and Syria since declaring its caliphate in 2014.
Advertisement
The city itself remains occupied by Daesh, but SDF forces are slowly closing in.
Reflecting the stepped-up fight against IS, the US military said a second carrier group is nearing the Mediterranean to bolster operations, the first time two American carriers will be in those waters at the same time since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
A Syria Democratic Forces (SDF) fighter stands near a woman looking out a doorway in a village, on the outskirts of Manbij city, after they took control of it from Islamic State forces, Aleppo province, Syria June 8, 2016.
“The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) cut off the last road from Manbij to the Turkish border”, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitoring group.
Manbij, which had a prewar population of 100,000, is one of the largest Islamic State-held urban areas in the northern Aleppo province and is also a waypoint on an Islamic State supply line between Raqqa and the Turkish frontier.
Pressure mounted on the so called Islamic State group yesterday as anti-IS forces pressed on with triple offensives in Syria, Iraq and Libya.
Syria has been mired in a civil war since 2011, with numerous opposition factions and Islamic extremist groups fighting government forces seeking to topple the government of President Bashar Assad.
De Mistura said in Darayya, a government-besieged suburb of Damascus that has been without food deliveries for four years, a mosque had been “heavily shelled”. The shipment to Daraya was the first food aid since 2012 to reach a town where the United Nations says residents are suffering from malnutrition. It claimed responsibility for two suicide bombings that killed at least 24 people in Baghdad, and was presumed to be behind a suicide bombing that killed a Western-backed rebel leader in southern Syria.
A top USA presidential advisor said Friday a fresh Syria assault would shut down an important transit route linking the Islamic State group’s “capital” in Raqa with the heart of Europe.
In a sign of the town’s perceived significance, the SDF’s advances were accompanied by intense airstrikes from the U.S.-led coalition battling the IS militants. That provided the opening for administration and USA military officials to push for an alternate plan, using Arab and Kurdish forces it had gathered and supported from earlier battles against the Islamic State in the east. The channel has good connections with Shi’ite politicians and Iraqi forces. The coalition has not confirmed this.
Kurdish Peshmerga forces are positioned in an arc around the north and east of Mosul while the Iraqi army is trying to capture Falluja, 50 km (30 miles) west of Baghdad.
In neighbouring Iraq, the government’s elite counterterrorism service moved to within three kilometres of central Fallujah on Friday, the operation’s commander said.
Advertisement
Loud explosions and bursts of gunfire were heard from the district, while aircraft believed to belong to the U.S.-led coalition flew overhead.
