“ISIL has lost its contact with the outside world after losing the remaining border villages”, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the conflict in Syria.
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Backed by Turkey, Free Syrian Army rebels have cleared the area between the northern Syrian border towns of Azaz and Jarablus, said Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim.
Turkey launched the incursion into Syria – the so-called Euphrates Shield operation – to back Syrian rebels in their fight to push IS out of the town of Jarablus and to limit the Syrian Kurdish forces’ advance west of the Euphrates River.
His comments came two weeks after Turkey launched an ambitious operation inside Syria, sending tanks and special forces to back up Syrian opposition fighters and cleanse its frontier from IS jihadists and Kurdish militia.
Turkish officials are reporting that a weekend offensive westward from Jarabulus has expelled ISIS from its entire territory along the Syria-Turkey border, a region spanning 91 km, and cut off their primary supply route into Syria.
“Raqa is the most important centre of Daesh”, Erdogan told Turkish journalists on board his plane as he returned from China, using an Arabic acronym for IS.
According to Hasan Selim Oztertem, a security and energy analyst, two key issues – global reactions and the realities in the field – will determine Turkey’s next moves in Syria. The Islamic State group claimed twin suicide bombings in the neighboring coastal towns of Tartus and Jableh in May that killed over 160 people.
“We will never allow the formation of an artificial state in the north of Syria”, he told a crowd in Diyarbakir, the largest city in the mainly Kurdish southeast. “I’ve said all along we’re not going to rush and we’re not going to do something that we think is less than what we believe is a legitimate opportunity to be able to try to get the job done”.
Meanwhile, the recapture and return to siege of rebel-held parts of Aleppo dealt a major blow to insurgent groups and risked causing a new humanitarian crisis. The military has said that more than 100 militants from the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) were either killed or injured in clashes on Saturday.
Turkish authorities are also building a wall to boost security along a stretch of its border with Syria, Anadolu reported.
It would oblige Russian Federation to prevent warplanes from bombing areas held by mainstream opposition, require the withdrawal of Damascus’s forces from a supply route north of Aleppo, and focus on delivery of humanitarian aid unhindered by warring sides to the city’s population, said the letter, dated September 3.
He noted that all terrorism is bad, further adding that the US and Turkey must adopt a common attitude against terrorism.
After three years in control of portions of the border, IS’s grasp over the last villages dissolved in a matter of hours. “If we take a backward step terror groups like Daesh, PKK, PYD and YPG will settle there”, he said.
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A source in the Failaq al-Sham rebel group said FSA factions had also captured the villages of Fursan, Lilawa, Kino and Najma just south of Arab Ezza.
