Manbij is important because it lies on a key supply route between the Turkish border and the city of Raqqa, the declared capital of the Islamic State’s self-styled caliphate.
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Since the battle for Manbij began, US-led strikes have destroyed more than 50 IS heavy weapons and more than 600 fortified fighting positions, Trowbridge said.
Manbij was being used as a IS hub for the lucrative trade of looted artefacts and other IS exports, due to the city’s location near the Turkish border and on an intersection of major roads.
“While withdrawing from a district of Manbij, Daesh jihadists had abducted around 2,000 civilians from Al-Sirb neighbourhood”, said Sherfan Darwish, spokesman for the Manbij Military Council, a key component of the SDF.
Ahmad Hisso, the spokesman of the SDF, said on Sunday that they believe that ISIS would use suicide auto bombs in the city as acts of revenge.
As they fled the city on Friday, Islamic State fighters took scores of civilians with them, possibly to be used as human shields, Mr. Araj said. The retreat from the city, which IS captured in 2014, marked the jihadists’ worst defeat yet at the hands of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), an Arab-Kurdish alliance supported by United States air strikes. “They slaughtered us”, said a young man to ISIS as amateur videos relating stories in Manbij were posted in the social media.
Kurdish control of Manbij would certainly hurt relations with the US -led coalition as there is some remote involvement with Turkey as they border the newly liberated city, who have a rocky relationship with the Kurds.
In other developments, monitors linked to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Sunday that Syrian and Russian warplanes launched a new wave of airstrikes near the embattled city of Aleppo.
A USA -backed coalition of Syrian fighters, fresh from driving Islamic State extremists from a key northern city, says it will now target another IS-held town near the Turkish border. Wrestling control of Mabij from ISIS marks the biggest defeat for the group in Syria since July 2015, notes the Associated Press, and comes amid a string of territorial losses for the extremist group.
The observatory said the battle for Manbij had claimed the lives of at least 437 civilians, 299 SDF fighters and 1,019 jihadis. To this end, the militants’ headquarters from which more than 150 miles of Libyan coastline were controlled was lost.
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“I am happy if this operation would start, because numerous attackers of 13 November came from the Manbij pocket, and received training”. But the job of clearing the city will be hard after the jihadists left behind hundreds of mines and booby traps, he added. However, IS still controls large parts of Syria as well as Iraq’s second largest city, Mosul. But after an array of rebels and extremists linked to al-Qaida broke the government siege of opposition neighborhoods earlier this month, the rebels escalated the assault to besiege the government side.
