The town lies on a key supply route between the Turkish border and the city of Raqqa, the center of the IS group’s declared caliphate.
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Extraordinary pictures show men having their beards cut off and women burning niqabs after the Syrian city of Manbij was liberated from Islamic State.
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.
But while the US and its allies prepare for that tough battle, resident of Manbij will likely return to a state of relative normalcy that existed before ISIS captured the town. More than 2,000 civilians, who were being held captive by ISIS, were released.
USA officials have said once the Manbij operation is completed, it would create the conditions to move on the militant group’s de facto capital of Raqqa, Reuters reported. It progressed slowly after the terror group used civilians as human shields, forcing forces to go house-to-house to clear them.
“As you can see, when they withdraw from an area, they burn it up”, an SDF member told Kurdistan 24.
“They used these civilians as human shields as they withdrew to Jarabulus, thus preventing us from targeting them”.
Sherfan Darwish, another Syria Democratic Forces official in Manbij, also confirmed that the town is under the full control of his fighters.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which relies on sources inside Syria to cover the war, gave a similar report, saying Isis forced about 2,000 civilians into cars it confiscated and headed for Jarabulus.
US-backed Syrian forces said on Sunday they had established a military council to push ISIL fighters out of their northern bastion of Al Bab, two days after ousting the extremists from Manbij.
Manbij controlled one of just two crossings to Turkey from Syria, and its fall will probably deprive the extremists of that route.
With air support from the US-led coalition, the SDF began its assault on Manbij on May 31, surging into the town itself three weeks later. ISIS, tough still controlling important territories, has gone through several defeats in both Syria and Iraq. The United Nations has said more than 78,000 people have been displaced since then.
The SDF assured that the military operations would continue until all the towns are free from extremist presence.
Since May 21, the SDF has liberated more than 1,000 square kilometers of territory from ISIS and taken out more than 600 fortified fighting positions, Trowbridge said.
That has disrupted supplies of food and medicine to an area where more than 1 million people live.
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In response to the escalated assault on Aleppo’s west side, rebels and opposition activists say, Assad’s forces have responded with intensified bombings that struck hospitals and involved munitions containing chlorine gas, a choking agent.
