After ISIS ignores offer to flee Syrian city, fighting resumes

BEIRUT -- Sporadic clashes between Islamic State militants and U.S.-backed fighters broke out Friday in a northern, Islamic State-held Syrian city after the extremists ignored a 48-hour offer from the day before to leave the besieged town without a fight, opposition activists and a Kurdish official said.

The fighting is forcing many civilians to flee, and the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said about 200 civilians fled the city of Manbij in the morning hours. A 20-year-old woman among those fleeing died when she stepped on a land mine while trying to escape with her children, the Observatory said.

A Facebook page that covers Manbij posted two photographs of a few dozen people, mostly women and children, saying they "risked their lives" to flee the city's southern neighborhood of Hazawneh. The photographs appeared genuine and corresponded to other reporting of the events depicted.

Members of the predominantly Kurdish U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces have been on the offensive in Manbij for weeks, backed by U.S.-led coalition airstrikes.

On Thursday, the Manbij Military Council -- part of the Democratic Forces -- said Islamic State fighters were given 48 hours to leave the city with their "individual weapons," saying this was their last opportunity to leave alive.

Sherfan Darwish of the Democratic Forces said the extremists did not respond to the offer and that sporadic clashes broke out again on Friday.

The Islamic State-linked Aamaq news agency said the U.S.-led coalition conducted about 20 airstrikes on the center of Manbij on Friday.

Manbij is an Islamic State hub and lies on a key supply route to the Islamic State group's de facto capital of Raqqa. If Manbij is captured by the U.S.-backed fighters, it will be the biggest strategic defeat for the Islamic State in Syria since July 2015, when the extremist group lost the border town of Tal Abyad.

In Geneva, spokesman Jens Laerke of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said a convoy carrying assistance for 32,000 people arrived Friday in the hard-to-reach town of Halat al-Madeh in the central province of Hama.

"This is the first interagency convoy to Hama in 2016," Laerke said, adding that the Syrian government had removed some "surgical and certain medical items" from the cargo.

The United Nations says there are nearly half a million people in besieged areas in Syria and an estimated 4.5 million Syrians in so-called hard-to-reach areas.

In Moscow, Russia's Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, during a recent visit to Russia, reiterated the West's stance that Syrian President Bashar Assad must leave power.

Moscow, a major Assad ally, disagrees with that, fearing a worse turmoil if the Syrian president were to go.

"Kerry ... said we need to agree first that Assad goes," Lavrov said Friday. "Who can guarantee that what happened to Libya won't happen to Syria?"

Information for this article was contributed by Jamey Keaten and Nataliya Vasilyeva of The Associated Press.

A Section on 07/23/2016

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