Anti-ISIS forces cheer Raqqa's fall

U.S. military says coalition still faces holdouts in Syrian city

This frame grab from video released Tuesday and provided by Hawar News Agency, a Syrian Kurdish activist-run media group, shows fighters from the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces celebrating in Raqqa, Syria.
This frame grab from video released Tuesday and provided by Hawar News Agency, a Syrian Kurdish activist-run media group, shows fighters from the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces celebrating in Raqqa, Syria.

BEIRUT -- U.S.-backed forces said Tuesday that they had seized the northern Syrian city of Raqqa from the Islamic State militant group, which had long used the city as the capital of its self-declared caliphate.

Kurdish and Arab fighters, part of the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, took to the streets to celebrate the end of the battle they have fought for four months, climbing onto vehicles and parading around the deserted, destroyed city, according to photographs posted on social media. One photo showed the offensive's commander, Rojda Felat, waving the yellow-and-red Syrian Democratic Forces flag in Naim Square, where the Islamic State carried out beheadings.

But the U.S. Central Command stopped short of declaring victory, saying "more than 90 percent of Raqqa is in [Syrian Democratic Forces'] control."

Col. Ryan Dillon, a spokesman for the U.S. military in Baghdad, said Tuesday that Raqqa was on the verge of being liberated but that there were still pockets of the city controlled by the Islamic State.

[THE ISLAMIC STATE: Timeline of group’s rise, fall; details on campaign to fight it]

Syrian Democratic Forces officers, however, were emphatic in phone interviews and public statements that they had finally wrested control of the city from the militants after a monthslong campaign.

"There is an air of jubilation in the city," said Mustafa Abdi, a spokesman for the Syrian Democratic Forces. "People are overjoyed that they are finally rid of this scourge."

Still, another coalition spokesman said suicide bombers might still be hiding in the city. And in a video teleconference with Pentagon reporters, Dillon also said that Islamic State fighters had booby-trapped the city with improvised explosive devices and unexploded ordnance that officials say could take years to remove.

In a reminder of the humanitarian catastrophe unleashed by the fighting, the international charity group Save the Children said camps housing tens of thousands of people who fled Raqqa were "bursting at the seams."

It said about 270,000 people from Raqqa are still in critical need of aid. With the high level of destruction reported in and around Raqqa, most families have nowhere to go and are likely to be in camps for months or years, it said.

Ilham Ahmed, a senior member of the Syrian Democratic Forces' political wing, said the hardest part will be administering and rebuilding Raqqa. The group has appointed a civilian administration of residents to rebuild the city, but larger questions loom.

The Syrian Democratic Forces is a multiethnic force, but its Kurdish leadership harbors ambitions of autonomous rule over a Kurdish region in Syria that includes the Arab-majority Raqqa, leading to concerns of a possible backlash among the city's Sunni Arab population.

Syrian government officials have spoken on several occasions about their determination to regain control over all of the territory they lost to the rebellion against President Bashar Assad, including the area controlled by the Kurds.

Brett McGurk, the top U.S. presidential envoy to the anti-Islamic State coalition, arrived in northern Syria and met Tuesday with members of the Raqqa Civil Council and members of the reconstruction committee.

He also met tribal leaders and urged them to work closely with the Syrian Democratic Forces, preventing Assad's government from using any divisions between them, according to the Furat FM, an activist-run news agency.

RECRUITMENT HUB

The loss of Raqqa will deprive the Islamic State of a key hub for recruitment and planning, Dillon said, because the city attracted hundreds of foreign fighters and was a place where attacks in the Middle East and Europe were planned.

Raqqa's liberation also carries symbolic weight. At its height in 2014, the militant group controlled Iraq's second-largest city, Mosul, as well as Raqqa and large stretches of land on both sides of the border. And it had aspirations to increase its territory and cement its rule.

The Islamic State leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who once spent time in a prison run by occupying U.S. troops in Iraq, claimed to be the successor to the caliphs, the Islamic emperors who shaped the region in past centuries. He persuaded tens of thousands of Muslims from around the world, some new to the faith or poorly versed in it, to travel to the region to fight. The group seized the ancient ruins of Palmyra in Syria and those of Hatra in Iraq, destroying historical monuments in the name of its interpretation of Islam.

With the fall of Raqqa, the Islamic State has lost the two most important cities of its self-declared caliphate in three months. It was pushed out of Mosul, Iraq, in July, and now holds only a fraction of the territory it once controlled.

A victory in Raqqa will have come at a heavy cost. Much of the city has been devastated by U.S.-led airstrikes that killed more than 1,000 civilians, according to tallies by local activists and international monitors. In earlier years, many were killed by Russian and Syrian government strikes. In addition to the thousands of people who were displaced, thousands of homes have been destroyed.

The battle for the city began in June and the Syrian Democratic Forces met with stiff resistance from the militants. It began its final assault Sunday after nearly 300 Islamic State fighters surrendered. Naim Square was captured Monday.

The force seized the hospital Tuesday, taking down the last black Islamic State flag, according to the Kurdish-run Hawar news agency. A video from Hawar showed the clashes around the hospital, which appeared riddled with bullets and partly blackened from a fire.

It is unclear what happened to the last several hundred Islamic State fighters holed up in Raqqa. There were conflicting reports about whether foreigners fighting among them would be allowed to evacuate on buses in a surrender deal.

Heather Nauert, the U.S. State Department spokesman, said that once Raqqa is fully liberated, the U.S. and its coalition partners will focus on helping to remove dangers posed by unexploded bombs in the area.

"Eventually, we would get to the point where we would start to remove some of the rubble, get to the point where we would get the electricity going once again, providing clean water -- the same types of things that the U.S. and coalition partners were able to do in Mosul," she said.

Last week, the U.S.-led coalition said there would be no negotiated withdrawal of Islamic State fighters, just the evacuation of civilians, if necessary, to keep them out of the crossfire. But in previous battles, in Hawija and Tal Afar, surrendering fighters were allowed to board buses to Islamic State-held territory. Witnesses in Raqqa said several busloads of Islamic State fighters, both Syrians and foreigners, had been allowed to board buses to Deir el-Zour.

For months, Islamic State commanders and fighters have been withdrawing from Raqqa and moving southeast into the neighboring province of Deir el-Zour. They have clustered in neighborhoods in the provincial capital, which is also called Deir el-Zour, as well as in the town of Mayadeen and in a town on the border with Iraq called al-Bukamal. Hundreds of Islamic State fighters had decamped from Raqqa to Mayadeen in recent months, taking heavy equipment with them.

But over the weekend, Syrian government forces, backed by their Russian and Iranian allies, took the town of Mayadeen and continued their advance into the provincial capital, leaving the Islamic State with the border town as the only urban area entirely under their control in Syria. Beyond that, Islamic State fighters are scattered in a large area of the Syrian desert, outside population centers.

Information for this article was contributed by Anne Barnard and Hwaida Saad of The New York Times; by Sarah El Deeb, Zeina Karam, Bassem Mroue, Robert Burns and Matthew Lee of The Associated Press; and by Louisa Loveluck, Liz Sly, Heba Habib, Zakaria Zakaria, Erin Cunningham and Alex Horton of The Washington Post.

A Section on 10/18/2017

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