U.S.-backed Syria Force Closes in on ISIS-held City

Beirut – U.S.-backed Syrian fighters have surrounded the ISIS-held city of Manbij from three sides as they press a major new offensive against the extremists located near Turkish borders, a spokesman for the fighters said on Monday.

The simultaneous assaults on Manbij in Syria and Fallujah in Iraq, at opposite ends of ISIS-held terrain, are considered two of the biggest operations yet against the terrorist organization in what Washington says is the year it hopes to defeat the self-declared caliphate.

The Syria Democratic Forces (SDF), including a Kurdish militia and Arab allies that joined it last year, launched the Manbij attack last week to ISIS from its last stretch of the Syrian-Turkish frontier. If successful it could cut the militants’ main access route to the outside world, paving the way for an assault on their Syrian capital Raqqa.

Last week Iraqi forces also gathered at the southern outskirts of Fallujah, an insurgent stronghold 750 km down the Euphrates River from Manbij and just an hour’s drive from Baghdad.

The SDF in Syria are backed by U.S. air strikes and a small contingent of American special forces. The Iraqi army is also backed by U.S. air forces, as well as by powerful Iran-backed Shi’ite militia led by politicians who have emerged as rivals of Prime Minister Haider Abadi, Reuters reported.

The assaults by ISIS’s disparate enemies on a variety of fronts have put unprecedented pressure on the group, although the terrorists have displayed remarkable resistance so far.

The offensives have also put large numbers of civilians in grave risk. The United Nations estimates 50,000 civilians are trapped in Iraq’s besieged Fallujah, and more than 200,000 are at risk of being displaced by battles around Syria’s Manbij.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British-based group that reports on the war, said that the U.S.-backed forces in northern Syria had cut the road north from Manbij to ISIS-held Jarabulus at the Turkish border.

Sharfan Darwish, spokesman for the SDF-allied Manbij Military Council, said the U.S.-backed alliance had advanced to within 6 km of Manbij, and the attack was going to plan. More than 150 terrorists had been allegedly killed. Darwish claimed that 50 of the ISIS bodies are in SDF hands.

U.S.-backed Syria Force Closes in on ISIS-held City