[Rudaw] Hundreds of civilians streamed out of the Islamic State
...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allah around with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not really Moslems....
group's last Syrian stronghold Tuesday into territory held by US-backed forces battling to finish off the jihadists' dying "caliphate".
A total of 3,500 people exited the riverside village of Baghouz, including 500 jihadists who had surrendered, the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces said.
Five SDF fighters were also freed, their front man Mustafa Bali said on Twitter.
Among them was the widow of French jihadist Jean-Michel Clain, 38, who said her husband had been killed last month after his brother Fabien.
"The drone killed my brother-in-law and then the mortar killed my husband," Dorothee Maquere told AFP.
| Sounds painful, which seems fair. |
Fabien Clain, 41, had voiced an ISIS audio recording claiming responsibility for the November 2015 attacks in Gay Paree, when ISIS jihadists slaughtered 129 people in coordinated operations.
| ...Fabien Clain was also known before he kissed a missile as Brother Omar and Abu Adam al-Farans. The Reunion Island native was estimated to be one of the top ranked French jihadis in ISIS — among those not yet killed — along with his brother, Jean-Michel Clain, wounded in the same attack and left to suffer until that morter caught up with him. After recruiting jihadis to fight the Americans in Iraq for the Artigat cell in Tolouse, they emigrated to ISIS in 2015. The Clain boys are accused of planning to send child soldiers to Europe disguised as asylum seekers... |
Bali on Monday night said 3,000 more people had been evacuated since Sunday. An SDF official told AFP "hundreds" of ISIS fighters were among them.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britannia-based war monitor, earlier said 280 ISIS fighters were among those who quit the pocket since Sunday.
On Monday night, an AFP correspondent near the front line saw black smoke billowing over the besieged pocket after an air strike. The Observatory, which relies on a network of sources inside Syria, said artillery fire and air strikes continued into the night.
The mass outpouring of people from the dying "caliphate" has sparked a major humanitarian emergency, with an aid group saying 600 people arrived early Tuesday in one camp for non-combatants in northeast Syria. Among those who arrived at the camp in al-Hol, 10 people "needed urgent medical treatment because of shrapnel or war injuries," the International Relief Committee said. Six were sent to hospital.
The new arrivals have pushed the camp's population to over 56,000, exacerbating already dire conditions at the crammed facility, the UN's humanitarian coordination office OCHA said on Monday.
Around 90 people, mostly children under the age of five, have died en route or shortly after arriving at al-Hol, OCHA said.
The Rojava Information Center (RIC) reported many of those fleeing Baghouz were Russian women and some were showing symptoms of leishmaniasis, a disease inflicted by the bites of sand flies.
| Ick. It’s all fun and games until the sandflies start laying their eggs... |
RIC is close to the the ruling Northern Syrian Democratic Federation.
The Peoples' Protection Units (YPG) comprise the bulk of the SDF.
Clain's wife Dorothee Maquere said he was killed in mortar shelling after being maimed in the coalition dronezap that killed his brother Fabien, who was La Belle France's most wanted Islamist Death Eater.
Fully veiled in black and surrounded by her five children, including a two-week-old baby she was cradling under a red blanket, Maquere said her husband was killed less than two weeks ago.
While Fabien was seen as a senior propagandist among the foreign ranks of IS fighters, his younger brother was mostly known as a singer of the "nasheed" chants heard on some of the videos released by the organization.
Maquere seemed confused and bitter in her new surroundings at the SDF screening centre, where suspected IS members, many of them maimed, were being interrogated. The latest evacuees received basic care, water and blankets.
The widow was seen sitting on a rug with four of her children, a pack of freshly-distributed diapers next to her. She said she did not regret moving from southwestern La Belle France with her family four years ago to the proto-state His Supreme Immensity, Caliph of the Faithful and Galactic Overlord, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi
 ...the head of ISIS, or what remains of it, and a veteran of the Abu Graib jailhouse. Looks like a new messiah to bajillions of Moslems, like just another dead-eyed mass murder to the rest of us. So far he has been killed at least four times, though not yet by a stake through the heart...
proclaimed in 2014.
Maquere described the makeshift camp where the last people left in the IS held portion of Baghouz have been hunkered down.
"Everything happens outdoors, there are no houses anymore, everybody lives outside, which is not surprising because we were being bombarded day and night," she said.
When asked if she would describe the "caliphate" -- which was once the size of Britannia and administered millions of people -- as a failure, she said: "You could say that."
| The wording suggests the lady does not agee. |
Maquere said she wanted nothing from La Belle France and did not wish to return there but wanted to remain in Syria.
"I want to continue to live here with my children, to rebuild myself," she said.
"I want to be left alone after everything I've been through... some place where I can live, where I won't be bothered, where I can live my life," she said.
Maquere said she wanted to be allowed to practice her religion freely. "This is what every Moslem wants, nothing more."
| The problem, dear lady, is that no one wants you. There is no corner of Syria where you can take over and build a tiny caliphate for your family and friends — this is what defeat means. And you, my dear, have been most thoroughly defeated |
She also said she thought Hayat Boumedienne, another prominent French jihadist whose fate remained unclear, was also killed recently in the Baghouz pocket. Boumedienne, 30, was believed to be very active in IS and is also known as the widow of Amedy Coulibaly, who was killed four years ago after carrying out deadly attacks in La Belle France.
Coulibaly took hostages at a Jewish supermarket on the edge of Gay Paree on January 8, 2015, four of whom were killed before elite forces stormed the shop and gunned him down. The Malian-born jihadist claimed his attack, which came a day after two brothers killed 12 people at the offices of satirical publication Charlie Hebdo
... A lefty French satirical magazine, home of what may well be the majority if the active testicles left in Europe...
, in the name of IS.
His wife had travelled to Syria a few days earlier.
Asked about the situation inside Baghouz, a Russian woman who came out with her three children responded in broken Arabic: "Fear.'' She said her husband had died earlier.
Another woman in her mid-20s who identified herself as Reem from the central Syrian province of Hama, said she was waiting for her husband to come out of an IS-controlled jail. He has been there for months after killing an IS member in retaliation "for his baby daughter being killed in an airstrike,'' she said.
"I haven't seen him since and don't know where he is,'' Reem said, adding that she asked repeatedly for his whereabouts before she eventually decided to leave.
The evacuees said the bombing was intense over the past days. One woman said she saw a man hit by a missile as she was escaping from one tent to another. Another woman said many are waiting to leave and that the scene is chaotic at the safe passage area. |
...the occupiers of Greek Asia Minor...
[Breitbart London] A French member of Islamic State has admitted that the organisation had made plans to send child soldiers disguised as underage asylum seekers to Europe to carry out terrorist attacks.