US general warns of IS resurgence as 'caliphate' nears collapse

[Valin]

Digital Journal

Rouba El Husseini and Dylan Collins

Mar. 7 2019

A top US commander warned Thursday that the battle against the Islamic State group was "far from over" despite the jihadists' loss of territory, as survivors abandoned the last shred of the group's collapsing "caliphate" in eastern Syria.

A fierce assault by US-backed forces has sparked an exodus of dust-covered children, veiled women dragging suitcases and dishevelled men, many of them wounded, from the village of Baghouz where besieged IS fighters are making a last stand.

But General Joseph Votel, head of the US Central Command, warned that many of those being evacuated are "unrepentant, unbroken and radicalised", calling for a "vigilant offensive" against the group.

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Around a tenth of the nearly 58,000 people who have fled the last IS bastion since December were jihadists trying to slip back into civilian life, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based war monitor.

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