ISIS capital Raqqa falls to Syrian forces
A commander with the U.S.-backed Syrian forces battling the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) says the city of Raqqa has been liberated from militants, and combing operations are underway to clear the city of land mines and extremist sleeper cells.
Brig.-Gen. Talal Sillo told The Associated Press on Tuesday that there are no longer clashes in the city.
Sillo said a formal declaration will follow befitting “the fall of the capital of terrorism.”
Dozens of militants who refused to surrender had made their last stand in the city’s stadium, which had become notorious as a prison and dungeons for the group.
It wasn’t immediately clear if ISIS militants are still holed up inside the stadium. The area was being cleared by Kurdish and Arab militias, according to Rojda Felat, commander of the Raqqa campaign for the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).
The SDF, an alliance of Kurdish and Arab militias backed by a U.S.-led international alliance, has been fighting ISIS inside Raqqa since June.
Destroyed buildings are seen in a residential district on the front line in Raqqa on Oct. 16. (Erik De Castro/Reuters)
Raqqa fell to the militant group in 2014 and became the de facto capital of its self-styled caliphate.
It used the city as a planning and operations centre for its warfare in the Middle East and its string of attacks overseas, and for a time imprisoned Western hostages there before killing them in slickly produced films distributed online.
ISIS has lost swaths of territory in Syria and Iraq this year, including its most prized possession, Mosul, and in Syria it has been forced back into a strip of the Euphrates valley and surrounding desert.