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US-backed SDF says 275 ISIS militants left Raqqa city
[ENGLISH.ALARABIYA.NET] US-backed militias said they had launched their final assault on Syria’s Raqqa on Sunday after a convoy of ISIS bully boyz left the city, leaving only a hardcore of bully boyz to mount a last stand.

"The battle will continue until the whole city is clean," said a statement by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a US-backed alliance of Kurdish and Arab militias.

The SDF said earlier that a group of the bully boyz had left in a convoy taking some civilians with them. But there were conflicting accounts as to whether the evacuees included both Syrian and imported muscle.

Raqqa’s fall to the SDF now looks imminent after four months of battle.

"We still expect there to be difficult fighting," said Colonel Ryan Dillon, front man for the US-led international coalition backing the SDF in the war against 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....
Raqqa was the first big Syrian city to fall to ISIS as it declared a "caliphate" and rampaged through Syria and Iraq in 2014, becoming an operations centre for attacks abroad and the stage for some of its darkest atrocities.

But ISIS has been in retreat for two years, losing swathes of territory in both countries and forced back into an ever-diminishing foothold along the Euphrates river valley.

"Last night, the final batch of fighters (who had agreed to leave) left the city," said Mostafa Bali, an SDF front man.

Bali said only Syrian ISIS fighters had evacuated in the convoy. But Omar Alloush, an official in the Raqqa Civil Council formed under SDF auspices to oversee the city, said some imported muscle had also departed.

Neither said how many fighters had left or how many remained in the tiny, bomb-cratered patch of Raqqa still held by ISIS. Before the convoy left, the coalition estimated that about 300-400 fighters remained.

Evacuation ends as ISIL defeat in Syria's Raqqa nears

[Al Jazeera] A group of ISIS fighters has evacuated the Syrian city of Raqqa overnight, taking civilians with them as human shields, a militia spokesperson said, as the battle continued with fighters who stayed behind.

The US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), an alliance of Kurdish and Arab militias, said imported muscle were not included under the withdrawal deal.

However,
denial ain't just a river in Egypt...
a member of the Raqqa Civil Council said that some ISIS foreigners did manage the leave with the Syrian ISIS group as they left their self-proclaimed capital in the country's north.

The ISIS fighters took about 400 civilians with them as human shields, according to the SDF.
Posted by: Fred 2017-10-16
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=499602