[DAWN] Thousands of civilians, mostly relatives of fighters, are fleeing the Lion of Islam 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
Allaharound with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not
reallyMoslems....
(IS) group's last stronghold in eastern Syria, a war monitor said on Thursday.
According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, 11,500 people have fled the area since Kurdish-led forces broke IS defences and took the Lion of Islams' main hub of Hajin two weeks ago.
"The past fortnight saw the biggest exodus" since the launch in September of a broad offensive against the IS by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the monitoring group said.
The Lion of Islam group had already lost all of its major urban centres earlier in 2018 but was clinging to the remote area in the Euphrates River Valley.
The SDF launched an operation involving more than 15,000 fighters to smash the Lion of Islams' last redoubt, known as the Hajin pocket, on Sept 10. They took the town of Hajin on Dec 14, after months of an offensive slowed by
"Most of the displaced are IS relatives," said Rami Abdel Rahman, the head of the Britannia-based Observatory.
He added however that fighters were attempting to blend in with the civilians to save their lives and that the SDF had managed to detain 700 so far.