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Derechos | Equipo Nizkor
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Derechos | Equipo Nizkor
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16Oct16
Village Mythologized by ISIS Is Recaptured, Syrian Rebels Say
Syrian rebels said Sunday that they had captured the village of Dabiq from Islamic State fighters, forcing the group from a stronghold where it had promised to fight a final, apocalyptic battle with the West.
The rebels, backed by Turkish tanks and warplanes, took Dabiq, in northwestern Syria about nine miles from the Turkish border, and neighboring Soran after clashes on Sunday morning, said Ahmed Osman, the leader of one of the Free Syrian Army factions involved in the fighting.
"The Daesh myth of their great battle in Dabiq is finished," he told Reuters, using an Arabic term for the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL.
A spokesman for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey said Dabiq's liberation was a "strategic and symbolic victory" against the Islamic State.
The Free Syrian Army is an umbrella group for rebels seeking to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad of Syria in a civil war that has killed hundreds of thousands and displaced millions, dragging in regional and global powers and creating space for jihadists.
An Islamic prophecy identifies Dabiq as the site of a battle between Muslims and infidels that will presage doomsday. The Islamic State has used that message in its propaganda, going so far as to name its main publication after the village.
However, the militant group has appeared to back away from Dabiq's symbolism after advances by Syrian rebels.
Those Turkish-backed rebel forces will now advance on the Islamic State-held town of Al Bab, southeast of Dabiq, said Ibrahim Kalin, Mr. Erdogan's spokesman.
Since the beginning of the year, the Islamic State's territory in Syria has been steadily eroded by the Syrian Democratic Forces, an umbrella group of Kurdish and Arab militias backed by the United States.
The campaign has cut the Islamic State off from the Turkish border, long its most reliable entry point for supplies and foreign fighters. Airstrikes have killed a succession of Islamic State leaders in Syria, including Omar al-Shishani, the group's minister of war, and Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, its chief propagandist and the strategist behind the group's efforts to carry out attacks in Europe.
In Iraq, the army and allied Shiite militia groups recaptured Falluja this year and have been ordered to begin an offensive on Mosul, where the Islamic State's leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, declared himself the heir to Islam's caliphs in 2014.
However, in Syria the group still holds its de facto capital, Raqqa, and most of the country's Euphrates River basin.
[Source: The New York Times, Reuters, 16Oct16]
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