(Yahoo! News)
Tony Gamal-Gabriel Rouba El Husseini 13 March 2019
US-backed forces said Wednesday the Islamic State group was living its "final moments" after thunderous shelling on its last scrap of land in eastern Syria prompted 3,000 jihadists to surrender.
But the die-hard IS fighters who stayed to defend the remnants of their "caliphate" struck back with a wave of suicide bombings, said the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces.
IS once ruled over millions in a swathe of Syria and Iraq, but it has since lost all that territory except for a riverside slither in the village of Baghouz near the Iraqi border.
Thousands of men and women have poured out of the pocket in recent weeks, hampering an advance by the US-backed SDF, which has paused its offensive multiple times to allow evacuations.
Supported by air strikes by the US-led coalition against the jihadists, the SDF resumed artillery shelling on Sunday after warning holdout IS fighters their time was up.
For three nights in a row, the Kurdish-led SDF has unleashed a deluge of fire on jihadist outposts, engulfing their makeshift encampment in a ravaging blaze.
"IS's final moments have started," SDF official Jiaker Amed told AFP.
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