Saturday I covered the Syrian army’s offensive against the Islamic State pocket in the Yarmouk Basin along the border with Jordan and the Golan Heights.
Now news reports indicate that pocket has been completely crushed:
The Syrian regime’s army and its allies have taken full control of the Yarmouk Basin in southwestern Syria after routing Daesh, the Hezbollah group’s Al Manar TV said on Tuesday.
The basin borders Israel and Jordan and had been the last embattled pocket of the southwest after a sustained advance by President Bashar Al Assad’s forces into the longtime rebel stronghold.
The Iranian-backed Hezbollah has fought alongside Al Assad’s forces as he has turned the tide of the civil war against rebels and militants with the help of Russian air power since 2015.
The regime’s army seized Daesh’s main redoubt in the town of Shajara on Monday, which left just a few villages in the hands of an Daesh-affiliated faction, the Khalid Ibn Al Walid army, that had controlled the Yarmouk Basin.
Here was the Livemap snap Saturday:
And here’s the map just after the pocket was crushed:
Pocket by pocket, the last remnants of the Islamic State are being dismantled.
Faster, please.
Tags: Foreign Policy, Golan Heights, Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, Jihad, Military, Syria