Flag of freedom flies over vanquished Daesh ‘caliphate’

Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) raised their yellow banner on Saturday from a shell-pocked house where militants once flew the notorious black flag of ISIS.

Around it stretched a field pitted by trenches and bomb craters and littered with scorched tents, the twisted wreckage of burned out vehicles, unspent explosives and few remaining corpses.

Scattered amid empty foxholes and trenches were personal belongings, blankets, generators, oil barrels, water tanks and satellite dishes. Cars and motorcycles were turned to rusted, twisted heaps of metal. There were unused rockets, mortars and grenades, and a pile of suicide vests.

So ended the so-called “caliphate” — the brutal regime carved out by ISIS in large parts of Iraq and Syria in 2014. The five-year war that has devastated cities and towns across north Syria and Iraq ended in Baghouz, a Syrian border village where the cornered militants made their last stand.

“Baghouz is free and the military victory against Daesh has been achieved,” said SDF spokesman Mustafa Bali, adding that the SDH would continue its military and security campaigns against the group's sleeper cells.

SDF fighters, who besieged Baghouz for weeks while US-led coalition warplanes pounded from above, paraded in a ceremony at the nearby Al-Omar oil field base in memory of 11,000 comrades killed. 

At a televised ceremony, its general command called on the Syrian government, which has sworn to retake the whole country, to recognize the autonomous administration that runs areas the SDF controls in northeast Syria.

It also called on Turkey, which regards the SDF as a terrorist organization and has staged incursions into Syria against it, to leave Syrian territory, especially the mostly Kurdish region of Afrin.

The SDF has been battling to capture Baghouz at the Iraqi border for weeks.