BEIRUT // Syrian Kurdish fighters were within 55 kilometres of the ISIL stronghold of Raqqa last night after capturing the key town of Ain Issa.
The latest victory yesterday came after ISIL lost control of a military base on Monday night and the border town of Tal Abyad more than a week ago.
“Ain Issa has come under our full control, along with dozens of villages in the surrounding area,” said a spokesman for the YPG, the Kurdish People’s Protection Units.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitor based in Britain, said ISIL had withdrawn from the town and YPG and rebel forces were sweeping it to clear mines laid by the extremists.
Both the military base and Ain Issa are on the main road between Kurdish-held territory in Aleppo province to the west and Hasakeh province to the east.
The same route links territory held by ISIL in Aleppo and Hasakeh provinces.
“It’s also a defence line for Raqqa,” said Mutlu Civiroglu, a Kurdish affairs analyst. “Considering that Raqqa is a sort of capital of the ‘caliphate’, it creates a lot of pressure on ISIL.”
The advance by the YPG and rebels opposed to the regime of Bashar Al Assad has been backed by air power from the US-led coalition fighting ISIL.
The Observatory said at least 26 extremists were killed in air strikes in and around Ain Issa on Monday. At least 2,896 people, mostly ISIL militants, had been killed in coalition strikes in Syria since the air campaign began in September last year.
Despite the string of defeats, the extremist group, which controls a large area of territory in Iraq and Syria, continues to commit atrocities and acts of destruction.
A video yesterday showed ISIL militants murdering 16 men by drowning them in a cage, decapitating them with explosives and firing a rocket-propelled grenade into a car.
The video, apparently shot in Nineveh province in Iraq, was one of the most brutal yet in a series released by the extremists of killings of opponents in areas under their control.
ISIL has executed hundreds of people by gunfire, dozens by beheading, stoned some to death, thrown others from buildings and burned a captured Jordanian pilot alive.
The men killed in the latest video are said to be “spies”, and some of them made recorded “confessions”.
The group also claimed yesterday to have blown up two ancient shrines they consider sacrilegious in Palmyra, the 2,000-year-old Unesco World Heritage site in central Syria.
The militants seized control of the ancient city in May. Syrian regime forces have bombed the city, and the militants camped within it, since then.
Before-and-after pictures showed several militants carrying explosives and the shrines, which are not among the city’s Roman buildings, reduced to rubble.
The Observatory said this week that the militants had planted mines in Palmyra but that it was not clear whether it was preparing to destroy the site or wanted to deter government forces from advancing towards it.
* Agence France-Presse and Reuters
