In what constitutes the so-called Islamic State’s largest and most critical defeat since The Battle of Kobane, the last one hundred or so Daesh(IS) fighters in Manbij tucked their tails between their legs and fled the city yesterday, taking hundreds of civilian hostages with them. They were the last remaining of a large force of thousands of Daesh extremists who had been encircled in Manbij by the men and women of the Kurdish-Arab-Assyrian-Turkmen SDF(Syrian Democratic Forces) coalition.
About two months ago, the SDF struck across the Euphrates River from Kobane Canton, liberating hundreds of villages in the countryside surrounding Manbij, a city with a population near 100,000. In the years of occupation by Daesh, Manbij had earned the nickname “Little London”, because it was Daesh’s main staging and training area for foreign fighters flooding across the border from Turkey and these fighters were more likely to communicate in English than any other language. The city was also critical to Daesh because it sits on their only remaining major re-supply route to Raqqa from our NATO “ally” Turkey and was the main hub for Daesh oil trading. In addition to all that, the city was being used by Daesh to send trained fighters to Europe via Turkey in order to stage attacks there. In the process of liberating Manbij, the SDF seized more than 10,000 ISIL documents and 4.5 terrabytes of digital data, in what may be one of the greatest blows to global terrorism in years. It is safe to say that U.S. and European intelligence agencies have been inundated with work, sorting through this treasure trove of intelligence data. Last, but not least, the liberation of Manbij is significant for the Kurds because it brings them another step closer to connecting the Afrin Canton in northwest Syria with the already unified Kobane and Jazeera Cantons, which would completely shut off Daesh from re-supply with materiel and foreign fighters via Turkey.
As can be seen in the maps above, the Kurds and the SDF have liberated more territory from Daesh than any other force in Syria. Unlike the Kurdish Peshmerga in Iraq, they have done this without receiving major supplies from western nations, thanks to “Sultan” Erdogan of Turkey, who seems to hate the Kurds far more than he objects to fanatical Islamist Jihadis(if he even objects to them at all), and continually pressures the E.U. and the U.S. not to assist the Syrian Kurds. The only major support the Syrian Kurds have been receiving comes in the form of U.S. airstrikes, which President Obama initiated when the city of Kobane was about to be overrun by Daesh and — to his great credit — has continued to support since then. The end result has been that hundreds of thousands of civilians, at the very minimum, have been liberated from the iron grip of fascist Daesh, with 150,000 being freed during the Manbij offensive alone. Sadly, these gains against Daesh have not come without sacrifice. Daesh has been using civilians as human shields, even sending suicide bombers dressed as civilians along with fleeing civilians and shooting civilians wanting to flee zones controlled by them. Countless people have been killed or maimed by IEDs left behind by Daesh and up to 300 SDF fighters gave their lives in the Manbij Offensive, including a YPG volunteer from Colorado, whom I will give the last word in this piece:
R.I.P. Jordan MacTaggart and all those who gave their lives defending all of us from fascist fanatics.