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Syria regime completely expels Daesh from border town — monitor

By AFP - Jun 12,2018 - Last updated at Jun 12,2018

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Syria regime forces ousted the Daesh militant group from a town near the border with Iraq on Monday after days of clashes to end a deadly incursion there, a monitor said.

On Friday, the militants used at least ten suicide bombers in their offensive on Albu Kamal, quickly overrunning several of its neighbourhoods, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

It was the biggest attack on the town in the eastern province of Deir Ezzor since the extremist group lost it to regime forces in November 2017, the Britain-based monitor said.

On Monday, “regime forces and their allies regained control of the whole town of Albu Kamal after expelling Daesh from its northern and northwestern parts,” observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman said.

After loyalist forces tried to surround them, the militants fled back into Syria’s vast Badiya desert, which stretches from the country’s centre to the border with Iraq, he said.

Violent clashes since Friday have killed at least 48 regime forces and allied fighters, as well as 32 militants including the 10 suicide bombers who led the initial raid.

Daesh has ramped up its attacks on fighters loyal to President Bashar Assad since the extremist group withdrew from its last bastion in the capital last month.

The extremists were bussed out of the southern suburb of Yarmouk to parts of the Badiya desert under a secretive evacuation deal with the regime.

Daesh has lost much of the “caliphate” it declared in 2014 in Syria and neighbouring Iraq, but still holds slithers of land in the desert and east of the country.

In eastern Syria, regime forces hold land west of the Euphrates River.

A Kurdish-Arab alliance backed by the US-led coalition, meanwhile, has been fighting extremists in a tiny pocket on its eastern banks and another to the north in the northwestern province of Hassakeh.

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