Coalition troops forced to allow ISIS fighters to flee Syrian battlefield

U.S. and coalition troops were forced to allow hundreds of Islamic State commanders, fighters and their families to flee the embattled northern Syrian town of Manbij, fearing any attempt to attack the escaping forces would end in massive civilian casualties.

A convoy of a “hundred to a couple of hundred” individuals associated with the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, left Manbij Friday shortly after the Syrian Defense Forces, the American-backed paramilitary force battling the Islamic State in the country, wrested the city from the terrorist organization’s control, according to Col. Chris Garver, the top U.S. military spokesman in the region.

American intelligence assets detected the convoy leaving the Syrian city late Friday, but opted not to attack since any strike would result in massive civilian casualties, Col. Garver said Tuesday.

“We have repeatedly mentioned the care that our partnered forces were taking to avoid civilian casualties and collateral damage, so the partnered forces on the ground did not engage the convoy,” he told reporters at the Pentagon during a briefing from coalition headquarters in Baghdad.

American and allied forces held their fire on a suspected Islamic State convoy fleeing the village of Albu Bali near the Iraqi city of Ramadi when that town eventually fell to government forces earlier this year.

But U.S. warplanes destroyed a convoy of fleeing Islamic State fighters and their families who were attempting to escape the Iraqi city of Fallujah, days after Iraqi forces liberated the city located in the country’s volatile Anbar province. Over 170 vehicles were destroyed in that strike, according to Defense Department estimates.

That said, the Islamic State convoy heading out of Manbij was much smaller than the one that attempted to escape Fallujah, according to Col. Garver.

While local forces opted not to attack the convoy coming from Manbij, American intelligence assets in the region continue to track its movements through northern Syria, Col. Garver said. He declined to comment on where American and allied intelligence officials anticipate the convoy is headed.

It remained unclear whether the civilians traveling on the convoy were tied to Islamic State, or whether they were forced to travel with the insurgents as human shields.

“They’ve been taking human shields all along. They’ve tried to introduce all throughout the Manbij fight,” Col. Garver said, noting as Syrian forces closed in on the city, Islamic State fighters “kept throwing civilians to basically walk into the line of fire, trying to get them shot.

“So have they placed civilians in harm’s way before? Absolutely. Do we anticipate that they’ll do it again? Absolutely again,” he said, adding that it was highly unlikely that all the civilian passengers aboard the convoy were being held there against their will.

Manbij, 100 miles southeast of the Turkish border city of Gaziantep, has long been the main artery for fighters, weapons and equipment moving from Islamic State’s de facto Syrian capital of Raqqa to the group’s strongholds in Iraq and elsewhere.

Arab and Kurdish Syrian forces backed by American air power seized the city center Friday, the culmination of a nearly two-month campaign to free Manbij from Islamic State control. Roughly 300 U.S. special operations troops were on the ground in Syria advising SDF and Kurdish militias during the Manbij operation and will likely remain until the eventual assault on Raqqa.

“The success in Manbij city will also help reinforce the growing isolation of Raqqa and enable us to achieve the next objective of our campaign in Syria — collapsing ISIL’s control over that city,” Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said in a statement days after the city’s liberation.