Date: Jun 18, 2018 Source: The Daily Star U.S.-backed fighters expel Daesh from key Syrian border village Agence France Presse BEIRUT/LONDON: A U.S.-backed Kurdish-Arab alliance Sunday ousted Daesh (ISIS) from a key village in northeastern Syria near the Iraqi border, it said. The Syrian Democratic Forces, supported by U.S.-led coalition air power, have been battling to expel the militants from the last villages they hold in eastern Syria. “The SDF were able Sunday to liberate Dashisha village” in the northeastern province of Hassakeh, the alliance said in a statement. SDF fighters “are now just 3 kilometers from the Syrian-Iraqi border,” it said. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said fighting for the village since Saturday had killed 30 militants. Dashisha was an important Daesh bastion on a corridor linking militant-held territory in Syria and Iraq, observatory head Rami Abdel-Rahman said. Saturday, the Kurdish-Arab alliance seized the nearby village of Tal al-Shair from the militants, according to the observatory. Since declaring their so-called “caliphate” in 2014, the militants have since lost much of the territory they held to various offensives – in Syria to Russia-backed regime forces and to the SDF. In early May, the SDF announced the final phase of its operation against the militants to expel them from their holdouts in Hassakeh and along the Euphrates River in the adjacent province of Deir al-Zor. A senior Iraqi official said last month Daesh leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was still alive and moving between militant-held areas in both provinces along with a small group of followers. In September, an U.S. military chief said the militant leader was still alive and probably hiding in eastern Syria’s Euphrates Valley. British newspaper The Daily Telegraph released a report Friday claiming that the SDF have released European militants captured allegedly fighting for Daesh back to the militants under several secret deals. In return, Daesh has returned an equal number of Kurdish prisoners. The SDF has complained that Western countries are refusing to take responsibility for the fighters, and that it does not have the capacity to hold them indefinitely. The Kurdish coalition struck three agreements with Daesh to exchange militants and their families with its own captured fighters, The Telegraph said, citing people with knowledge of the negotiations and relatives of those detained. Four of the 15 mediators involved were later assassinated, causing the remaining negotiators to pull out of further talks, according to the report. The Foreign Office in London declined to comment.