RAQQA/BEIRUT: U.S.-backed forces in Syria declared victory over Daesh (ISIS) in its capital Raqqa Tuesday, raising flags over the last militant footholds after a four-month battle.

The fighting was over and the alliance of Kurdish and Arab forces were clearing the city’s stadium of mines and any remaining militants, said Rojda Felat, commander of the Raqqa campaign for the Syrian Democratic Forces.

A formal declaration of victory in Raqqa will soon be made, once the city has been cleared of mines and any possible Daesh sleeper cells, SDF spokesman Talal Silo said.

In Washington, the U.S. military said that about 90 percent of Raqqa had been retaken from the militant group but it expected the SDF to face pockets of resistance.

The fall of Raqqa, where Daesh staged euphoric parades after its string of lightning victories in 2014, is a potent symbol of the militant movement’s collapsing fortunes.

The SDF, backed by a U.S.-led international alliance, has been fighting since June to take the city that Daesh used to plan attacks abroad.

A Reuters witness said militia fighters celebrated in the streets, chanting slogans from their vehicles.

The fighters and commanders clasped their arms round each other, smiling, in a battle-scarred landscape of rubble and ruined buildings around the main square.

The flags in the stadium and others waved in the city’s streets were of the SDF, its strongest militia the Kurdish YPG, and the YPG’s female counterpart, the YPJ.

Fighters hauled down the black flag of Daesh, the last still flying over the city, from the National Hospital, which they took early Tuesday, near the stadium.

A field commander, who gave his name as Abjal al-Syriani, said SDF fighters had found burned weapons and documents in the stadium.

The stadium and hospital became the last major positions held by Daesh after some of its fighters quit, leaving only foreign militants to mount a last stand.

Fatima Hussein, a 58-year-old woman, sitting on a pavement smoking a cigarette, said she had emerged from her house after being trapped for months by the fighting.

Daesh had killed her son for helping civilians leave the city, she said.

The fight has shattered much of the city. Houses, apartment blocks and public buildings were flattened by airstrikes or holed by shellfire.

The SDF has said that after the Raqqa battle ends, it will hand over control to a civil council set up by its political allies.

This echoes the pattern in other territory the YPG and its allies have taken across northern Syria.

To the west, meanwhile, a military media unit run by Hezbollah said the Syrian army had pushed into the last Daesh districts of Deir al-Zor city after seizing the whole area between the city and Mayadin, which includes the city of Al-Mohsen and the towns of Albuamr, Albuleil and Abed, following a major military offensive.

“These are not desert areas, they are villages along the Euphrates that were Daesh strongholds,” the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. “Daesh is collapsing under pressure from the regime in Deir al-Zor province,” it added. The Observatory also said the army captured neighborhoods around the old military airport.

The only populated areas the militant group still controls in Syria are the towns and villages downstream of Deir al-Zor city along the Euphrates valley. For the past three years Daesh ran these areas from Raqqa.

To the east, the army and its allies captured several towns in Hama’s eastern countryside, including Jub Eid, Umm Ghazal and Al-Zaroub, and secured the Salamiya-Ithriya road, part of the government’s supply route to Aleppo.