Battle of Baghuz Fawqani 2019
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Recorded location from Wikidata; battle sites are often approximate.
About the battle
The Battle of Baghuz Fawqani was an offensive by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), assisted by Combined Joint Task Force – Operation Inherent Resolve (CJTF-OIR) coalition airstrikes, artillery, and special forces personnel, that began on 9 February 2019 as part of the Deir ez-Zor campaign of the Syrian Civil War. The battle—which was composed of a series of ground assaults—took place in and around the Syrian town of Al-Baghuz Fawqani in the Middle Euphrates River Valley near the Iraq–Syria border, and was the territorial last stand of the Islamic State (IS) in eastern Syria.
After corralling IS forces into a densely populated cluster of hamlets and a tent city along the riverside within the first week, the SDF realised that a greater-than-anticipated number of civilians, most of whom were relatives of the what were now mostly foreign IS fighters, were still in the enclave. With CJTF-OIR oversight, the SDF took an incremental approach to the battle, launching assaults then pausing to allow surrendering fighters, hostages, and families to evacuate in order to minimize civilian casualties. The "trickle-out" strategy, coupled with stiff resistance by veteran Islamic State jihadists within a small dense area, prolonged the battle into a protracted siege.
Text adapted from the Wikipedia article Battle of Baghuz Fawqani (revision 1374131225), licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Changes: excerpted from the article lead section; shortened by selecting paragraphs and trimming at a sentence boundary; formatting and citations removed. No text added.
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Browse more: battles in Syria · Asia · Post-1945 battles