Islamic State’s media arm has announced electing the group’s so-called “princess of the women” in Tal Afar, a local source said like reported by iraqinews.com.

Speaking to AlSumaria News, the source said, “the group’s media arm announced over the past few hours in Tal Afar, west of Mosul, the election of ‘princess of IS women’ known as Um Hajar, a Russian national who is famous for using sniping gun.”

“The princess will have powers to run the group’s women cells,” the source added.

The group, according to the source, “has been trying to attract women given that it’s hard for them to be discovered. In addition, they play pivotal roles in follow-up and information gathering.”

The source described the step of having a princess within its structure as the first of its kind.

IS recruited hundreds of women, some whom became suicide bombers who attacked security troops, especially during the battle in Mosul’s Old City.

Iraqi Defense Ministry said on Wednesday that a date has been set for the town invasion, however, it will not be declared to maintain the secrecy of the intended operations.

During a weekly press briefing on Tuesday, Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi said a special plan has been drawn to invade Tal Afar.

Col. Ryan Dillon, spokesperson of the U.S.-led coalition against IS, was previously quoted as saying that Tal Afar will be the next target of operations after victory was declared in Mosul.

Tal Afar is one of the important strongholds still held by IS in Nineveh since August 2014.

Ten Islamic State militants were killed as an airstrike targeted an alternative headquarters, west of Mosul, a local source from Nineveh province said like reported by iraqinews.com.

“An airstrike targeted an IS alternative headquarters at the outskirts of Tal Afar town, west of Mosul, killing at least ten militants,” the source, who preferred anonymity, told AlSumaria News. “The bodies were taken to the group’s medical centers.”

The source added that the group previously evacuated its main headquarters and moved to alternative ones to avoid airstrikes.

News reports said, earlier this week, that the group carried out emergency evacuations over the night at many of its main headquarters in the town over growing doubts on the people’s cooperation with security services. Other reports indicated huge explosion that occurred at a field clinic, where IS injured militants are treated in the town, which urged the group to block the main roads.

Iraqi Defense Ministry said on Wednesday that a date has been set for the town invasion, however, it will not be declared to maintain the secrecy of the intended operations.

During a weekly press briefing on Tuesday, Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi said a special plan has been drawn to invade Tal Afar.

Col. Ryan Dillon, spokesperson of the U.S.-led coalition against IS, was previously quoted as saying that Tal Afar will be the next target of operations after victory was declared in Mosul.

Tal Afar is one of the important strongholds still held by IS in Nineveh since August 2014.

For 60 miles across the vast desert of eastern Syria, far beyond the trashed Roman ruins of Palmyra, the army of Syria is moving through the hot grey sands towards the besieged garrison city of Deir ez-Zour. For 60 miles, tanks and heavy artillery – and brand new Russian Army multiple missile launchers – line the narrow, melting highway through the oilfields, pale tents flourishing in the dry wadis of distant hills which belonged to Isis only a month ago, gun batteries thumping amid the sand dunes, like reported by independent.co.uk.

We’ve been through this before, of course: Syrian army advances that turned sour in northern Syria, the long siege of eastern Aleppo, Isis retreats that transformed themselves into new and savage suicide attacks out of the desert and into Palmyra. But the Russian army foot patrols in the wrecked modern city of Palmyra – I even saw Russian Army Chechen troops in the city, a vital Muslim component to Moscow’s military alliance with Damascus – suggest that this time the Syrian army has its enemies on the run.

So enormous is the landscape – harsh, lined with green desert grass and baked sand hills – and so intense is the 47-degree heat that images do greater credit to this desert war than dry essays on the strategy of an army that plans to free 10,000 of its soldiers still holding out further east, surrounded by Isis for three years in the ancient city of Deir ez-Zour, along with 400,000 civilians in two pockets of land in the valley of the Euphrates. Sixty miles beyond Palmyra I travelled eastwards, the only western journalist to reach this far front line in a convoy of Syrian vehicles until we stopped just five miles short of the crossroad town of al-Sukhnah.

“Sukhnah” means heat. It is the right name. Isis is still there. The desert mirages turn empty sand beds into waterless rivers but the Syrian encampments and the 122- and 130mm guns are real enough. So are the tanks heading east, some loaded with infantry, thrashing up the tarmac, truckloads of green-painted ammunition boxes crammed on top, soldiers clinging to the tailboards.

The wreckage of war – a bombed-out Isis truck, a shattered army lorry, carbonised buses pushed off the road – is everywhere. A bearded Syrian officer – how many of them have grown these big bushy Isis-style beards over the past two years, perhaps to mock their enemies – shouts that the gun line have been ordered to fire and then the desert shakes ever so slightly and long lines of sand streak in front of the artillery. They look like those big wheeled guns on the old silent Somme newsreels and they are almost as quiet in the desert. The fine dust absorbs the thumping detonations.

When we stop at a military post beside the highway, a sergeant emerges holding two tiny drones, just shot down at a height of 350 feet by a soldier with a Kalashnikov, the machine stinking of burned plastic, a beady camera glass hanging from one wire, the little rotors still rotating at the touch of a finger. Isis, through the heat haze, is watching us through these sinister little lenses. Someone with a fully working brain in al-Suknah, ready to retreat no doubt, is looking for targets.

Only when we pass the batteries of Russian army BM-30 SMERTCH “Whirlwind” multiple rocket launchers, their Russian crews beside them, magenta and blue camouflage amid the sand, does a Syrian officer ask us not to take pictures. No problem with Syria’s weapons. We can shoot photographs of as many guns as we like, as many mortar batteries, although they appear dwarfed by the immensity of the landscape.

There’s an operational battle map in General Mohamed Khadour’s air-conditioned headquarters. It shows a black patch for al-Sukhnah, and just to the left a grim series of blood-red circles. These are the gun lines. And Khadour, the senior army commander for this huge area of desert and remote cities, tall, head shaped like a bullet, thinning hair, face darkened by the sun – a 58-year-old graduate of the Aleppo military college with an infantry training degree – coldly reads off a set of coordinates to open fire. Beside him on a sofa leans a heavy black six-chamber 46mm rocket gun that his men captured up north in Hassakeh – “RPG-6, GLV-HEF [stock number] 4348” for those who can trace its foreign manufacturers – and the general looks contemptuously at it. “However many weapons they got from the West, Isis is finished,” he says. “They are like a banana that has fallen out of its skin. Only the skin is left.”

I’m not so sure about this. There’s a small truck park in Palmyra filled with the big black iron suicide trucks that Isis manufactured in its black caliphate, identical to the massive killer cars captured by the Iraqi army in far distant Mosul to the east. General Khadour reports that in one month his soldiers have faced seven suicide trucks and 20 individual Isis suicide fighters, all of whom had blown themselves to pieces. And I ask the same old question I put to everyone who fights Isis: who are they really? And I get the same reply from the general. “Animals,” he says. “But even animals are not evil.”

Curiously, the brain inside the Isis “animal” does not interest these soldiers. They regard the al-Nusrah/al-Qaeda fighters as far better trained – and with far more sophisticated Western weapons and anti-aircraft missiles – than Isis. For Nusrah, still fighting on in Idlib province, they have a curiosity rather than respect. But for Isis they have contempt. There is a creepy story which two officers tell me, which might – given the nature of the Isis mind – have some pathetic truth. Several suicide bombers, they say, were found with women’s underclothes in their pockets – for the virgins they would meet in paradise.

Some generals only speculate on dates – a sound precaution in the Syrian war – but General Khadour does not hesitate to tell me that he will reach and “liberate” Deir ez-Zour by the end of August, just 30 days away. Why not? He was head of the security and military headquarters in the eastern region of Syria – including the surrounded city – until flown out north to fight Isis and Nusrah around Hassakeh and he will, no doubt, resume his duties there when his army breaks the siege. “I and General Mohamed Sbeh here,” he says – Sbeh, Khadour’s subordinate officer, sits, rotund and narrow-eyed and listening like a fox to his left – “told the people of Deir ez-Zour we would come back for them and we shall. That is what I am doing. We have got a third of the way. We have just 130 kilometres to reach Deir ez-Zour.”

An Isis radio station went on the air a few days ago and many of the soldiers heard it. “They said they were still winning and our soldiers in the desert heard it,” General Khadour said. “Isis said: ‘We have captured a major in the army and destroyed a tank of the regime and killed a lot of ‘pigs’ [soldiers].’ We all laughed. It was a lie. We have no one captured; we have not lost a tank. We are winning.”

But the Syrians are of course taking casualties. On a small hill captured only 24 hours earlier, General Sbeh told me he had two soldiers “martyred”, one of them an officer, and others wounded. But he said that Isis was now retreating to Mayadeen, along with some of their families. These Syrian officers are dismissive of American power – their army has certainly advanced in the desert faster than the US-supported and largely Kurdish “Syrian Democratic Forces” east of the Euphrates when they approached Raqqa – and dismissively list the American airbases on Syrian soil. “We know their bases are outside Hasakeh, and at Al-Ermeilan, Al-Shedadeh and Ein al-Arab [Kobani] and other places – but these are temporary,” Khadour says. “They cannot stay there.”

The general says he will never retire – like many soldiers, I suspect he likes fighting too much – and he says he will never give up till the end of his life. We first met in Aleppo five years ago when he was defending the middle-class Saef al-Dawla district. “We did not know whom we were fighting then,” he says. “They had no tactics and we had much to learn. Then they would start getting sophisticated equipment from the West and we had to adopt our tactics. Now we are fighting in the desert.”

And therein runs a tale. For the Syrian Army was trained – always – to fight Israel on the Golan Heights, to go to war in cooler climates, to head south. But now it is fighting its way east in arid lands that resemble those of the Iran-Iraq war – indeed of the Second World War in Egypt and Libya – and it has become a desert army.

Khadour ponders this for some time and then looks across the destroyed modern metropolis of Palmyra. In Roman antiquity, Queen Zenobia ruled this ancient city, infuriating the empire with her arrogance and independence. No civilian has returned to Palmyra. The general gazes across the smashed hotels and villas and shops and laughs mirthlessly. “Why did Zenobia ever come here?” he asks.

As people return home to Mosul and other areas of northern Iraq freed from Islamic State, homemade bombs and explosives laid on an industrial scale by the insurgents are claiming hundreds of victims and hampering efforts to bring life back to normal, like reported by reuters.com.

Houses, schools, mosques and streets are all booby-trapped, a big problem in West Mosul following its recapture by government forces this month after nine months of fighting.

Beyond Mosul, in villages and fields stretching from the Plain of Nineveh to the Kurdish autonomous region, retreating Islamic State fighters have sown a vast area with improvised bombs and mines as their self-proclaimed caliphate shrinks.

“The scale of contamination? There are kilometres and kilometres and kilometres of active devices, sensitive enough to be detonated by a child and powerful enough to blow up a truck,” Craig McInally, operations manager for Norwegian People’s Aid anti-explosives project, said.

While mines are usually laid in rows in open ground, improvised explosives in buildings are wired into household appliances such as fridges, heaters and televisions, primed to explode at the flick of a switch or an opened door, experts say.

Since clearing operations began last October, about 1,700 people have been killed or injured by such explosives, according to the United Nations Mines Action Service, which co-ordinates the clearing campaign.

By targeting civilians, Islamic State hopes to thwart a stabilisation effort aiming to get people back to their homes, jobs and studies, rebuild infrastructure and reinstate government rule.

While the crisis lasts, Islamic State – whose strategy extends far beyond military operations – could thrive again, said Charles Stuart, charge d’affaires at the European Union mission in Iraq.

Under the Rubble

Sheikh Amir, on the main Erbil-Mosul road at the line between Kurdish and Iraqi army control, is an abandoned, bombed-out ruin – one of hundreds of villages in such a state.

On a sweltering morning, Haskim Hazim, 37, was working with his brother and a few friends to repair his house, mixing cement and erecting a cinder-block wall.

Apart from his, only one other family out of a village that once had 120 Sunni and Shi’ite Muslim households has returned since it was recaptured from Islamic State in October, he said.

When he came back, his house, adjacent buildings and animal pens had been booby-trapped. “All were connected together. The bomb was a jerry can,” he said.

Many other houses had been rigged with improvised explosives. Islamic State had also dug tunnels in and around the village. A Mines Advisory Group (MAG) team had gone through and cleared most of that but it was still dangerous, he said.

A few weeks ago, a 12-year-old boy tending sheep nearby had picked up an object from the ground. It exploded and blew the fingers off one of his hands, Hazim said.

“We don’t know what is under the rubble,” said his brother, Jassan Abbas Hazim, 35, pointing to houses demolished by U.S.-led coalition air strikes and Islamic State.

Their families were staying in rented rooms in Erbil and Qaraqosh, the men said.

“There’s nothing here, no school, no medicine, no water – just a well,” Hazim said. “I hope other people come back. If they don’t, then what?”

In Qarqashah, in the same area, two returning families were killed when the pick-ups they were driving in triggered a mine. Today, only one family of shepherds lives there full-time, the NPA’s McInally said.

In nearby Kaberli, about 20 families have returned since February after NPA teams cleared schools and houses.

The EU’s Stuart gave the example of a schoolroom in Fallujah where explosives were packed beneath a classroom’s floorboards to kill children as they went to their desks. It was discovered in time.

A big problem is civilians taking matters into their own hands and trying to clear their homes themselves, Stuart said, and children playing in the streets are particularly vulnerable.

Crush Necklaces

In the NPA office in Erbil, McInally, a U.S. army veteran who has cleared explosive hazards in countries from Colombia to Afghanistan, showed off a collection of devices, many fashioned from rusty bits of metal.

The most common is a “pressure plate” – two long plates held apart by spacers, one connected to a negative lead the other to a positive lead. When trodden on, the circuit closes and detonates the main charge.

Other devices, so-called “crush necklaces”, are like miniature pressure plates made from small metal or plastic clips. They are difficult to find with metal detectors and hard to spot visually.

“This is an industrialised assembly line. These are guys who are educated. They understand electronics,” McInally said.

The bomb-makers are also learning from clearers’ techniques and are adapting to them, he said.

The anti-explosives campaign involves Iraqi and Kurdish authorities, the United Nations, and an array of NGOs and commercial outfits. It extends beyond decontaminating sites.

Community liaison teams give mine-risk awareness lessons to hundreds of people.

At the Kadiz Abdulajad School in West Mosul, recently reopened after three years of Islamist rule, head teacher Thekriat Mohammed Hussein said the children were given lessons in mine and explosives awareness as part of the curriculum.

MAG is also training people to handle explosives-clearing in their own communities and civilians are being trained as first-responders to give emergency medical treatment to blast victims.

Bureacracy and funding can hinder the effort though and resources are insufficient, clearers say. For 2017, UNMAS has received $16 million of the required $112 million.

And the liberation of Mosul signifies the only the latest phase of the scourge. Iraq is peppered with “legacy” explosives going back to the Iran-Iraq War, former leader Saddam Hussein’s war against the Kurds, and the U.S.-led war following the 2003 invasion. Islamic State militants are also expected to plant new areas as they fall back to the Syrian border.

It could take decades to clear them, experts say.

Twenty-one Islamic State militants were killed on Tuesday in a military operation southwest of Iraq, Petra news agency reported.

Army Colonel Ahmed al-Shemari said troops foiled an IS attack against military sites in al-Nakhib region, southwest of Baghdad on Tuesday, leaving twenty-one IS members killed.

The clashes, which took place near the Iraqi-Syrian borders lasted for three hours, during which troops confiscated weapons and vehicles, Shemari said.

In related news, a military source from Anbar Operations Command said the army’s eighth division exploded a booby-trapped vehicles and explosives, west of Ramadi.

No casualties were reported, the source told AlSumaria News.

Earlier on the day, pro-government paramilitary forces of “Al-Jazeera Shield”, affiliated with the tribal mobilization forces killed two IS members and seized their ammunition truck west of Ramadi.

Iraqi troops were able to a return life back to normal in the biggest cities of Anbar including Fallujah, Ramadi and others after recapturing them. However, Anbar’s western cities of Annah, Qaim and Rawa are still held by the extremist group since 2014, when it emerged to proclaim a self-styled Islamic Caliphate. There has not been an officially-declared military campaign to free those regions, but the province’s military command launched a brief assault early January that managed to recapture some western villages before stopping again.

American-backed Syrian opposition fighters were standing watch against Islamic State militants from atop a water tower earlier this month when they were shocked to face a barrage of mortar shells — not from militants, but from the Syrian army, like reported by stripes.com.

“We are fighting ISIS. They are fighting ISIS. Why are they fighting us?” Raad Abdullah Hamoud, 17, said as he stood at the foot of the remote desert tower. “This is what they’re doing now. Think what they’re going to do after ISIS is gone.”

Syrian opposition fighters and their U.S. allies tried to maintain a strained detente with President Bashar Assad’s Russian-backed forces as the battle against the Islamic State has shifted this month across the border from northern Iraq to eastern Syria.

But there’s an essential conflict: Many of the U.S.-backed fighters also want to overthrow Assad, who has stubbornly clung to power through six years of a civil war that has spawned a multitude of competing armed groups and drawn in forces from Russia, the United States, Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Lebanon.

As Assad’s troops gain a foothold in Dair Alzour, the crossroads of a strategic land corridor from Tehran to Beirut, U.S.-trained opposition fighters and allies nearby said they hope to take a stand with American backing, potentially drawing the U.S. into a long and costly conflict.

In recent weeks, an 80-mile stretch of the Euphrates River has served as a buffer zone — a so-called deconfliction line — between U.S.-backed opposition fighters and the Syrian government.

To the west of the river, some of Assad’s estimated 40,000 soldiers are fighting with support from allied militias, Russia and Iran. To the east, some of the 55,000 opposition forces are fighting with help from U.S. forces. The U.S.-backed coalition said it has about 500 troops in Syria, but experts estimate that has grown to include up to 1,500 Marines, Army Rangers and special forces, plus 1,000 contractors.

U.S.-backed forces have largely focused on recapturing the Islamic State’s self-declared capital, Raqqa, while Assad’s forces and allies advanced on the militant stronghold of Dair Alzour to the southeast.

“The coalition mission is to defeat ISIS,” the coalition said. “We have no fight with Syrian or pro-regime forces as long as all forces adhere to the agreed-upon deconfliction line.”

But the Syrian government and its supporters have already made several forays across the buffer zone.

Last month, a Syrian fighter jet clashed with U.S.-backed forces south of Raqqa. Farther south, near the border with Jordan and Iraq, what appeared to be an Iranian-made drone attacked American advisers training Syrian opposition forces at a U.S. base in Tanf. That clash came soon after U.S. warplanes struck Iranian-backed Shiite militias approaching the base for the third time in as many weeks.

A U.S. coalition spokesman declined to say last week whether it would back Syrian opposition fighters should they confront Assad’s forces.

“Future operations depend on many different factors and we will not speculate on what the coalition or partner forces may do in the future,” the statement said.

Complicating matters is the instability of the Syrian opposition’s alliance of multi-ethnic militias that includes Assyrian, Arab and Kurdish forces, among others. Most are fighting as part of the Syrian Democratic Forces, an umbrella group created with help from the Pentagon, but each has its own agenda for what it will do once the militants’ “caliphate” falls.

The largest opposition militia is the Kurdish People’s Protection Units, or YPG, with about 25,000 troops, including Hamoud’s unit at the water tower. The militia’s political wing has been governing northeastern Syria since Assad’s government withdrew about four years ago, adopting the Marxist-inspired philosophy of Abdullah “Apo” Ocalan, whose image adorns not just YPG command posts but billboards and local squares.

Ocalan’s leadership could prove problematic for the U.S., particularly in its relations with Turkey. He was convicted of treason and sentenced to life in prison, and his Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, is considered a terrorist group by both Turkey and the U.S.

Earlier this month, YPG military leaders on the front lines said eastern Syria should govern itself according to Ocalan’s principles, not be beholden to Turkey or Assad.

“The regime allies are trying to extend, to control as much as they can,” said YPG commander Daman Frat from his post north of Dair Alzour. “We need to coordinate with the coalition to do an advance before the regime comes.”

He compared the situation outside Dair Alzour to Syria’s embattled northwestern border region of Afrin, where Turkey deployed added troops this month and shelled Kurdish fighters as tensions increased. The head of the Syrian YPG said the buildup amounted to a “declaration of war” and warned of coming clashes.

“If the coalition doesn’t help us now, the same thing will happen here,” Frat said — this time with the Syrian army, not Turkish, forces.

Outside his compound, a convoy of what appeared to be U.S. forces passed, headed south toward the front line. Marine convoys were visible farther north, as were encampments behind dirt berms that YPG officials identified as U.S. bases. The U.S. has at least 10 bases across northern Syria, the Turkish state news agency Anadalou reported last week.

U.S. officials declined requests to accompany or interview those forces.

One Kurdish commander, Orkesh Serdam, has been encouraged to see the U.S. expanding its makeshift bases in eastern Syria, but said that doesn’t mean America is willing to take on Assad’s troops.

“Now when we are fighting, we don’t put all our hope in the Americans. We always say, ‘Just imagine you don’t have airstrikes,’” said Serdam, 27.

Arab militia commanders in the Syrian Democratic Forces said they also want to recapture Dair Alzour, but are unsure if they can count on the U.S. to support them.

Members of an affiliated group, the 10,000-strong Army of the Revolutionaries militia, traveled east from Idlib province this month as a U.S.-Russian negotiated ceasefire was declared there. They had come to fight in Raqqa and, they hoped, Dair Alzour. They complained the U.S. coalition had failed to provide them with needed equipment, including armored cars and night vision goggles.

Why, the fighters asked, was the U.S. helping Iranian-affiliated Popular Mobilization Forces (also known as Hashd al Shabi) across the border in Mosul, Iraq, and would those militias ultimately help Assad — also aligned with Iran — recapture Dair Alzour?

“We all know that Hashd al Shabi are Iranian militias, they are under the control of Iran. And the U.S. is training them,” complained one of the fighters, Abu Ghayas, 45.

The Free Syrian Army, another opposition militia, already has about 2,500 forces north of Dair Alzour, according to a spokesman leading about 1,000 of the fighters in Raqqa who identified himself as Abu Imad, the nickname he’s known by on the battlefield. They are waiting to see if the battle becomes a proxy war.

“The future of Syria is in the hands of America and Russia, like a card game,” he said as he sat surrounded by dozens of fighters armed with rifles and automatic weapons at their post in an abandoned house east of the embattled city earlier this month.

Abu Imad, 30, mentioned what he saw as encouraging signs: President Donald Trump called Assad “an animal” in an April interview with Fox News. When Syrian forces unleashed chemical weapons on civilians in the central city of Khan Sheikhoun in April, Trump ordered swift retribution in the form of missile strikes. U.S. forces had trained some of Abu Imad’s militia fighters, and promised to train an additional 500.

He hopes they follow through soon. There has been infighting among the militias. Earlier this month, a Free Syrian Army commander squabbled with a Kurdish counterpart after withdrawing some troops from Raqqa under fire. The Kurdish commander accused them of deserting. Abu Imad insisted they had only partially withdrawn.

The Sunni Muslim militia leader saw a showdown coming in Dair Alzour, at least between Syrian militias and Assad’s forces (he insisted the opposition is largely united).

“If the regime takes Dair Alzour, they will not stop there. They will go to Raqqa and Hasakah” to the north, he said. “I want America to help us fight in Dair Alzour.”

To the west in Resafa, a remote desert village built around an ancient fortress, Zinar Kobani, the local YPG commander, also said he hopes he can count on U.S. support if his forces continue on their collision course with Assad’s army.

“It’s not part of our plan to attack the regime. But if someone comes to fight us, we will fight back,” said Kobani, 27.

For now, their red line is the water tower north of Resafa. If Assad’s forces try to pass it, closing the roughly five-mile dusty no man’s land in between, YPG troops will return fire.

They recently overheard military radio chatter suggesting an attack by Syrian forces in coming days. Soon after, Syrian troops closed the gap. So far, they haven’t tried to pass the tower.

Al Qaeda-linked jihadi group is on the verge of snuffing out what remains of the country’s uprising in northwestern Syria, after the extremists seized control of the opposition-held regional capital, Idlib, last weekend, like reported by thenational.ae.

With the jihadis cementing their authority over the city and its province, also called Idlib, Syrian president Bashar Al Assad has been supplied with a useful pretext for a long-expected assault against the rebellious province: that the uprising against him is largely driven by Islamists and terrorists.

“There is the real possibility that because of [Jabhat Al] Nusra’s domination, the regime will enter the area with international approval,” said Lt Col Fares Bayoush, a longtime opponent of Mr Assad, who has been leading a rebel faction in north Syria.

Jabhat Al Nusra is one of the many names for the Al Qaeda-affiliate that now heads the mighty Hayat Tahrir Al Sham militant group — Arabic for Levant Liberation Committee — that seized the city of Idlib, as well as two border crossings with Turkey to feed its coffers. It is also known as HTS.

In July last year, Jabhat Al Nusra changed its name to Jabhat Fatah Al Sham and said it was cutting all its links with Al Qaeda, a move seen by many as an attempt to improve its image and market itself as a faction defending the Syrian people.

It abides by a deeply conservative code for ethics and jurisprudence and tolerates no dissent — leading many who live under its rule to complain they are no better than the government they sought to overthrow in 2011.

The fresh gains by Hayat Tahrir Al Sham in northern Syria come at a time when ISIL is suffering defeats at the hands of Iraqi and Syrian forces as well as US-backed Kurdish-led fighters in northern Syria.

In Idlib demonstrations last week, the group’s members shot at protesters waving the tri-color flag of the Syrian uprising. Hayat Tahrir Al Sham will only accept their own, jihadi-inspired black flags to be flown in their presence.

“Any party that tries to confront Hayat Tahrir Al Sham will be crushed,” said an activist based in northwest Syria.

“This is a big blow for the Syrian revolution. Bashar will look like he is fighting terrorism,” the activist said, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals by the Hayat Tahrir Al Sham.

With its previous incarnations, Hayat Tahrir Al Sham has long been the top dog in Idlib province but the putsch has had the effect of making it feel official. In recent weeks, the group deployed masked gunmen and carried out raids in search operations for alleged ISIL members.

Hayat Tahrir Al Sham deployed across Idlib city last weekend after a rival faction, the ultraconservative Ahrar Al Sham group, withdrew. Five days of clashes around the province left 77 fighters and 15 civilians dead, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group.

Other factions, including many once financed and armed in part by the CIA, kept to the sidelines. They are hoping to win a share of the revenues from the lucrative Bab Al Hawa border crossing, said a Turkey-based opposition activist who liaises with Syrian rebels and their state sponsors. He asked for anonymity so as not to jeopardise his position.

That crossing used to bring Ahrar Al Sham over $1 million (Dh3.67m) in revenues a month, according to a senior Ahrar Al Sham official, who also asked for anonymity for the same reason. The group will now have to share those revenues with Hayat Tahrir Al Sham after forfeiting its monopoly over it to a “civilian administration” forced in by the extremists.

Hayat Tahrir Al Sham also seized Sarmada — the first town after the Bab Al Hawa crossing and an important trade hub in north Idlib — and Khirbet Al Jouz, home to a second, less important crossing with Turkey.

“Ahrar Al Sham no longer has a real on-the-ground presence in Idlib province. It’s over,” said the Observatory’s chief, Rami Abdurrahman.

Hayat Tahrir Al Sham and Ahrar Al Sham have long been at odds over Idlib, but the rout last week nevertheless carried a hint of betrayal, as the two sides fought side by side in 2015 to throw the government out of the province once and for all. Armed with anti-tank missiles supplied to supporting moderate opposition forces, some of which ended up in the hands of Jabhat Al Nusra, the coalition’s advantage was so great that Mr Assad conceded, for the first time in the war, that he might not be able to retain control over all of Syria.

But Russia intervened with a bruising aerial campaign that drove the rebels and insurgents back on all fronts. Further infighting between the factions has all but doomed any hopes of rebels reaching the Syrian capital, Damascus.

Mr Assad, who has long eyed Idlib province since he lost it, will be further emboldened by a White House decision to halt the CIA supply-and-equip programme for Syrian rebels. It was first reported by the Washington Post last week.

Opposition activists saw it as an acknowledgement that Hayat Tahrir Al Sham was exploiting its position in northwestern Syria to pilfer weapons from vetted opposition groups.

“It means Hayat Tahrir Al Sham will have less access to arms,” said the Turkey-based opposition activist.

But it is also a sign of growing closeness between the White House and the Kremlin over Syria.

Russia, a strong backer of Mr Assad, had long pushed the US to end the programme. And US secretary of state Rex Tillerson was reported to have told UN secretary general Antonio Guterres earlier this month that the US was leaving “Syria’s fate in Russia’s hands now”, according to Foreign Policy magazine.

Syrian women celebrated being freed from Islamic State (IS) rule by burning their burqas, while men shaved their beards off in defiance of their captors, like reported by newshub.co.nz.

The civilians were liberated from the northern city of Raqqa by US-backed forces, and video from the People’s Protection Units (YPG) shows the celebrations afterwards.

One woman, clutching her children and crying, says IS killed her husband and her father with mortar fire at their house.

Another pulls off her burqa and cries: “Give me a lighter, I’m going to burn this!”

“Burn these!” shouts another. “May Allah burn them (IS)! They burned my father!”

“May Allah put fire to their hearts!”

“They killed my son because he wouldn’t pray,” another woman says in the YPG footage.

“They didn’t allow us to take his body for a whole week.”

Some of the men shaved off their facial hair in protest at their treatment.

One man says: “Cut it all off. Cut it all just to spite them.”

IS enforced strict dress codes in their captured territories, making women wear black burqas and requiring the men to grow beards.

The military units who freed the civilians in Raqqa were mainly made up of Kurdish fighters, known as the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).

Fighting continues in Raqqa, while IS has been defeated in its main stronghold in the city of Mosul.

Islamic State has ordered execution of one of its senior leaders over spying, southwest of Kirkuk, a security source said according to iraqinews.com.

“The self-styled chief of the IS legislative court has ordered on Sunday evening the execution of one of the group’s prominent leaders in Hawija, southwest of Kirkuk,” the source told AlSumaria News. “The leader, abu Omar al-Jabouri, is known to be close to the group’s supreme leader abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.”

The group’s judge, according to the source, accused Jabouri of treason and espionage against the group.

Earlier on the day, a source was quoted saying that the group banned mourning ceremonies for its dead members in Kirkuk in order not to demoralize its fighters.

Hawija has been held by IS since mid-2014, when the group emerged to proclaim an Islamic “caliphate” in Iraq and Syria. The group executed dozens of civilians and security members there, forcing thousands to flee homes.

IS still holds three towns in western Anbar close to the borders with Syria, in addition to a few areas in Salahuddin, Diyala and Kirkuk.

Dozens of residents from Hawija and the regions in its vicinity escape to Kirkuk province on a daily basis. Despite the risky routes to the freed regions, the civilians prefer death to staying under IS control.