A US-backed alliance of forces entered the key militant-held town of Tabqa yesterday as they pursued their campaign against the Islamic State group in northern Syria.
The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) have set their sights on Tabqa and the adjacent dam as part of their broader offensive for the city of Raqqa, the Syrian heart of the militants’ self-styled “caliphate” since 2014.
Supported by US-led coalition air strikes and special forces advisers, the SDF surrounded Tabqa in early April.
Yesterday, they entered it for the first time, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said.
“They seized control of several points in the town’s south and were advancing on its western edges,” said Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman.
He said US-led coalition warplanes were carrying out “intense” strikes in support of the offensive, but that one raid had killed three women and five children trying to flee Tabqa.
“One raid killed eight civilians from a single family, including five children, who were trying to escape in their car via the town’s southwest,” Abdel Rahman said.
In an online statement, the SDF said it had captured IS-held positions in west Tabqa, including a roundabout, and part of a southern district.
“There are now clearing operations in the liberated positions,” the SDF said.
Tabqa sits on a key supply route about 55 kilometres west of Raqqa, and served as an important IS command base, housing the group’s main prison.
According to the Syrian Economic Task Force, a Dubai-based think tank, Tabqa is home to 85,000 people including IS fighters from other areas.
The assault on Tabqa began in late March when SDF forces and their US-led coalition allies were airlifted behind IS lines.
The ensuing fight has been intense, with IS dispatching suicide bombers daily to try to slow the offensive and coalition warplanes intensifying their raids.
“The real battle begins now,” Abdel Rahman said yesterday, adding that IS fighters had “no way” out of the town.
For months, the SDF has been advancing on Raqqa, hoping to encircle it before a final attack.
The city was home to around 240,000 residents before 2011, and more than 80,000 people have fled to it from other parts of the country.
Syria’s war has left more than 320,000 people dead since it began with protests in 2011 that were brutally repressed by the government of President Bashar al-Assad.
Regional and international powers have since been drawn into the complex conflict, in which internationally prohibited weapons such as cluster bombs and toxic gas have been used.
On April 4, a suspected chemical attack killed 87 civilians, including many children, in the northwestern rebel-held town of Khan Sheikhun.
Much of the international community blamed the Syrian regime, and three days later 59 US cruise missiles targeted the airbase from where the attack was launched.
Assad ally Moscow protested the US action and consistently sought to deflect blame from Damascus over the incident.
Air raids on Khan Sheikhun have continued, with seven people killed in strikes on the town market yesterday, the Observatory said.
It came as Russia’s defence ministry said the Syrian army would halt fire around Khan Sheikhun if experts were allowed in to conduct a probe.
The ministry said Damascus was “ready to declare a complete moratorium on the activities of its troops, aviation and artillery in the area” if investigators were sent in.
Syria’s government has not commented on the offer.

Hundreds of research centre employees blacklisted
The United States yesterday blacklisted 271 employees of a Syrian government agency it said was responsible for developing chemical weapons, weeks after a poison gas attack killed scores of people in a rebel-held province in Syria.
The US Treasury Department sanctioned 271 employees of Syria’s Scientific Studies and Research Centre (SSRC), an agency that Washington says develops chemical weapons for the government of Bashar al-Assad, the Treasury said in a statement.
Some of the people blacklisted had worked on Syria’s chemical weapons programme for more than five years, the Treasury Department said.
The sanction orders US banks to freeze the assets of any employees named, and bans American companies from conducting business with them.
Those designated were “highly educated” individuals likely to be able to travel outside of Syria and use the international financial system even if they may not have assets abroad, administration officials said during a conference call with reporters.
“These sweeping sanctions target the scientific support centre for Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s horrific chemical weapons attack on innocent civilian men, women, and children,” US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in a statement.
US authorities, he said, would “relentlessly pursue and shut down the financial networks of all individuals involved with the production of chemical weapons used to commit these atrocities.”
Earlier this month, the United States launched dozens of missiles against a Syrian air base the Pentagon says was used to launch the chemical attack.
President George W Bush first placed sanctions against the SSRC in 2005, accusing it of producing weapons of mass destruction.
Although the Syrian government promotes the SSRC as a civilian research centre, “its activities focus substantively on the development of biological and chemical weapons,” US officials said.
During the Obama administration, the United States in July 2016 sanctioned people and companies for supporting the SSRC, and on Jan 12, the US Treasury sanctioned six SSRC officials it said were linked to SSRC branches affiliated with chemical weapons logistics or research.