Syrian rebels seize village of Dabiq from IS

Beirut: Syrian rebels said they captured the village of Dabiq from IS on Sunday, forcing the militant group from a stronghold where it had promised to fight a final battle with the West.
Its defeat at Dabiq, long a mainstay of IS' propaganda, underscores the group's declining fortunes this year as it suffered battlefield defeats in Syria and Iraq and lost a string of senior leaders in targeted air strikes.
The group, whose lightning advance through swathes of the two countries stunned world leaders in 2014, is now girding for an offensive against Iraq's Mosul, its most prized possession.
The rebels, backed by Turkish tanks and warplanes, took Dabiq and neighbouring Soran after clashes on Sunday morning, said Ahmed Osman, head of the Sultan Murad group, one of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) factions involved in the fighting.
"The Daesh (IS) myth of their great battle in Dabiq is finished," he told Reuters.
The Free Syrian Army is an umbrella group for rebels seeking to overthrow President Bashar Al Assad in a civil war that has killed hundreds of thousands and displaced millions, dragging in regional and global powers and creating space for militants.
IS chose Dabiq as the location for its killing in 2014 of Peter Kassig, an American aid worker held hostage by the group, by Mohammed Al Emwazi.
However, it has appeared to back away from Dabiq's symbolism since advances by the FSA groups backed by Turkey had put it at risk of capture.
The village, at the foot of a small hill in the fertile plains of Syria's northwest about 14km (9 miles) from the Turkish border and 33 km north of Aleppo, has little strategic significance in its own right.
But Dabiq and its surroundings, where the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said IS had brought 1,200 fighters in recent weeks, occupied a salient into territory captured by the Turkey-backed rebels.
Ankara launched the Euphrates Shield operation, bringing rebels backed by its own armour and air force into action against IS, in August, aiming to clear the group from its border and stop Kurdish groups gaining ground in that area.
A Turkish military source said that while Dabiq was largely under control, IS fighters were still firing on the FSA groups from outside the village and that some rebels had been killed in blasts by landmines and other bombs.
The rebels and Turkish military were working to secure Dabiq's surroundings to prevent any remaining IS fighters trapped in the area from escaping.
Since early 2016, IS' territorial possessions in Syria have been steadily eroded by the Syrian Democratic Forces, an umbrella group of Kurdish and Arab militias backed by the United States, which in August took the city of Manbij.
Turkey's campaign has since cut the militant group off from the Turkish border, long its most reliable entry point for supplies and foreign fighters.
Meanwhile, air strikes have killed a succession of IS leaders in Syria, including its "war minister" Omar Al Shishani and Abu Mohammed Al Adnani, one of its leading strategists and an architect of its shift towards plotting attacks in Europe.
In Iraq, the army backed by militia groups has this year recaptured Falluja and is now poised for an offensive on Mosul.
However the militants still hold most of Syria's Euphrates basin, from Al Bab, 26km southeast of Dabiq, through the group's capital of Raqqa and to the Iraqi border.