BEIRUT, LEBANON (12:00 P.M.) – Several buses arrived this morning in the western Qalamoun region of Syria to transport the remaining 350 Islamic State (ISIL) terrorists to the Deir Ezzor Governorate.

The 350 Islamic State terrorists will be joined by their 500 family members as they leave Jaroud Jarajeer and Jaroud Qarah for Deir Ezzor Governorate city of Albukamal near the Iraqi border.

Once these Islamic State terrorists leave the area, this region of Syria will be ISIL-free for the first time in two years. </s> Hundreds of Islamic State militants have been bussed from a Lebanese-Syrian border region, in the jihadist group’s first publicly declared evacuation deal.

A convoy of some 600 Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) fighters and their families reached an exchange point in eastern Syria on Tuesday, where they would be transferred into Isil-held territory under a ceasefire deal.

The convoy of buses and ambulances left the border area on Monday under Syrian military escort after a ceasefire took effect on Sunday.

Under the agreement, the bodies of eight Lebanese soldiers and one Iranian military adviser killed by Isil in Syria were to be returned. </s> Syria's state news agency says buses taking hundreds of Islamic State militants and their families from the border area between Lebanon and Syria have arrived to eastern Syria.

SANA says the buses with the militants and their families arrived on Tuesday in Deir el-Zour province, an IS-stronghold.

Some 600 militants were allowed to leave as part of a deal, negotiated by Lebanon's Hezbollah, in exchange for identifying the location of the remains of Lebanese soldiers captured by IS in 2014, and later killed. The deal has provoked controversy in Lebanon, as some voiced opposition to negotiations with the militants

IS' departure leaves the border between Syria and Lebanon free of extremists for the first time in years. </s> BEIRUT (Reuters) - A convoy of Islamic State fighters and their families left the Lebanon-Syria border region on Monday under Syrian military escort, surrendering their enclave and traveling to eastern Syria after a week-long battle.

A line of ambulances and buses were shown on Syrian state television driving slowly through the arid countryside, the border’s pale hills behind them, as they departed.

The transfer ends any insurgent presence on the border, an important goal for Lebanon and Hezbollah, and marks the first time Islamic State has publicly agreed to a forced evacuation from territory it held in Syria.

Islamic State agreed a ceasefire deal that took effect on Sunday with the Lebanese army on one front and Hezbollah with the Syrian army on the other. The militants had lost much of their mountainous enclave straddling the border since the two offensives began on opposite sides of the frontier.

The Lebanese army has said its offensive against Islamic State did not involve coordination with the Syrian army or Hezbollah.

Lebanon’s Hezbollah has been a close ally of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad through Syria’s six-year war. The Iran-backed Shi’ite group has played a major role fighting Sunni militants at the border and has sent thousands of fighters into Syria to support Assad’s government.

The leader of Hezbollah, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, said on Monday that the group had accepted Islamic State’s evacuation partly in order to find out the fate of nine Lebanese soldiers in Islamic State captivity since 2014.

The convoy being transferred into Syria included 308 militants with their small arms and 331 civilians, Nasrallah said in a televised speech.

Islamic State will hand over one Hezbollah captive and the bodies of some Hezbollah forces and one Iranian fighter killed in battles across Syria, he said.

At the last stage of the deal, the two sides would exchange the bodies for the convoy of militants at a transit point in Syria, Nasrallah said.

Eleven Hezbollah fighters and seven Syrian soldiers had been killed in their offensive in the western Qalamoun region on Syria’s side of the border, he said.

The border battle has ended in “fully liberating Lebanese land and securing the border with Syria,” he said.

Both Hezbollah and Lebanese officials have billed the evacuation as a surrender by Islamic State.

“We do not bargain. We are in the position of the victor and are imposing conditions,” the head of Lebanon’s internal security agency, General Abbas Ibrahim, said on Sunday.

A commander in the pro-Assad military alliance said Syria and Hezbollah had accepted Islamic State’s evacuation rather than a fight to the end, to avert a bloody war of attrition.

Islamic State fighters were sheltering among civilians and to complete the offensive would have involved great bloodshed, the commander said.

An Islamic State fighter is seen in a bus as he departs from the Lebanon-Syria border zone in Qalamoun, Syria August 28, 2017. REUTERS/Omar Sanadiki

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Syrian state television and a Hezbollah military media unit said the convoy left the western Qalamoun for its destination in eastern Syria.

The evacuees will travel across Syria under heavy security escort to Islamic State lines near Al-Bukamal in the eastern province of Deir al-Zor, a Lebanese security source said.

The Syrian army and Hezbollah were communicating with Islamic State near Al-Bukamal to arrange the transfer of the convoy into jihadist territory, the source said.

Islamic State fighters were earlier seen burning heavy equipment and arms which they left in the border enclave.

Northeast Lebanon saw one of the worst spillovers of the Syrian conflict in 2014, when Islamic State and other militants briefly overran the border town of Arsal. The fate of nine Lebanese soldiers that Islamic State took captive in 2014 had remained unknown until Sunday.

Ibrahim, the Lebanese general, said the troops were almost certainly dead after recovering remains thought to belong to them. The news and the evacuation deal have sparked some public outcry in Lebanon that authorities had not been able to retrieve the soldiers alive.

Earlier this month, Nusra Front militants and a Syrian rebel group withdrew from their footholds along the border after accepting similar evacuation deals.

Those agreements came after a brief Hezbollah offensive that began at the end of July against militants of the ex-Nusra Front, which was al Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria until last year.

Slideshow (4 Images)

Hezbollah has maintained a strong presence in the parts of Syria near the border with Lebanon for years, helping Assad capture several rebel-held towns and villages there.

Inside Syria, Islamic State is retreating on many fronts, losing territory to separate offensives, including by the Russian-backed Syrian army and U.S.-backed militias. </s> Beirut: A convoy of Islamic State fighters and their families have left the Lebanon-Syria border region under Syrian military escort, surrendering their enclave and travelling to eastern Syria after a week-long battle.

A line of ambulances and buses were shown on Syrian state television driving slowly through the arid countryside, the border's pale hills behind them, as they departed on Monday.

The transfer ends any insurgent presence on the border, an important goal for Lebanon and Hezbollah, and marks the first time Islamic State has publicly agreed to a forced evacuation from territory it held in Syria.

IS agreed a ceasefire deal that took effect on Sunday with the Lebanese army on one front and Hezbollah with the Syrian army on the other. The militants had lost much of their mountainous enclave straddling the border since the two offensives began on opposite sides of the frontier.

The Lebanese army has said its offensive against IS did not involve coordination with the Syrian army or Hezbollah.

Lebanon's Hezbollah has been a close ally of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad through Syria's six-year war. The Iran-backed Shiite group has played a major role fighting Sunni militants at the border and has sent thousands of fighters into Syria to support the Assad government.

The leader of Hezbollah, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, said on Monday that the group had accepted Islamic State's evacuation partly in order to find out the fate of nine Lebanese soldiers in IS captivity since 2014.

The convoy being transferred into Syria included 308 militants with their small arms and 331 civilians, Nasrallah said in a televised speech.

IS will hand over one Hezbollah captive and the bodies of some Hezbollah forces and one Iranian fighter killed in battles across Syria, he said.

At the last stage of the deal, the two sides would exchange the bodies for the convoy of militants at a transit point in Syria, Nasrallah said.

Eleven Hezbollah fighters and seven Syrian soldiers had been killed in their offensive in the western Qalamoun region on Syria's side of the border, he said.

The border battle has ended in "fully liberating Lebanese land and securing the border with Syria," he said.

Both Hezbollah and Lebanese officials have billed the evacuation as a surrender by Islamic State.

"We do not bargain. We are in the position of the victor and are imposing conditions," the head of Lebanon's internal security agency, General Abbas Ibrahim, said.

A commander in the pro-Assad military alliance said Syria and Hezbollah had accepted Islamic State's evacuation rather than a fight to the end, to avert a bloody war of attrition.

IS fighters were sheltering among civilians and to complete the offensive would have involved great bloodshed, the commander said.

Syrian state television and a Hezbollah military media unit said the convoy left the western Qalamoun for its destination in eastern Syria.

The evacuees will travel across Syria under heavy security escort to IS lines near al-Bukamal in the eastern province of Deir al-Zor, a Lebanese security source said.

The Syrian army and Hezbollah were communicating with IS near al-Bukamal to arrange the transfer of the convoy into jihadist territory, the source said.

IS fighters were earlier seen burning heavy equipment and arms which they left in the border enclave.

Northeast Lebanon saw one of the worst spillovers of the Syrian conflict in 2014, when IS and other militants briefly overran the border town of Arsal.

Ibrahim, the Lebanese general, said the troops were almost certainly dead after recovering remains thought to belong to them. The news and the evacuation deal have sparked some public outcry in Lebanon that authorities had not been able to retrieve the soldiers alive.

Earlier this month, Nusra Front militants and a Syrian rebel group withdrew from their footholds along the border after accepting similar evacuation deals.

Those agreements came after a brief Hezbollah offensive that began at the end of July against militants of the ex-Nusra Front, which was al-Qaeda's affiliate in Syria until last year.

Hezbollah has maintained a strong presence in the parts of Syria near the border with Lebanon for years, helping the Assad regime capture several rebel-held towns and villages there.

Inside Syria, IS is retreating on many fronts, losing territory to separate offensives, including by the Russian-backed Syrian army and US-backed militias. </s> Jets carry out two sets of air raids to block ISIL evacuees from reaching area held by the group near Syria-Iraq border.

A US-led coalition battling ISIL says its fighter jets have blocked a convoy of the group's fighters evacuated from Lebanon from reaching eastern Syria, and also struck a number of their comrades travelling from the other direction to meet them.

The strikes on Wednesday were aimed at derailing a deal for fighters of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) to leave their enclave on the Lebanon border, along with their family members, for areas the armed group holds on Syria's eastern frontier with Iraq.

The evacuation deal, brokered by Lebanon's Hezbollah and the Syrian army, sparked a furious reaction from Iraq and the United States.

Iraq's Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said moving hundreds of fighters towards the Iraqi border was "unacceptable" and "an insult to the Iraqi people", while US officials said ISIL fighters should be killed on the battlefield.

The first set of strikes on Wednesday took place east of Humeima in southeast Syria, said Ryan Dillon, a spokesman for the coalition.

"To prevent the convoy from moving further east, we cratered the road and destroyed a small bridge," he told AFP news agency.

Dillon said the coalition understood there were civilians aboard the buses, and would only bomb the convoy if fighters could be separated from the civilians.

Describing ISIL as a "global threat", he said "relocating terrorists from one place to another for someone else to deal with is not a lasting solution".

Later, coalition fighter jets also bombed ISIL vehicles heading towards the convoy from the Syrian town of Albukamal.

The buses, which left the Lebanese-Syrian border two days ago, were now stuck in territory held by Syria'a government, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based group monitoring the country's conflict via a network of contacts on the ground.

There were about 300 fighters and almost as many family members, including children, on the buses being evacuated, according to Hezbollah, which defended the evacuation deal saying it was the "only way" to find out the fate of nine Lebanese soldiers ISIL had kidnapped in 2014.

The deal also involved ISIL surrendering Hezbollah and Syrian army prisoners and bodies in east Syria.

Hezbollah had fought a week-long offensive against ISIL on the Syrian side of the border with Lebanon, coinciding with a simultaneous assault by Lebanese troops on their side of the frontier.

The battles ended on Sunday with the announcement of the evacuation deal.

ISIL is on the back foot in both Syria and Iraq, losing swathes of its territory and its most important towns and cities.

In Syria, the US-led coalition is backing an alliance of Kurdish and Arab armed groups in the north which are assaulting ISIL in the city of Raqqa.

The Russian-backed Syrian army and allied armed groups have meanwhile seized most of the central desert from ISIL, and are advancing eastwards to relieve the army's besieged enclave in Deir Az Zor. </s> The Syrian government has reached an evacuation deal with fighters from Hay'et Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) to leave the Yarmouk refugee camp in southern Damascus.

The official SANA news agency announced on Monday that the fighters and their families, numbering about 5,000, would be evacuated in two stages, the first of which would see 1,500 people transported to the rebel-controlled Idlib province in northwestern Syria.

The deal is part of a wider agreement between HTS, formerly al-Nusra Front, al-Qaeda's affiliate in Syria, and President Bashar al-Assad's government to surrender heavy and medium military hardware.

Al Jazeera's Zeina Khodr, reporting from Beirut, said the rebel group had to concede to government demands of releasing prisoners and allowing thousands of Syrians from the besieged loyalist towns of Kefraya and Foua to head for government-controlled territory.

SANA reported that these include 85 prisoners, "mostly women, children and elderly", from the rebel-controlled town of Eshtabraq.

"Pro-government forces have long wanted to fully evacuate the predominately Shia towns because that would deny the rebels the ability to pressure Damascus by threatening to target them," she said.

Buses to transport the rebels and their relatives have already begun gathering around Yarmouk near midnight, local news media reported.

Khodr said this was the fourth such agreement in recent weeks and constituted another important win for government forces and their allies.

"Rebels have already surrendered Eastern Ghouta, which was their main stronghold close to the capital, and a pocket of territory in the Qalamoun region, northeast of Damascus," she said.

"In a few days, rebel factions linked to the Free Syrian Army are expected to hand over the districts of Babbila, Beit Sahm and Yalda in southern Damascus in order to stave off a military operation".

Nevertheless, this falls short of securing the entirety of southern Damascus, with a few pockets of territory still under control of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) group.

Government forces have been involved in a two-week-long offensive to recapture the territory, but ISIL units have put up fierce resistance in areas where heavy weapons have proven to be of limited use. </s> DEIR AL-ZOR PROVINCE, Syria (Reuters) - The U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) said on Sunday that their frontline troops had received orders to attack the final Islamic State enclave in eastern Syria, and the assault could begin at any moment.

The advance on the besieged enclave at Baghouz, near the Iraqi border, has stalled repeatedly to allow for the evacuation of civilians.

Mustafa Bali, head of the SDF media office, said no more civilians had come out of the enclave since Saturday, and SDF forces had not observed any more civilians in the area.

“Frontline forces have received orders to move”, he said. “This evening, we expect movement at any moment.”

Thousands of people - many of them the wives of Islamic State fighters and their children - have been streaming out of the enclave over the last few weeks.

Bali said more than 4,000 militants had surrendered to the SDF in the past month and tens of thousands of civilians had been evacuated.

“Our forces are ready now to start and finish what is left in ISIS hands,” Bali said in a separate comment on Twitter. </s> Truce announced to pave the way for negotiations over the fate of government soldiers currently in ISIL captivity.

Lebanon's army has announced a ceasefire in its offensive against ISIL fighters at the country's northeast border with Syria.

The ceasefire takes effect at 7am local time (04:00 GMT) on Sunday in order to determine the fate of the nine Lebanese soldiers who are in ISIL captivity, the military statement said.

Speaking from Beirut, Al Jazeera's Mohammed Jamjoom said that this ceasefire was a significant development in Lebanon, considering the fact that "the army seemed very confident just a couple of days ago that they were going to rid those areas of the last remnants of ISIL fighters."

"Now the Lebanese government is sending out a message that they care for their soldiers, and are tyring to ensure that these soldiers can be released as quickly as possible," Jamjoom said.

Northeast Lebanon saw one of the worst spillovers of Syria's war into Lebanon in 2014, when ISIL, or the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant group, and other armed groups briefly overran the border town of Arsal.

The fate of nine soldiers that ISIL, also known as ISIS, took captive then remains unknown.

The Lebanese army has been battling ISIL fighters in their last border foothold, near the town of Ras Baalbek.

The attack began last week, coinciding with an offensive that Hezbollah and the Syrian army launched against ISIL on the other side of the frontier in Syria’s western Qalamoun region.
ISIL militants and their families, estimated to be around 600 people, begin to leave their strongholds on the Lebanon–Syria border and Qalamun Mountains for the Deir ez-Zor Governorate under Syrian military escort. A ceasefire was reached between warring parties yesterday.