Turkey-backed rebels capture key symbolic stronghold from IS

Turkish-backed rebel fighters on Sunday captured the northern Syrian town of Dabiq from the Islamic State jihadist group, a monitoring group said.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said rebels “captured Dabiq after IS members withdrew from the area.”

Dabiq holds crucial ideological importance for IS because of a Sunni prophecy that states it will be the site of an end-of-times battle between Christian forces and Muslims.

The town — after which Islamic State’s English-language magazine is named — is often cited in IS propaganda.

It lies some 10 kilometers (six miles) from the Syrian-Turkish border.

The town itself has negligible military value compared with the strategic IS-controlled cities of Raqqa in Syria and Mosul in Iraq.

Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman said the fighters also captured the nearby town of Sawran.

One Turkey-backed rebel faction, the Fastaqim Union, also said Dabiq had fallen “after fierce clashes with Daesh,” using the Arabic acronym for IS.

It published pictures on Twitter of a group of fighters on the back of a small white truck waving assault rifles in the air, with the town of Dabiq apparently in the background.

News of Dabiq’s capture came a day after a US-hosted meeting in Lausanne, Switzerland, of top envoys from Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, Qatar, Iraq, Egypt and Jordan, aimed at creating a new, multilateral track for ending Syria’s grinding war.

The talks came amid heightened urgency about the city of Aleppo, the latest flashpoint in a war that has killed up to a half-million people, sparked a refugee crisis and offered a territorial base to the radical Islamic State group.

Kerry’s new approach comes after last month’s US-Russian bid to end the war collapsed in days as Syrian forces backed by Russian air power launched an offensive on rebel-held parts of Aleppo.

The multilateral talks will continue in the coming days.