The jihadists overran large parts of Syria and neighbouring Iraq in 2014, but several offensives have retaken all but half a square kilometre (a fifth of a square mile) of the territory in the eastern Syrian village of Baghouz. A spokesman for the US-led coalition fighting IS said international forces "continue to support the SDF as they negotiate having innocent civilians released" and their captured fighters returned. As the SDF pressed the last IS diehards a car bomb killed 14 oil workers and six of the Kurdish-led alliance's conscripts near the Omar oil field which is uses as its main base in the region, the US-backed group and a monitor said. SDF spokesman Adnan Afrin said the blast in the village of Shheel, some 100 kilometres (60 miles) north of Baghouz, was another example of IS cells attacking its fighters behind the front line.
A day after hundreds of people were evacuated from the last IS remnant, more than 50 trucks on Thursday returned near empty from Baghouz to SDF territory, an AFP correspondent said.
"We couldn't enter Baghouz," said a man who had accompanied the convoy. "We got to an SDF point and we found around 15 people - women and children including a French woman and an Egyptian woman. We took them," he said.
"The fighters asked us to go back tomorrow at 8 am." Thousands of people have escaped IS territory in recent weeks, but the flow slowed to a trickle at the weekend, before Wednesday's first batch of evacuees. SDF spokesman Afrin said most of those trucked out on Wednesday were civilians, but they also included IS fighters.
On Thursday, the AFP reporter saw hundreds of people waiting in a screening area where the SDF have been questioning new arrivals in recent weeks, to separate out suspected jihadists from the civilians. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based war monitor, said Wednesday that negotiations were being held "for the surrender of the last IS fighters".
Syria's Kurds have long demanded the repatriation of foreigners accused of belonging to IS in their custody, but their home countries have been reluctant. US President Donald Trump said Wednesday he was barring a US-born former IS propagandist from returning home from Syria, where the conflict has killed more than 360,000 people and displaced millions since 2011.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Thursday that the diplomatic status of the father of Alabama woman Hoda Muthana means she is not a US citizen. It came after a lawyer for the family of a teenager who fled London to join the jihadists when she was 15 said Britain was revoking her citizenship. Shamima Begum, 19, at the weekend gave birth to her third child. Two previous children died at an early age.