BEIRUT: Syrian government troops backed by Russia and fighters backed by the United States made separate advances against the militant Islamic State group on Friday, gaining ground in new offensives that have put unprecedented pressure on the self-declared caliphate.

In neighbouring Iraq, government troops also fought for territory in an IS bastion near Baghdad. There was no confirmation of an Iraqi media report that IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had been wounded in US-led air strikes.

A US-backed militia, the Syria Democratic Forces (SDF), launched an offensive last week to capture the last stretch of Turkish-Syrian border still in IS hands and have surrounded the main city in the area, Manbij.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said the SDF, which is backed by US air support and special forces, took control of the last route into Manbij on Friday.

Further south, government troops and their allies, backed by Russia, captured a crossroads in Raqqa province that controls a highway leading to Tabqa, an IS-held city on the Euphrates River, and Raqqa city itself, the Observatory and the army said.

The army also launched its advance last week in what media sympathetic to Damascus have described as a “race to Raqqa” — to take territory in IS’s heartland before the US-backed militia get their first.

Attempts to coordinate a campaign against it have been undermined by a five-year multi-sided civil war in Syria and the weakness of the Iraqi state. Still, Washington and other powers hope this year could see assaults on Raqqa and Mosul that would bring the caliphate down.

The SDF advance is the most ambitious yet in Syria by a group allied to Washington, which has previously struggled to develop capable allies on the ground in Syria’s civil war.

It appears to have provoked Moscow and its ally, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, to turn their fire on Islamic State as well, after months in which the West criticised Russia for mainly striking other enemies of Assad.

On a separate front, in the Syrian civil war, U.N. aid convoys reached two rebel-held suburbs of Damascus on Friday. The shipment to Daraya was the first food aid since 2012 to reach a town where the United Nations says residents are suffering from malnutrition. However, the local council said the aid was too little to feed people for a month as promised.

Bringing aid to besieged areas is a crucial part of diplomatic efforts to end the wider conflict, sponsored since last year by Washington and Moscow but so far fruitless.

In Iraq, US and Iraqi officials said on Friday they could not confirm a report by an Iraqi TV channel that IS leader Baghdadi had been wounded in an air strike in the north of the country. A spokesman for the US-led coalition fighting the Islamist militants, Colonel Chris Garver, said in an email that he had seen the reports but had “nothing to confirm this at this time”.

Published in Dawn, June 11th, 2016