BEIRUT: A convoy of IS fighters and their families began to depart the Lebanon-Syria border zone on Monday under Syrian military escort, surrendering their enclave and leaving for 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.

It will end any Sunni militant presence on the border, an important goal for Leba­non and the Shia Hezbollah group, and is the first time IS has publicly agreed to a forced evacuation from territory it held in Syria.

IS agreed to a ceasefire on Sunday with the Lebanese army on one front and the Syrian army and Hezbollah on the other after losing much of its mountainous enclave straddling the border, paving the way for its evacuation.

Both Hezbollah and Leba­nese officials have billed the evacuation as a surrender by the jihadist group.

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

A total of 600 people, including both IS fighters and their family members, will leave in the convoy, Syria’s state-run Ikhbariya television station reported.

The militants will travel across Syria under heavy security escort to IS lines near Al-Bukamal in the east, 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 security source said.

One Hezbollah prisoner and the corpses of five Hezbollah fighters, as well as the bodies of some Syrian soldiers, will be handed over by IS, the security source added.

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

The deal also involved IS revealing the fate of nine Lebanese soldiers it captured when it overran the town of Arsal in Lebanon in 2014.

A senior Lebanese security official said late on Sunday the soldiers were almost certainly dead after recovering six bodies and digging for two others in areas previously held by IS.

Earlier this month, two other pockets straddling the border were recaptured by Lebanon and Syria after other militant groups accep­ted similar evacuation deals.

Those agreements were prompted by a brief Hez­bol­lah offensive that began at the end of July against militants of the group for­me­rly known as Nusra Front, which was Al Qaeda’s official partner in Syria until last year.

Published in Dawn, August 29th, 2017