More than 150 IS militants handed over to Iraq from Syria

OUTSIDE BAGHOUZ, Syria (AP) — U.S.-backed Syrian forces fighting the Islamic State group handed over more than 150 Iraqi members of the group to Iraq, an Iraqi security official said today, marking the biggest repatriation from Syria of captured militants so far.

The official said the IS militants were handed over to the Iraqi side late Wednesday, and that they were now in a "safe place" under investigation.

The transfer comes as the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces is involved in a standoff over the final sliver of land held by IS in eastern Syria, close to the Iraqi border.

Many believe the IS threat would not end with the pocket's recapture and that an insurgency by the group is underway. And in a foreboding sign, twin suicide attacks hit a village miles away from the IS pocket, leaving more than a dozen people dead in a rare targeting of civilians.

A few hundred people – many of them women and terrified-looking children – were evacuated Wednesday from the group's tiny tent camp on the banks of the Euphrates River, signaling an imminent end to the territorial rule of the militants' self-declared "caliphate" that once stretched across a third of both Syria and Iraq.

Some 300 IS militants, along with hundreds of civilians believed to be mostly their families, have been under siege for more than a week in the tent camp in the village of Baghouz. It wasn't clear how many civilians remain holed up inside, along with the militants.

More trucks were sent in today to the tip of a corridor leading to the camp to evacuate more people, but Associated Press journalists on the ground outside Baghouz said no civilians emerged.