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		</div><p>Hundreds more people have left the last area held by the Islamic State group in eastern Syria and gathered in a massive reception area to be searched and screened by US-backed fighters.</p>
<p>Some of those who gathered outside the village of Baghouz said they had been waiting since the previous night when hundreds left the IS-held pocket.</p>
<p>The latest wave of evacuations brings closer the final defeat of the extremists’ so-called “caliphate” at the hands of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces.</p>
<p>Officers from the US-led coalition were screening the men who left the IS-held area to determine if they were militants or civilians.</p>
<p>The exodus came three days after the US-backed forces resumed their push on militants holed up in Baghouz on the banks of the Euphrates River, close to the Iraqi border.</p>
<p>In the past few weeks, thousands of civilians left the speck of territory in organised evacuations following an earlier halt in fighting.</p>
<p>The Kurdish-led forces said their fighters were surprised by the large number of civilians, including IS family members, cooped up in the tiny area squeezed smaller and smaller by intermittent offensives.</p>
<p>The US-backed forces slowed their push on Baghouz last week to allow civilians to leave the tiny enclave.</p>
<p>Asked about the situation inside Baghouz, a Russian woman who came out with her three children responded in broken Arabic: <em>“Fear.”</em></p>
<p>She said her husband had died earlier.</p>
<p>Another woman in her mid-20s who identified herself as Reem, from the central Syrian province of Hama, said she was waiting for her husband to come out of an IS-controlled jail.</p>
<p>He has been there for months after killing an IS member in retaliation <em>“for his baby daughter being killed in an air strike”</em>, she said.</p>
<p><em>“I haven’t seen him since and don’t know where he is,”</em> Reem said, adding that she asked repeatedly for his whereabouts before deciding to leave.</p>
<p>The evacuees said the bombing was intense over the past few days. One woman said she saw a man hit by a missile as she was escaping from one tent to another.</p>
<p>Another woman said many are waiting to leave and that the scene is chaotic at the safe passage area.</p>
<p>Earlier today, SDF spokesman Mustafa Bali, said about 3,000 people came out of Baghouz on Monday. They left through a humanitarian corridor established by Kurdish-led forces for those who want to leave or surrender.</p>
<p>Since February 20, more than 10,000 people have left the IS pocket, often in dramatic scenes of black-robed women with children in the back of trucks passing through the corridor and heading into the desert.</p>
<p>They were then whisked off to a camp for displaced people to the north, while suspected IS fighters were moved to detention facilities.</p>
<p>Retaking the last IS-held enclave in Baghouz would be a milestone in the devastating four-year campaign to end the group’s self-proclaimed caliphate that once covered a vast territory straddling Syria and Iraq.</p>
<p>Mr Bali said a large number among those who left on Monday were IS fighters who “surrendered to our forces”.</p>
<p>It is unclear how many IS militants and civilians remain inside, but the number is thought to be in the hundreds.</p>
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