‘Raqqa is finished, kill your fanatical commanders, surrender’ – British fighter to ISIS (VIDEO)
RT.com
4 Jul, 2017
Macer Gifford, a British volunteer who went to Syria to fight Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL), has called on the US-led coalition to provide military, humanitarian, and political support to the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in liberating Raqqa.
In a video statement posted on Gifford’s Facebook page on Monday night, the former currency trader-turned-soldier asked the international community to maintain its military support to force the terrorist group out of its de facto capital, which it seized in 2014.
SDF forces have now breached the walls of Raqqa’s Old City, the US military reported on Tuesday.
Gifford, a former Conservative Party councilor, also called for humanitarian aid to protect civilians fleeing the battle and for political assistance to foster democratic institutions once the group has been expelled.
In the video, recorded three days earlier, the crack of sniper fire can be heard as Gifford describes the battle unfolding in the city streets.
“Every single night we are doing something, and even during the day we’re calling in airstrikes, shooting back, we’ve got our own snipers who are very, very talented, which are whittling down ISIS’s numbers and making their defeat much more likely.
“It’s going to take a long while because we’ve got to root them out. There’s a lot of snipers as you just heard; there’s a lot of IEDs [improvised explosive devices] as well, and that’s pretty much our biggest challenge. It’s finding, isolating these snipers, pinning them down, calling in airstrikes, avoiding during the night the IEDs and other things that plague the city.”
Gifford, who says he is fighting with a unit of Christian fighters, says air support has been critical to their operations.
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