Started with protests in Daraa in 2011, the Syrian conflict rapidly turned into a war with a number of foreign powers supporting various militant groups (including al-Qaeda-linked) against the government of Bashar al-Assad. Since then, the country has been a point of instability in the Middle East.
Russia began a military intervention in Syria in 2015 after an official request by the Syrian government for military help against militant groups.This allowed the Syrian government to survive and to regain initiative in a battle against Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (formerly Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda), ISIS and other militant groups.
If the SDF area on the east Ephrates bank has been showing no presence of ISIS for about a year now, what have the SDF been fighting all this time? How can people take reporting from this site to be credible at all with reporting like that?
The Euphrates river is in iraq.
I didn’t see it in Syria on this map, just in case I was wrong.
The sdf you were referring to might not be engaging ISIS, but holding territory or fighting militants.