Raqqa Governorate is one of the fourteen governorates of Syria, located in the north of the country. al-Raqqah is the provincial capital, with al-Thawrah and Tal Abyad being the other districts of the province. The town was almost always under the Syrian Opposition's control during the Syrian Civil War, with the Free Syrian Army taking the city on 3-6 March 2013 and the Islamic State taking the city on 25 July 2014. Raqqa would be a center of the Islamic State for the rest of the war, but the Kurdish YPG and the Syrian Democratic Forces would liberate Tal Abyad and the other northern provinces in a series of offensives in 2014 to 2015. On 2 June 2016, the Syrian Arab Army and the YPG both launched offensives to liberate al-Raqqah from the Islamic State, facing a city that had been pounded by US Air Force airstrikes since the autumn of 2014. The governorate had a population of 944,000 people in 2011.
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