SYRIAN troops drove Isis further back across the country yesterday — after Kurdish forces insisted that the US military will remain in northern Syria long after the jihadis are defeated.

Army troops backed by Palestinian and other volunteer militia pushed Isis fighters from the town of Uqrayribat in the terrorists’s stronghold of eastern Hama yesterday, according to reports by al-Masdar News.

Troops and Hezbollah guerillas also took areas from Isis near the Lebanese border.

Late on Thursday special forces captured a 20-mile swathe of oil fields between Palmyra and Raqqa.

On the same day, a spokesman for the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) said the US had a “strategic interest” to stay in the the SDF-controlled north — where it already has 10 bases against government wishes — after Isis is defeated.

“There will be military, economic and political agreements in the long term between the leadership of the northern areas … and the US administration,” Talal Silo told Reuters News Agency.

The US currently supports the SDF, a coalition of militias dominated by the Kurdish YPG which has won significant victories against Isis, with air strikes, weapons and special forces on the ground.

On Thursday Russia’s second-in-command in Syria Lieutenant Geneneral Sergei Kuralenko said as terrorists are driven out “more and more members of the opposition are understanding the need for the end of the civil conflict and launching the political settlement.”