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Al-Hol (Syria) (AFP) - Outside her home in a town of northeast Syria, four-year-old Baydaa scribbles on a leaflet of religious rules left behind by the Islamic State group as they fled earlier this month.

Her face is adorned with make-up of the sort banned by the jihadist group, which was expelled from Al-Hol by a new US-backed coalition of Kurdish and Arab forces that overran the area on November 12.

The town was once a key waystation for IS between the territory it holds in Iraq and Syria, and its capture was a strategic victory for the new Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) coalition.

But it is also a chance for residents to breathe easy again.

"My little daughter Baydaa has put kohl on her eyes and make-up on her face, which was forbidden when the 'organisation' was here," said Baydaa's father, Hamdan Ahmed, referring to IS.

"I'm so happy not to see them in our village anymore," the 39-year-old told AFP.

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Syrians collect items from their destroyed house in the Al-Shallal suburb of Al-Hol in Syria's H …

When IS seized Al-Hol two years earlier, Ahmed refused to leave his home in the Al-Shallal suburb of the town.

As a result, he was forced to abide by the group's strict rules based on their harsh interpretation of Islam.

Women were forced to cover up completely, and men to keep their faces unshaved.

Parents were ordered to send children under the age of 12 to religious schools run by IS "to avoid punishment or being whipped", the father-of-nine told AFP.

- Trapped for two years -

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A Syrian boy stands near his house in the Al-Shallal suburb of Al-Hol in Syria's Hasakeh provinc …

Elsewhere in the suburb, on the dusty sandy outskirts of the town, 42-year-old Mariam fed a small herd of sheep by a row of mud houses, including her own modest home.

"We left the village during the fighting after shells landed in our food store. We lost grain for the sheep, lentils and flour and were left with nothing to eat," she said.

Even though the jihadist group is now far from her home, Mariam is still afraid they may return and covers her face with her headscarf when speaking to strangers.

She wears a long colourful dress that is traditional in the conservative region, but would not have met the strictures of IS.

"When IS was here, any woman who left home without a face veil and black robes would face whipping," she said.

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Syrian woman Najwa Abdullah, 27, washes clothes at her home in the Al-Shallal suburb of Al-Hol in Sy …

With IS gone, local residents who survive mostly on agriculture and livestock, are trickling back to check on their homes and their land.

"For two years, I couldn't sow my land because Daesh prevented us from leaving the areas under its control to get what we needed, like seeds and oil" for agricultural machinery, said 44-year-old Hamid Nasser, using the Arabic acronym for IS.

The capture of Al-Hol and the surrounding villages was the first major victory for the SDF, an alliance of the powerful Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) and Arab and Christian armed opposition groups.

The alliance is backed by the US-led coalition fighting IS, and has received air drops of American weapons to support its fight against the jihadists.

Al-Hol in particular was considered a strategic win for the group, severing a key route used by IS between its territories in Iraq and Syria.

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A Syrian boy drinks tea in the Al-Shallal suburb of Al-Hol, in Syria's Hasakeh province, after S …

- Religious slogans on walls -

In the town, IS's slogans and strictures can still be seen, particularly those encouraging religious practice and the wearing of the veil.

"Sister in niqab, how wonderful and beautiful you are in your chastity," reads one.

On barber's shops, signs still hang reading "Dear brothers, shaving or trimming the beard is forbidden".

And on walls are slogans including: "In the Caliphate, there are no bribes, no corruption and no nepotism."

For the SDF, the challenge now is to secure the approximately 200 towns and villages, some of them home to no more than a dozen people, that it has captured from IS in recent weeks and set up a new local administration.

While the SDF is dominated by Kurdish fighters, the region where the force is advancing is majority-Arab, raising potential sensitivities.

Elsewhere, the YPG has faced charges of discrimination against Arab residents, with Amnesty International last month accusing it of "war crimes" in north and northeast Syria.

The rights group claimed Kurdish forces had carried out a "deliberate, coordinated campaign of collective punishment of civilians in villages previously captured by IS".

The YPG dismissed those claims and has pointed to its strong ties with some Arab militias to ridicule allegations of discrimination.

SDF spokesman Talal Ali Sello told AFP that civilians were being allowed to return to captured areas after they were cleared of explosives, which IS frequently sows in areas before it retreats.

He said his forces are working "on the creation of a political body tied to a military entity that will oversee the liberated areas in the coming period."

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (AP) — A gunman burst into a Planned Parenthood clinic and opened fire, launching several gunbattles and an hourslong standoff with police as patients and staff took cover under furniture and inside locked rooms. By the time the shooter surrendered, three people were killed — including a police officer — and nine others were wounded, authorities said.

For hours, police had no communication with the shooter other than intermittent gunfire from inside the Colorado Springs clinic. As the standoff progressed, officers inside the building herded people into one area and evacuated others.

Officers eventually moved in, shouted at the gunman and persuaded him to surrender, police said. About five hours after the attack started, authorities led away a man wearing a white T-shirt.

Police identified him as 57-year-old Robert Lewis Dear of North Carolina. Jail booking records indicate Dear is due in court on Monday.

Few other details about the suspect were immediately available, including whether he had any connection to Planned Parenthood.

"We don't have any information on this individual's mentality, or his ideas or ideology," Colorado Springs police Lt. Catherine Buckley told reporters on Friday. She said Saturday that investigators expect to study the crime scene for several days looking for clues.

Dear spent time at a small cabin in North Carolina with no electricity or running water about a half-mile up a twisty dirt road near Black Mountain, a neighbor said. On Saturday, there was a cross made of twigs on the wall of the pale yellow shack.

"If you talked to him, nothing with him was very cognitive — topics all over place," said James Russell, who lives a few hundred feet down the mountain.

Back in Colorado, Planned Parenthood said all of its staff at the clinic was safe. The organization said it did not know the circumstances or motives behind the attack or whether the organization was the target.

The University of Colorado in Colorado Springs police department identified the officer killed as 44-year-old Garrett Swasey, a six-year veteran of the force. He was married and had a son and daughter, according to the website of his church, Hope Chapel in Colorado Springs.

There were no immediate details about the two civilians killed in the attack. Five officers and four others were hospitalized in good condition, police said.

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A law enforcement officer secures a perimeter near a deadly shooting at a Planned Parenthood clinic …

"Certainly it could have been much, much worse if it were not for the heroism of our police officers to corner the person in the building," Colorado Springs Fire Chief Chris Riley said.

President Barack Obama condemned the violence.

"This is not normal. We can't let it become normal," he said in a statement. "If we truly care about this — if we're going to offer up our thoughts and prayers again, for God knows how many times, with a truly clean conscience — then we have to do something about the easy accessibility of weapons of war on our streets to people who have no business wielding them. Period. Enough is enough."

Witnesses described a chaotic scene when the shooting first started just before noon.

Ozy Licano was in the two-story building's parking lot when he saw someone crawling toward the clinic's door. He tried to escape in his car when the gunman looked at him.

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Police confer at an intersection near the scene of a shooting at a Planned Parenthood clinic Friday, …

"He came out, and we looked each other in the eye, and he started aiming, and then he started shooting," Licano said. "I saw two holes go right through my windshield as I was trying to quickly back up and he just kept shooting and I started bleeding."

Licano drove away and took refuge at a nearby grocery store.

"He was aiming for my head," he said of the gunman. "It's just weird to stare in the face of someone like that. And he didn't win."

Inside, terrified patients and staff hid wherever they could find cover. Jennifer Motolinia ducked under a table and called her brother, Joan, to leave him final instructions for the care of her three children in case the gunman found her.

Joan Motolinia said he could hear gunshots in the background as his sister spoke. "She was telling me to take care of her babies because she could get killed," he said.

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Colorado Springs shooting suspect Robert Lewis Dear of North Carolina is seen in undated photos prov …

For others, the first sign that something was wrong was when police officers appeared and ushered people to the building's second floor. Planned Parenthood employee Cynthia Garcia told her mother, Tina Garcia, that the officers wouldn't say why they were gathering everybody together — then she heard the gunshots.

Her daughter and the others were holed up there for hours while the standoff continued, Tina Garcia said.

Some people managed to escape the building and flee to a nearby bank. An armored vehicle was seen taking evacuees away from the clinic to ambulances waiting nearby.

With the immediate threat over, authorities swept the building and turned their attention to inspecting unspecified items the gunman left outside the building and carried inside in bags. They were concerned that he had planted improvised explosive devices meant to cause even more destruction.

Buckley, the police lieutenant, said Saturday that the items Dear brought to the scene were "no longer a threat," but she would not say what those items were or why they were no longer considered a threat.

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Associated Press writers Kristen Wyatt in Colorado Springs, Alina Hartounian in Phoenix, Michael Biesecker in Black Mountain, North Carolina, and Colleen Slevin, Dan Elliott and Thomas Peipert in Denver contributed to this report.