ISIS caliphate near the end, but crisis still unresolved
BEIRUT — For 1,653 days the Islamic State ruled over its prophesied caliphate. During the 41/2 years they inflicted untold misery on the nearly 10 million people who lived in it, a vast cross-border territory that at its peak was the size of Britain.
But their reign of terror appeared to be in its dying hours Saturday night. U.S. President Donald Trump, whose country has led a coalition of nations against the Islamic State (ISIS), predicted Friday it would be declared over “in the next 24 hours.”
Saturday that timeline had slipped, as more civilians emerged from the rubble inside. “We will very soon bring good news to the whole world,” said Ciya Furat, a commander with the Kurdish-led group known as the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).
The Western-backed SDF has ISIS cornered in one neighbourhood of a tiny village in the eastern Syrian province of Deir Ezzor.
A small group of ISIS fighters, most of whom are foreign, is refusing to surrender. They are holding with them a number of civilians as human shields, who have been brought out from tunnels to slow the SDF’s advance. This is how ISIS has fought — dirty.
The battle has taken four times longer than the liberation of western Europe from the Nazis. It has taken two national armies, a band of militias, the combined might of the US, British and French air forces and a coalition of more than 70 countries to crush the jihadists.
Entire towns and cities across Iraq and Syria have been levelled. More than 20,000 civilians are thought to have been killed. The number continues to climb as civil defence workers in both countries make grim discoveries of mass graves. Hundreds of thousands are still living as refugees in tented cities.
Tens of thousands of people came from all over the world to live in the first caliphate of modern times. But they would quickly discover the cruel and violent reality of living with a group that wanted to return to the Dark Ages; from the massacres to the mass murder and enslavement of defenceless minorities, to the beheading of hostages.
In the end, there were few without regret. “We were promised a paradise, but it turned to hell,” one woman from central Asia told The Telegraph last week from near the front line of Baghuz village in Deir Ezzor. Most were left begging to be allowed back to their home countries, that have made clear they are not welcome.
With the caliphate in its final hours, questions still remained, such as the whereabouts of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, its elusive leader, and the fate of a number of high-profile hostages including John Cantlie, the captured British journalist.
While there is no concrete information on Cantlie, who was captured in 2012, there are rumours Baghdadi could be hiding out in the Anbar desert in western Iraq.
Another of the most pressing issues is what is to be done with the thousands of foreign ISIS fighters and their families who have been caught by the SDF. At least 4,000 foreign men, women and children are in prisons and detention centres around northern Syria.