Waiting for the Isis endgame
The collection of tents was largely silent on a sunny winter afternoon. Few people were visible, but the few out and about were calm – two men in long robes and pants walked slowly together through the grass, a woman leisurely came out of her tent to look around, a man on a motorcycle rode towards the river.
This is the last speck of land held by the Islamic State group – a patch along the Euphrates River in eastern Syria where an estimated 300 militants are mixed with hundreds of civilians, refusing to surrender and trying to negotiate an exit with the United States-backed forces surrounding them.
An Associated Press team got a rare glimpse of the Isis-held settlement from on a rooftop about a kilometre away during a media tour of the front lines organised by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). The roof looked out over a flat, green landscape with scattered palm trees, to an earthen berm and a line of pickup trucks put up by the militants at the edge of the camp.
At one point, gunfire crackled in the distance. An SDF commander on the roof with a number of fighters said it wasn’t always so quiet. Only days earlier, the militants surprised the soldiers with an attempted night raid.
The SDF could not assault the site or call in air strikes because of the civilians, he said, adding that his fighters had seen the militants moving civilians around at gunpoint as human shields.
‘‘They try a psychological war. But that is it! The war is over, and we won,’’ said the commander, who spoke on that condition that he be identified only by his nom de guerre, Baran.
The tense standoff by the village of Baghouz is the endgame for the militant group that since 2014 controlled a vast stretch of territory across Syria and Iraq – at one point nearly from Aleppo to Baghdad – and ruled for years, aspiring to create an enduring and expanding jihadi state. The 300 militants in the pocket may include high-level Isis figures, and are believed to be holding hostages.
Activists said a truce in place has been extended for five days as of Monday. A person familiar with the ongoing deliberations said the Isis fighters had demanded to be allowed to leave along with the civilians, and had asked for an exit through a corridor to the rebel-held northwestern province of Idlib. The SDF denies any negotiations are taking place.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an activist group that monitors the civil war in Syria, said another request by Isis to be evacuated to neighbouring Iraq was also rejected.
The SDF appears to be aiming to wait the militants out. ‘‘They don’t have supplies in the area they are in that would last for a week or more,’’ said Baran.
The SDF and the US-led coalition have been fighting Isis in the surrounding region since September. In recent years, they and other forces have steadily driven Isis from nearly all the territory it once controlled, in battles that have killed tens of thousands of people and left entire towns and neighbourhoods in ruins.
Villages leading to Baghouz lie mostly empty and destroyed.
Over 30,000 people who left the last Isis-held areas have arrived at the al-Hol camp in Syria’s northern Hassakeh province in the last few weeks, raising the overall population of the camp to almost 42,000.
In Baghouz, SDF fighters hold a base they seized from the militants last week after intense fighting and a blitz of air strikes.
The militants appear to have used the base as a makeshift hospital. Medical supplies and medicine were strewn all over the floor.
In the backyard, soldiers buried two Isis militants, including one who had lost a leg but continued to fight. A suicide vest still lay in the debris.
Scattered in the dirt outside the building were various items left behind. The identity cards of two men from Aleppo province, ; a teddy bear; and not far away, a torn copy of Milestones on the Road, a seminal book from the 1960s by Egyptian radical Islamic Sayyid Qutb that has been a major influence on jihadi groups around the world.
‘‘They try a psychological war. The war is over, and we won.’’
Baran, Syrian Democratic Forces commander