IN THE LAST DAYS OF THE IS CAPITAL, AIR STRIKES IF YOU STAY, MINES IF YOU FLEE
The militants are going down with a fight that’s leaving a city in tatters
Every few minutes, a deafening boom. Then a whistle of artillery. Occasionally, the clatter of a pickup truck, piled with soldiers, advancing to the front line. This is the neighbourhood, on the western edge of Raqqa, the Islamic State’s de facto capital, where Hassan Hashem Ramadan lives.
He had been detained and flogged three times while the IS ruled his city: Either his beard was too short or his pants weren’t short enough. When he tried to escape across the Euphrates River, he was marched at gunpoint into the city centre. Finally, on a Tuesday morning in August, his brother was hit by shrapnel from forces fighting the IS.
Mr Ramadan carried him in his arms, first to the hospital, then to the grave. Then he fled.
“Last few days,” he said, “I was just taking the wounded to the hospital or burying the dead. That’s all I was doing.”
He was one of dozens of people who described to me life in the waning days of the capital of the caliphate, the symbolic heart of the territory the IS sought to turn into its brutal version of God’s rule on Earth.
US military forces and their allies have all but encircled the city, reclaiming, they say, more than half of it. The IS is retreating, but not without a tenacious fight, trapping civilians in their last few enclaves.
Fewer than 25,000 civilians remain in what had been a city of 300,000. Those who fled described a death vise of airstrikes, artillery fire and land mines that litter every exit route. Also thirst: There’s not much water left to drink inside the city, they said.
They are living in fear and uncertainty, either along the dusty bombed-out roads leading out of the city center, or in a transit camp two and a half hours north, or lying in hospital beds farther north, their bodies broken.
A doctor, a seamstress, children, their lives were frozen in a state of awful suspension. They couldn’t say where they would go next, or under whose rule they would live.
In a western Raqqa neighborhood where the IS had recently been routed, Fawza Hamedi lay on a mattress on the floor of her sister’s house, wincing in pain. She had tried to get out of Raqqa weeks ago. But a woman ahead of her stepped on a mine and died instantly. Shrapnel punctured Hamedi’s back and legs, an IS sniper shot at her, and then fighters dragged her away to a makeshift jail. Landmine victims are hastily buried there, she said. The smell is still in her nose.
Air strikes pose a new danger to civilians, killing an estimated 800 people since the US-led coalition began its assault on the city in June, according to the Syrian Observatory, an independent group, and more than 150 in August alone, according to the United Nations.
Those who manage to get out often have a haunted, crazed look in their eyes. Memories taunt them, both good and bad.
Khawla al-Khallaf, a seamstress, lived near Naim Square, where families used to stroll at sundown and the loudspeakers played the songs of the Lebanese crooner Fairuz.
Now she can only think of the heads displayed on stakes there. Among the beheaded was one of her husband’s relatives, an imam at a city mosque who had defied the IS’s edicts.
“It’s no longer called Naim Square,” she said. “It’s called Hell Square.”
For a year, she and her family moved from one town to another.
“I wish we had died in 2010 instead of being humiliated like this,” she said.
She looked out at the broken road that ran alongside an empty tent assigned to her family, just beyond city limits. A funeral procession for a fallen Kurdish fighter hurtled down the road.
As evening fell, a convoy of armoured personnel carriers advanced to the front line, carrying US troops. Donald Trump’s administration has not said how many troops are deployed in Syria, but you see them across the north of the country, from the banks of the Tigris River in the far eastern corner, along the border with Turkey, and down into Raqqa.
Many of the wounded who escape Raqqa end up at the hospital in Tal Abyad, a two-hour drive further north, where the IS once detained its prisoners in a cage at the main traffic circle.
Medecins Sans Frontieres, the aid group that treats the wounded here, has warned that many wounded may be trapped inside the city, unable to pass through the gantlet. By the time they arrive, the aid group says, their wounds are infected, and limbs harder to save.
Some of them find a familiar face in Muhammad Ahmed Saleh, former director of the government hospital in Raqqa. He worked for more than a year there under IS rule.
“Their Kalashnikovs were always over our heads,” he said. Like so many Raqqawis, he had chaos written on his face: grey flyaway hair, a day’s stubble, frenzied eyes.
“Anytime you could be beheaded,” he said. “I tried to discuss things with them. They don’t believe anything other than what they believe, even if it’s facts.”
A four-year-old girl, Ahed, lay with her head on her mother’s lap. They were walking out of Raqqa at dawn the day before when they heard a loud blast. The girl fractured her right leg. Her father had died days before in an airstrike.
Another mother walked from bed to bed. Five of her daughters had been wounded in the same blast.
Doctors huddled around another bed, delivering news to a man waking from surgery. They told him his wife had died as they fled Raqqa, and that they had to amputate both his legs. His five-year-old daughter lay in the next bed, sleeping. Her left leg too was shattered. The good news, the doctors said: They had managed to save it.