Us-backed forces liberate Isil’s ‘capital’
Fall of Raqqa is a major victory in fight against jihadists, but experts warn the war is not yet won
Isil’s “capital” fell yesterday after Us-backed forces declared victory in the Syrian city from where the jihadist group plotted attacks on the West.
Brigadier General Talal Silo, the spokesman for the Syrian Democratic Forces, said clashes with Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) fighters in Raqqa had stopped, ending the terrorist organisation’s three-year reign of terror in the city.
“The SDF is now in control of the former capital of terrorism,” said Mr Silo. “A formal declaration will be made from the city soon.”
THE fighters limped out from their final redoubt in Raqqa’s central hospital yesterday, and on to waiting buses.
Having promised to fight to the death for the capital of their so-called Caliphate, in the end Isil’s jihadists surrendered after realising they had been cornered.
“Cowards to the end,” said Macer Gifford, a Briton fighting alongside the Us-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in Raqqa. He has been battling Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) militants in the city since the start of the offensive in June and was there to watch some of the last of them flee.
“It was difficult to see them so close and to just watch them leave,” the former currency trader from Oxford told The Daily Telegraph.
After a devastating four-month battle, the remaining 200-odd fighters surrendered and agreed to an evacuation deal which saw them bused out of the city to the last-remaining slivers of territory still under the jihadists’s control to the south.
The final black flag was yesterday taken down from the city’s stadium, which had been used as a prison during Isil’s brutal three-year rule and had become synonymous with the group’s violent excesses.
All that was left to do was to check the many tunnels that Isil fighters had dug to conceal sleeper cells and improvised explosive devices, Talal Silo, the SDF’S spokesman, said. “Raqqa is still full of landmines,” Mr Silo told The Telegraph. “But the SDF is now in control of the former capital of terrorism.”
During the campaign for Raqqa the city suffered massive devastation from Isil’s mines as well as from Us-led coalition air strikes which left most of its buildings levelled and in ruins.
The British Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor group put the overall death toll for the battle at 3,250, including fighters and civilians, but said hundreds were still missing or unaccounted for. Five British volunteers were also killed.
Isil’s use of civilians as human shields forced the coalition to rely on co-ordinated air strikes, at a heavy cost.
“They never fought us face-to-face like men,” Mr Gifford, who uses a pseudonym, said. “They would just shoot at us from sniper positions and drive at us with car bombs. They surrounded themselves with women and children, which they used as protection against the strikes.”
An international charity group says tens of thousands of people who did manage to flee the battle zone are now in desperate need of aid and the nearby camps “are bursting at the seams”. Given the appallingly high levels of destruction in and around the city, most families have nowhere to return to and are likely to stay in the camps for months, even years, to come.
The militants seized the city in early 2014 in a blitzkrieg offensive across Syria and neighbouring Iraq, making it the headquarters of its self-styled “Caliphate”. At one point they controlled
approximately a third of Syria and a third of Iraq, making up a quasi-state the size of Britain.
So confident was the group during its height that it even threatened to conquer Rome.
The effect the loss of Raqqa, which had become the administrative heart of Isil, will have on the group cannot be
overestimated. It was from there that its militants filmed their slickly produced and often gory propaganda videos.
They also plotted the most devastating attacks on Europe from the city’s internet cafés and it was from the hills outside Raqqa that Briton Mohammed Emwazi – Jihadi John – executed two of his countrymen in videos which shocked the world in 2014.
The jihadists would continue to rule over the city’s residents with an ultraconservative and brutal interpretation of Sharia for another three years. Schools were closed and children were sent to mosques for indoctrination into jihad and camps for military training. Adults were stoned to death and beheaded for infractions as minor as smoking or listening to music.
However, the group’s fortunes changed dramatically after Iraqi forces began their offensive to retake its most prized territory of Mosul last year. And in recent months in Syria they have been forced back into a strip of the Euphrates valley and surrounding desert.
Now more than 85 per cent of Isil’s territory in Syria has been liberated and around 90 per cent in Iraq, but experts say Isil will remain a serious threat for the foreseeable future.
While the battle may be over, the war is yet to be won.
‘They never fought us face-to-face like men. They surrounded themselves with women and children’