From IAN BIRRELL

THE civilians able to escape have fled. Now there are just an estimated 500 fighters, many of them foreigners, making the last stand of the Islamic State’s ‘caliphate’ in a remote Syrian hamlet near the Iraqi border. They include some of the group’s most battle-hardened veterans, many wearing suicide vests and using civilians for human shields as they attempt to resist the surrounding forces using tunnels drilled through the walls of houses in Baghouz.

Once these feared jihadis ruled eight million people in an area the size of Britain, relying on savagery to impose their medieval creed, and social media to woo recruits from Britain and around the globe.

But they have been pushed back into a fast-shrinking 840 square yards pocket beside the Euphrates River – and within days, perhaps hours, Islamic State will be declared dead after five bloodstained years of carnage, chaos and fear.

Ciya Furat, a commander with the Kurdish-led attackers, said yesterday in eastern Syria that his group will ‘very soon bring good news to the whole world’.

The stage has been built to hail this momentous victory. ‘We have won,’ Donald Trump has already declared on Twitter, while Vice-President Mike Pence says the terror group ‘has been defeated’.

Similar bold statements were made 14 months ago in Iraq after troops reclaimed the lost one-third of the country, including its second city Mosul. This was ‘the biggest victory against the forces of evil and terrorism’, proclaimed Haider al-Abadi, the Iraqi prime minister.

Yet listen to the tale told to me on Friday – in a refugee camp filled with families from Mosul in neighbouring Iraq – by Hamida Mohammad Taher about a neighbour who worked for the Baghdad government in the recaptured city.

‘Every day he would go to work and their three daughters went to school. One month ago a group came to their house when just his wife was at home. They killed this woman and wrote on the walls in her blood and brains, “This will be the same fate for you.’’’

That was her chilling reply when I asked if IS was still active.

Later, she described the horror of being forced to watch another woman being stoned to death as punishment for failing to cover up correctly.

And it was echoed by other families from the region and senior officers in the Peshmerga, the Kurdish military who spearheaded much of the fighting against IS,