Inside Syria’s last corner of ISIS, turmoil
U.S.-backed forces surround parcel of militant-held land
AL-HOL, Syria — At the end, the Islamic State is little more than a hamlet of tents, pitched in panic between U.S. bombing raids.
Inside, there has been chaos, witnesses say. Families have fled. Militants are hoarding food. Some fighters have turned their guns on each other.
As U.S.-backed forces surround the last square mile of Islamic State territory, preparing for a final assault on the eastern Syrian village of Baghouz, people who have escaped described a desperate scrabble for survival in the dying days of the statelet.
In more than a dozen interviews at screening points outside the village and at the al-Hol displacement camp, those who fled recounted the end of the self-proclaimed caliphate in graphic, often harrowing, detail. Wives and children of the Islamic State fighters looked confused and exhausted. Yazidi women and their families, who had been enslaved by the militants, were in shock.
One said she had walked “out of hell.”
They described how they had retreated in recent weeks from city to town and then into rural villages as the bombs kept falling and their Islamic State shrank. By the time they reached the villages of Sousa and then Shaafa, near Baghouz close to the Iraqi border, several women said they had given up unpacking their suitcases.
“We were just moving again and again,” said a woman from the Syrian city of Aleppo, who gave her name as Om Mohamed.
Basic supplies in Islamic State territory have dried up. Prices have soared, and civilians have subsisted on what food they have left.
Airstrikes have made the earth shake, with the U.S. military reporting 179 airstrikes in Syria targeting the militants in the twoweek period ending Feb. 9.
At its height, the Islamic State’s self-declared caliphate covered an area the size of Britain, straddling Syria and Iraq, and its propaganda sold a dream of Islamic paradise.
Its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, declared his state from the pulpit of a mosque in the Iraqi city of Mosul, while his army of militants rampaged on, slaughtering and enslaving thousands of members of the Yazidi religious minority in what the United Nations has described as a genocide. Inside the caliphate, jihadists ran hospitals and cleaned the streets. There were floggings and crucifixions in its public squares.
By last week, there was only one dusty path out of the Islamic State, and hundreds of fighters and civilians had trudged along it, toward the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces backed by the U.S. military, and then were sent hundreds of miles to refugee camps or prisons.
The militant group’s most diehard fighters have seen escape as a betrayal. But as the final battle loomed, others chose survival, laying down their guns and skulking out among fleeing civilians, or using middlemen to negotiate surrender.
The SDF has accused Islamic State fighters of moving civilians onto the front line as human shields in a last-ditch attempt to slow the offensive.
On the front lines, the fighters started to panic. Two Yazidis and a Syrian woman said they had witnessed open fighting between the jihadists in the final week. On one occasion, a Tunisian fighter pulled his gun on a Syrian fighter and shot him at close quarters.