Raqqa families make daring escapes from IS stronghold

RAQQA (SYRIA): As Shawakh Al Omar huddled with 16 relatives in a single room in house in IS’s Syrian stronghold Raqqa, a mortar round slammed into the home next door, killing four people and shaking the building.

The 57-year-old decided they should make a run for it.

“We didn’t even have time to bury the neighbours’ bodies, we just left,” he said, sitting with daughters and grandchildren on dusty ground at a displaced people’s camp near the town of Tabqa, nearly 50km west, a day later.

Omar said the family was joined by almost the entire neighbourhood, who decided to flee at the same time during the night as fighting between the militants and U.S.-backed forces intensified.

“When we got to the main road, bullets from IS militants started flying by -- they were trying to stop us leaving. The Syrian Democratic Forces started firing back, so we managed to run to SDF territory,” he said.