NEAR BAGHOUZ, Syria: US-backed forces in eastern Syria scrambled on Wednesday to extract more families from the last dreg of the “caliphate” before delivering a final blow to holdout militants.
Several thousand people — fighters and their relatives — are believed to be holed up in the last pocket of territory controlled by the IS group, barely half a square kilometre near the Iraqi border.
Nearly five years after IS leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi made a call for joining the newly proclaimed “caliphate”, the so-called IS is only days away from dying in a tiny village few Syrians had ever heard of until recently.
Thousands of its last denizens, many of them women and children, have been pouring out of the riverside hamlet of Baghouz in recent days, posing a huge humanitarian challenge for the Kurdish fighters leading the operation.
Survivors of the months-old siege spilling out of the double-trailer trucks that transported them out of Baghouz tell harrowing tales of starvation and many of the evacuees require immediate medical attention.
Lines of black-veiled women holding scruffy children and carrying their scant belongings in bags can be seen walking across the plain.
Save the Children said many of the surviving children have witnessed devastating events in recent months and are “showing signs of psychological distress”.
The men are carefully screened by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), who have spearheaded the battle against IS in Syria, with support from a US-led coalition.
According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, about 10 per cent of the estimated 50,000 people who fled the last militant bastions since December were IS members trying to slip back into civilian life.
The diehard militants, among them many foreigners, still clinging to the last patch of the “caliphate” in Baghouz have also been using civilians as human shields.
Footage captured by the BBC from positions held by Iraqi paramilitary forces across the Euphrates river shows an improvised camp, where what appears to be a militant can be seen running among makeshift tents.
As warplanes fly overhead, a woman is seen collecting water from the river in plastic jerrycan while black men move stealthily among the jumble of minivans and civilian shelters that make any direct air strike impossible.
— AFP
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