Politic?

Evacuating Baghouz, Syria

Smoke and fire billows after the shelling of Islamic State’s last holdout of Baghouz by Kurdish-led forces backed by US warplanes Photograph: Delil Souleiman/AFP/Getty Images

"More than 6,000 people have fled or left Baghouz within the past 48 hours and more are expected to arrive to the reception areas."
"There are a large number of fighters who are inside [Baghouz] and do not want to surrender."
Adnan Afrin, spokesman and commander, SDF

"[Baghouz is a] horror film. [There is a] massacre [inside; constant shooting]."
"There were] no more homes, we live underground in tunnels and tents."
Dorothee Maquere, widow of French ISIL fighter

The families of ISIL fighters are believed to be among the latest civilians to flee [Bulent Kilic/AFP]

Among the civilians evacuating from the besieged village there are groups cursing the SDF, and shouting "Islamic State will remain!". Defiant as complete defeat looms, they are aggressive and scream their hatsez of the infidels. Rowdy, aggressive and defiant women gather in groups to declare their undying faith and screaming that "Islamic State will stay, God is great, Islamic State will stay, God is great!"

Their belief and their faith undiminished despite the clear evidence before them that their caliphate is no more. A caliphate which at its height four years ago ruled over 7.7 million people, according to Operation Inherent Resolve (CITE-OIR) the coalition fighting ISIL. Since its peak the caliphate's conquest of a third of Syria and Iraq netted it an annual revenue of $1.9 billion in 2014, much of it in oil sales from the conquered territory it exploited which was reduced two years later to $870-million by the calculation of the International Centre for the Study of Radicalization and Political Violence, King's College London.

Nonetheless, territory lost, factored in along with the loss of its operating funds. An estimation in July 2018 by a UN monitoring committee warned that membership in the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant remained between 20,000 and 30,000. And even now, while the final geographic position of the terrorist group is on the cusp of vanishing, there are reports out of Iraq that ISIL has been busy setting up new groups in the country.

People who fled Baghouz are transported in an area controlled by the Kurdish-led SDF

Photograph: Bülent Kılıç/AFP/Getty Images

The stepped-up assault by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces bringing them another step closer to vacating the village entirely of its terrorists while the evacuation of civilians is ongoing has yielded the emergence of hundreds of defeated fighters along with women and children. One of the women married to a prominent French ISIL member who was killed on the weekend during a mortar barrage spoke of continual shooting in the village where to avoid crossfire people had to remain flat on the ground.

Her seven year-old daughter was killed, another daughter wounded by an explosion several weeks earlier while two other sons had been killed in a mortar attack and Syrian government fire. Her losses borne alongside the loss of the dream of an Islamic State caliphate. The women don't hesitate to express their loathing for the Kurdish forces under whose oversight their futures lie for the present time. With the children remaining to her she will be trucked along with other women and children to a designated holding camp.

The Kurds had arranged a safe corridor where civilians left in the village, along with wives and children of the ISIL fighters could be evacuated. Arranging and conducting the evacuation along with the process of documentation and trucking them to camps consumed the time and attention of the SDF, giving a breathing space to the die-hard fighters refusing to surrender their weapons. Then on Wednesday, about 400 of the Islamic State fighters did do just that.

A Russian woman who evacuated with her three children responded when asked what the situation inside Baghouz was like, with one word in Arabic: "Fear". She too a widow, her husband recently killed in an air strike. Yet another woman in her mid-20s identified herself as Reena from Hama and spoke of waiting for her husband to emerge from an ISIL prison, there for months after he killed an ISIL member, retaliating "for his baby daughter being killed in an airstrike", she said.

On Monday alone, SDF spokesman Mustafa Bali tweeted that 3,000 people exited Baghouz through the humanitarian corridor the Kurdish forces had established. Altogether, since the siege and fighting began to retake Baghouz from ISIL, over ten thousand people left, with black-robed women and children moved on trucks heading into the desert to the camp locations for displaced people to the north.

A large number among those leaving Monday were ISIL fighters who "surrendered to our forces", said Kurdish spokesman Bali. They were transported to detention facilities. It remains unclear how many civilians and ISIL fighters remain inside the village, but the estimate is that they have been reduced to hundreds from recent thousands.