The Last Days of ISIS’s Capital: Airstrikes if You Stay, Land Mines if You Flee
- 7 years ago
The Last Days of ISIS’s Capital: Airstrikes if You Stay, Land Mines if You Flee
For the men who come of out Islamic State territory
and into the transit camp in the S.D.F.-controlled town of Ayn Issa, a two-and-a-half hour drive north of Raqqa city, one of the first orders of business is to file into a tin-roofed barber shop.
"They want to control it." Many of the wounded who escape Raqqa end up at the hospital in Tal Abyad, a two-hour
drive further north, where Islamic State once detained its prisoners in a cage at the main traffic circle.
He had been detained and flogged three times while the Islamic State ruled his city: Either his beard was too short or his pants weren’t short enough.
The American airstrikes pose a new danger to civilians, killing an estimated 800 people since the United States-led coalition began its assault on the city in June, according to the Syrian Observatory, an independent group,
and more than 150 in August alone, according to the United Nations.
They were living in fear and uncertainty, either along the dusty bombed-out roads leading out of the city center,
or in a transit camp two-and-a-half hours north, or lying in hospital beds further north, their bodies broken.
That’s all I was doing." He was one of dozens of people who described to me life in the waning days of the capital of the caliphate,
the symbolic heart of the territory the Islamic State sought to turn into its brutal version of God’s rule on earth.
The Islamic State, also known as ISIS, is retreating, but not without a tenacious fight, trapping civilians in their last few enclaves.
For the men who come of out Islamic State territory
and into the transit camp in the S.D.F.-controlled town of Ayn Issa, a two-and-a-half hour drive north of Raqqa city, one of the first orders of business is to file into a tin-roofed barber shop.
"They want to control it." Many of the wounded who escape Raqqa end up at the hospital in Tal Abyad, a two-hour
drive further north, where Islamic State once detained its prisoners in a cage at the main traffic circle.
He had been detained and flogged three times while the Islamic State ruled his city: Either his beard was too short or his pants weren’t short enough.
The American airstrikes pose a new danger to civilians, killing an estimated 800 people since the United States-led coalition began its assault on the city in June, according to the Syrian Observatory, an independent group,
and more than 150 in August alone, according to the United Nations.
They were living in fear and uncertainty, either along the dusty bombed-out roads leading out of the city center,
or in a transit camp two-and-a-half hours north, or lying in hospital beds further north, their bodies broken.
That’s all I was doing." He was one of dozens of people who described to me life in the waning days of the capital of the caliphate,
the symbolic heart of the territory the Islamic State sought to turn into its brutal version of God’s rule on earth.
The Islamic State, also known as ISIS, is retreating, but not without a tenacious fight, trapping civilians in their last few enclaves.