Extremist fighters made a desperate last stand in eastern Syria on Wednesday, while their wives and children fled the final, blood-soaked implosion of the Islamic State group's "caliphate".
The US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces on Saturday launched a final push to expel ISIS fighters from the sole remaining morsel of the proto-state they declared in 2014 across parts of Syria and Iraq.
Thousands of people have flooded out of the so-called "Baghouz pocket" near the Iraqi border in recent days -- mostly women and children, but also suspected extremists.
Several dozen people fled Baghouz on Wednesday afternoon, walking to an SDF-held position four kilometres (two miles) away from the village.
As they approached, the SDF rushed to filter out the men. They separated 15, all with long beards, and took them one by one behind a rock to search them.
Afterwards, they loaded them into a truck destined for a gathering point where coalition troops were present.
In an open field serving as the main civilian reception location, about 300 women and children, almost all of them Iraqi, sat in small groups.
After fleeing Baghouz on foot on Tuesday afternoon, most had spent the night out in the open.
"I tried to go get a blanket for my kids but there weren't enough," said Umm Ayham, a young Syrian woman from the northern province of Raqa.
"Some people had lit a fire, burning plastic they found on the ground and baby diapers, so I went by it to get warm."
Hundreds of people fled the IS holdout in the night of Tuesday to Wednesday, SDF spokesman Mustefa Bali said.
Once separated from suspected extremists, civilians are ferried on trucks to Kurdish-held camps for the displaced hours north.
But after weeks of receiving little food inside the extremists' shrinking pocket, many small children do not survive the trek through the cold desert.
The International Rescue Committee said Wednesday 51 people had died on the way to the Al-Hol camp or shortly after arriving, most in the past few weeks.
The majority were young children or newborn babies, and most died from hypothermia.
Inside the pocket on Wednesday, the Kurdish-led SDF fighters were advancing slowly.
"We have retaken positions lost in a counterattack launched two days ago by IS. We have progressed and taken new positions," Bali said.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the SDF fighters were making painstaking progress.
"There are mines throughout the sector," said Rami Abdel Rahman, the head of the Britain-based war monitor.
"The SDF are firing rockets," he said, adding that both sides were locked in heavy clashes on the edges of Baghouz village.
Since December, more than 38,000 people, mostly wives and children of IS fighters, have fled into SDF-held areas, the Observatory says.
That figure includes around 3,500 suspected extremists, according to the monitor.
In SDF-held territory earlier Wednesday, two dozen members of the coalition forces searched men who had escaped, including one in a rickety wheelchair.
A coalition force member led one of the younger men to a subsequent point for a retina scan. Those who had been searched knelt on the ground.
The SDF launched a military offensive to expel IS from the eastern banks of the Euphrates in the oil-rich province of Deir Ezzor in September.
Since then, more than 1,300 extremists as well as 650 US-backed fighters have been killed, while more than 400 civilians have lost their lives, the Observatory says.
SDF spokesman Bali said at the weekend that up to 600 extremists could remain inside the pocket, most of them foreigners.
US President Donald Trump on Monday said the coalition may declare victory over IS in Syria within days.
A victory in Baghouz would allow the United States to withdraw all its 2,000 troops from Syria, as announced by Trump in December.
The pullout announcement shocked Washington's allies, as well as US military commanders.
In a report last week, the US Department of Defence warned that without sustained counterterrorism pressure, ISIS could resurge within months.
Syria's Kurds hold hundreds of suspected foreign ISIS fighters and have long urged their home countries to take them back, but these nations have been reluctant.
A senior Pentagon official told reporters Washington was pressing its allies to repatriate their nationals.
"We are seeing hopeful progress," he said.
Syria's civil war has killed 360,000 people since it started in 2011 with the brutal repression of anti-government protests.
UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
Sole survivors
- Cecelia Crocker was on board Northwest Airlines Flight 255 in 1987 when it crashed in Detroit, killing 154 people, including her parents and brother. The plane had hit a light pole on take off
- George Lamson Jr, from Minnesota, was on a Galaxy Airlines flight that crashed in Reno in 1985, killing 68 people. His entire seat was launched out of the plane
- Bahia Bakari, then 12, survived when a Yemenia Airways flight crashed near the Comoros in 2009, killing 152. She was found clinging to wreckage after floating in the ocean for 13 hours.
- Jim Polehinke was the co-pilot and sole survivor of a 2006 Comair flight that crashed in Lexington, Kentucky, killing 49.
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Armies of Sand
By Kenneth Pollack (Oxford University Press)
Ponti
Sharlene Teo, Pan Macmillan
Manchester United v Club America
When: Thursday, 9pm Arizona time (Friday UAE, 8am)
WHAT FANS WILL LOVE ABOUT RUSSIA
FANS WILL LOVE
Uber is ridiculously cheap and, as Diego Saez discovered, mush safer. A 45-minute taxi from Pulova airport to Saint Petersburg’s Nevsky Prospect can cost as little as 500 roubles (Dh30).
FANS WILL LOATHE
Uber policy in Russia is that they can start the fare as soon as they arrive at the pick-up point — and oftentimes they start it even before arriving, or worse never arrive yet charge you anyway.
FANS WILL LOVE
It’s amazing how active Russians are on social media and your accounts will surge should you post while in the country. Throw in a few Cyrillic hashtags and watch your account numbers rocket.
FANS WILL LOATHE
With cold soups, bland dumplings and dried fish, Russian cuisine is not to everybody’s tastebuds. Fortunately, there are plenty Georgian restaurants to choose from, which are both excellent and economical.
FANS WILL LOVE
The World Cup will take place during St Petersburg's White Nights Festival, which means perpetual daylight in a city that genuinely never sleeps. (Think toddlers walking the streets with their grandmothers at 4am.)
FANS WILL LOATHE
The walk from Krestovsky Ostrov metro station to Saint Petersburg Arena on a rainy day makes you wonder why some of the $1.7 billion was not spent on a weather-protected walkway.
History's medical milestones
1799 - First small pox vaccine administered
1846 - First public demonstration of anaesthesia in surgery
1861 - Louis Pasteur published his germ theory which proved that bacteria caused diseases
1895 - Discovery of x-rays
1923 - Heart valve surgery performed successfully for first time
1928 - Alexander Fleming discovers penicillin
1953 - Structure of DNA discovered
1952 - First organ transplant - a kidney - takes place
1954 - Clinical trials of birth control pill
1979 - MRI, or magnetic resonance imaging, scanned used to diagnose illness and injury.
1998 - The first adult live-donor liver transplant is carried out
On Instagram: @WithHopeUAE
Although social media can be harmful to our mental health, paradoxically, one of the antidotes comes with the many social-media accounts devoted to normalising mental-health struggles. With Hope UAE is one of them.
The group, which has about 3,600 followers, was started three years ago by five Emirati women to address the stigma surrounding the subject. Via Instagram, the group recently began featuring personal accounts by Emiratis. The posts are written under the hashtag #mymindmatters, along with a black-and-white photo of the subject holding the group’s signature red balloon.
“Depression is ugly,” says one of the users, Amani. “It paints everything around me and everything in me.”
Saaed, meanwhile, faces the daunting task of caring for four family members with psychological disorders. “I’ve had no support and no resources here to help me,” he says. “It has been, and still is, a one-man battle against the demons of fractured minds.”
In addition to With Hope UAE’s frank social-media presence, the group holds talks and workshops in Dubai. “Change takes time,” Reem Al Ali, vice chairman and a founding member of With Hope UAE, told The National earlier this year. “It won’t happen overnight, and it will take persistent and passionate people to bring about this change.”
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UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
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THE BIO: Martin Van Almsick
Hometown: Cologne, Germany
Family: Wife Hanan Ahmed and their three children, Marrah (23), Tibijan (19), Amon (13)
Favourite dessert: Umm Ali with dark camel milk chocolate flakes
Favourite hobby: Football
Breakfast routine: a tall glass of camel milk
