Baladi News
Suicide bombers, snipers, rockets -- Islamic State group fighters did everything they could to defend their last scrap of territory in eastern Syria, but their diminished resources were not enough.
The US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces on Saturday declared victory over the jihadists in the remote village of Baghouz, after reducing their once terrifying proto-state to a ghostly riverside camp.
From the top of an abandoned building overlooking the devastated encampment, SDF fighter Hamid Abdel Aal points to an earth berm half way to the Euphrates River.
"We arrived at night. We were there at that barricade," says the man in his thirties, a checkered green scarf wrapped around his jet black hair.
"In the morning, they attacked. They had snipers shooting at us," he says, a large yellow flag of the Kurdish-led SDF billowing behind him after their victory.
For four hours, the jihadists fought back, he said. But in the end, they retreated to the reedy river edges.
"Eight of them blew themselves up. Others handed themselves over," says Abdel Aal, who has been fighting with the Kurdish-led SDF since 2016.
Abdel Aal, who hails from the northeastern Kurdish province of Hassakeh, shows off war scars acquired in years of battle.
On his right side is a gunshot wound sustained during the battle for the jihadists' former de-facto Syrian capital of Raqa, on his neck a scar from a mine explosion.
- 'Hiding in tunnels' -
Another fighter named Omar, a slim 31-year-old wearing a mismatching uniform, also recalls the past days of battle.
Even as SDF forces advanced backed by the air strikes of a US-led coalition, the jihadists "would attack sporadically", he says.
"Suicide bombers would leap out of tunnels. Most were foreigners -- from Kazakhstan, France, Saudi Arabia and Iraq."
There was a time when the jihadists injected fear and claimed deadly attacks across the Middle East and beyond.
