The Last Days of ISIS’s Capital: Airstrikes if You Stay, Land Mines if You Flee<br />For the men who come of out Islamic State territory<br />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.<br />"They want to control it." Many of the wounded who escape Raqqa end up at the hospital in Tal Abyad, a two-hour<br />drive further north, where Islamic State once detained its prisoners in a cage at the main traffic circle.<br />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.<br />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,<br />and more than 150 in August alone, according to the United Nations.<br />They were living in fear and uncertainty, either along the dusty bombed-out roads leading out of the city center,<br />or in a transit camp two-and-a-half hours north, or lying in hospital beds further north, their bodies broken.<br />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,<br />the symbolic heart of the territory the Islamic State sought to turn into its brutal version of God’s rule on earth.<br />The Islamic State, also known as ISIS, is retreating, but not without a tenacious fight, trapping civilians in their last few enclaves.
