This was the final battle in which ISIS was defeated – 24/03/2019

There was still yesterday the caliphate that the ISIS organization wanted to create Thousands of stores built with blankets or any other piece of useful fabric. They had been raised on a sort of peninsula that went into the Euphrates River and, to protect them, they had surrounded them thousands of cars, now burned, They served as a means of transport for members of the Islamic State who sought refuge in this part of south-eastern Syria to the point that the so-called caliphate was contracting. At least 40,000 people had settled in this region.

The result of this mobilization, which also included civilians whom the jihadists were forced to move with them, was a kind of IDP camp where whole families (with thousands of children) lived huddled in holes dug in tents to protect themselves from bombing. These tents were mixed with trenches and battle positions.

Yesterday, there was virtually no trace of what it was. In the streets of the countryside where, the previous Sunday, the inhabitants who walked walked quietly they refused to surrender during a kind of ceasefire to create a corridor for fighters and civilians to leave, there was no human presence left. Neither alive nor dead.

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The corpses of the battle, which peaked between Sunday night and the following Monday, have disappeared. The fate of the bodies and their number will be one of the problems to know in the future.

The track left by the battle is impressive. As if a wave of fire had covered this plain where some objects remembered yesterday the life of its inhabitants: baby strollers, Patent leather heels, military boots, hair dryers, but also explosive grenades and belts which were the biggest weapon of the Islamic State to stop the advance of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). The fighters who took part in this latest battle, one of the most difficult that the SDS has fought against the Islamic State since the creation of this coalition of Kurdish, Arab and Assyrian militias in 2015, l 39; said. L & # 39; ISIS not only he had searched dozens of tunnels of those who took the FDS by surprise whenever they tried to go forward, but used thousands of civilians, women and children, as human shieldswhich forced them to withdraw more than once. "Every meter we make is a victory," said Kurdish commander Adnan Afrin, who pointed out that the jihadists' immolations had caused a lot of damage.

This last battle was closed in the afternoon of last Tuesday when More than 500 fighters surrendered. Baghouz was released by men and women who had been fighting since 2014 for the city of Raqqa, for Kobane, Al Shadadi and other localities. Only two small fractions of the camp remained in the hands of a small group of activists they refused to surrender. They were eliminated on Friday. One of them, under a rocky hill became the path of those who wanted to escape, was shot down by American planes. It happened hours after Donald Trump declared the end of the Caliphate anew.

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But yesterday morning, the operation continued. The sound of the explosions reached the field where the commanders declared the final victory on the roof of one of the buildings near the river where A big SDS flag was already floating.

With the end of this battle, the Islamic State lost all the vast territory that it had accumulated between Syria and Iraq. But although his defeat deserves to be celebrated (as was the case yesterday in some eastern cities of Syria such as Hasaka or Qamishlo), the memory left by ISIS is far from being erased. The destruction that persists throughout southeastern Syria is only a small part of the material, moral and human destruction attributable to the Islamic State. Some 11,000 fighters died in those years and more than 21,000 were wounded, as was recalled yesterday at the celebration held at the base of Al Omar, two hours from Baghouz and the other side of the desert.

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"It was the seat of the Moral Police, a secret prison", showed Imam, a man from this region, when he was taking the road that leads to northeastern Syria, where ISIS still has a large audience. Their ideology is far from over, and one of the great challenges will be dormant cells, which the FDS calculate at more than 250.

The caliphate is dead but the battle against what their ideology represents remains long. There is also a long way to go to rebuild socially and materially what the Islamic State has left behind.

Catalina Gómez Ángel – The Vanguardia