The caliphate falls
The United Nations stated that 100 people, mostly children, died on the way to Al-Hawl.
A girl changes a baby's nappy by the roadside as a convoy of women and children who the day before left Baghouz, the last village held by the Islamic State in Syria, stops on the way to the notorious Al Hol internment camp in north eastern Syria, on February 24, 2019.
By the start of February 2019, the Syrian Defence Force (SDF), backed by the international coalition against ISIS, had fought ISIS into a final pocket between the Euphrates River and the Iraqi desert. The coalition had predicted the presence of some two thousand fighters and their families and a short fight to finish them off, but the fighting wouldn’t end for almost two months, in which tens of thousands of civilians, fighters and their families fled ISIS’s final enclave under terrible conditions.
Picture unposed.
![A Syrian Democratic Forces fighter ducks as a pair of coalition airstrikes hit territory controlled by ISIL near the town of Baghuz on February 6, 2019. ISIL still controls some 2-square-miles of territory here, surrounded by the American backed SDF, which is largely a Kurdish force, Iraqi Shia militias, and Syrian government forces. [Sam Tarling for The Telegraph]](https://photos.smugmug.com/Essays/The-caliphate-falls/i-N4VJndX/0/c1435a00/Ti/2019_02_06_SYRIA_ISIS_civilans___MG_0864-Ti.jpg)
