The caliphate falls (Silver Award Paris Prix 2019)
The United Nations stated that 100 people, mostly children, died on the way to Al-Hawl.
Women and children wait in the rain to board lorries after leaving the last square half-mile of ISIL territory in the village of Baghuz in north eastern Syria on February 23, 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.
An unposed picture taken during a press visit to a screening point outside Baghouz, organised by the SDF.
![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)
