Hundreds of Islamic State loyalists in recent days have fled the group’s de facto Syrian capital of Raqqa, where emptying streets and a lack of water and electricity point to the extremists’ crumbling control.
Raqqa residents said Islamic State’s feared religious police is gone. Fewer fighters patrol the streets, and there are fewer military checkpoints, they said.
The departures began when Islamic State warned Sunday that the nearby Tabqa Dam would collapse under U.S.-led airstrikes. The warning sparked a chaotic exodus in which militants and residents alike fled for higher ground.
Some fighters who left with their families later returned alone, and Islamic State appears to have sent some reinforcements to Raqqa from elsewhere. But their overall forces on the ground in the city remain depleted, residents said.
It isn’t clear whether the departures are the first signs that Islamic State is abandoning Raqqa, which a U.S.-led coalition is preparing to attack as part of the campaign to defeat the group, or whether it is regrouping to defend the city.
“ISIS high-level leadership will revert to places where they believe they are more safe and leave low-level fighters and mid-level leaders to manage the battle,” the coalition said in an emailed statement.
Many Islamic State fighters had already fled Raqqa in recent months to a remote militant outpost to the south in Syria’s Deir Ezzour province. Local activists speculated that Sunday’s warning about the dam was intended to provide cover for Islamic State fighters and their families to flee among civilians. A spokesman for the coalition said Islamic State could be looking to blow up the dam to prevent the coalition from advancing.
Residents said the situation in Raqqa has changed significantly in recent days.
Oday, a Raqqa resident, said a handful of pregnant wives of Islamic State fighters had visited his sister, a midwife, on Monday asking if she could induce labor before they head off to Deir Ezzour.
The pregnant women were worried they would be stuck giving birth during the journey, according to Oday, who asked to be identified only by his first name because of safety concerns.
Residents said grocery stores are open but charging wildly inflated prices, now that the religious police are no longer there to enforce price controls.
Dozens of prisoners who had been detained for minor offenses like smoking had been freed, according to an activist group, Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently. A representative of the group said thousands of people remain in the city.
Conditions are dire, residents said. Hospitals in the city are shuttered and there is no running water or electricity, which are supplied by Tabqa Dam.
Raqqa was once a symbol of Islamic State’s strength and a crucial part of the terror group’s self-declared caliphate, which spread across broad swaths of Syria and Iraq. But the U.S.-led coalition and other forces have steadily eroded the group’s territory over the past year or so, and Iraqi forces have recaptured much of the northern city of Mosul from Islamic State.
Now, Raqqa is increasingly under intense pressure from the coalition. U.S. troops and members of the Syrian Democratic Forces, comprised of Kurdish and Arab fighters, have continued to advance around Tabqa city.
By Monday, the coalition had taken the strategic Tabqa air base from Islamic State, as well as Hama-Raqqa highway, a main thoroughfare used by the militants to reinforce its positions in Raqqa from its areas of control in the west.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a U.K.-based monitoring group, reported Tuesday that Islamic State sent 900 fighters from Raqqa to shore up its troops in Tabqa.
Islamic State said shelling by the U.S.-led coalition has ruined the control room at Tabqa Dam.
A spokesman for the coalition denied that Tabqa Dam was in any structural danger from coalition bombardment. A group of local engineers and technicians—some of whom currently service the dam or have done so in the past—have called for a pause in fighting to repair the dam, claiming it is structurally unsound.
A Western diplomat said Islamic State may have lost the manpower to administer the dam, leading to the lack of running water and electricity that Raqqa’s residents reported. The militants could be looking to blame the dam’s failure on the coalition, the diplomat said.
“The battle for Raqqa embodies Islamic State’s many dilemmas for its future strategy and image,” said Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi, a fellow at the Middle East Forum. “A retreat from Raqqa might make sense in the hope of consolidating what remains of its state-building project but a lack of a fight for its de facto [Syrian] capital will surely hurt its credibility as a fighting force.”
The warning about the dam on Sunday was distributed both via the internet and by loudspeaker on Raqqa’s streets, according to residents.
One resident watched Sunday’s exodus from her balcony but decided that she didn’t want to leave the city and risk dying as a refugee. “What else do we have? Whether we die here in our place or leave to a different place, it’s death in the end,” the woman said, according to a relative.
She and other residents described mayhem that day, with cars speeding through checkpoints and causing traffic accidents and families yelling at each other to pack up their belongings. Residents who fled Raqqa say the price of tents has shot up from $60 to more than $300, with many living in the open air of Raqqa province’s high deserts.
Residents who remained have stocked up on dwindling supplies of food and other goods. One resident said he was trying to move his family out of the city for their safety, but friends and distant relatives had no space in their cars, which were packed with their own loved ones and personal belongings.
Acknowledging the group’s territorial defeats and its increasing inability to wage conventional war with its dwindling forces, Islamic State has implored followers to launch guerrilla-style attacks both in the Middle East and abroad.
But in statements this month, the group has admitted a crackdown on immigration has curbed its capacity to carry out attacks in Europe. Still, extremists are exploiting civilian casualties from U.S.-led military operations in Iraq and Syria to justify attacks on civilian targets abroad.
“Notice in the land of the warrior crusaders there is nothing known as innocents or civilians and they do not guard their blood,” read an Islamic State statement on Monday. “Move on the [infidels] wherever you can find them.”
