Coalition forces to attack Islamic State’s heart, Raqqa, ‘in days’

The US, which is supporting the SDF with weapons, air power and special forces advisers, said that militias were “poised around Raqqa”, having snatched 135 square miles of territory from Isis over the past week.

Colonel Ryan Dillon, a spokesman for Operation Inherent Resolve, the US-led coalition against Isis, said: “Raqqa will be liberated. The pace at which that happens will be determined by the SDF.

“The coalition made up of 71 forces around the world is unprecedented . . . and it shows the unity of effort to defeat an enemy that poses a threat not only to Iraq and Syria, and to the region, but to the entire world.”

Raqqa has been under Isis control since January 2014 and was the jihadists’ first big urban stronghold. The fall of the city will be a severe blow at a time when it is rapidly losing territory across Iraq and Syria.

Raqqa has become the centre of Isis operations since the battle to retake Mosul, its stronghold in Iraq, began last October. The fighting there is also entering its final stages as the Iraqi army moves into the westernmost suburbs.

About 200,000 people are believed to remain in a shrinking patch of Isis-held territory in Mosul. About 700,000 have already left. Escapers have reported that the jihadists are shooting people who try to flee.

Scores of top Isis figures and their families have fled from Mosulto Raqqa, from where a number of recent terrorist attacks in Europe are believed to have been orchestrated. After Raqqa, the eastern Syrian city of Deir Ezzor will be Isis’s last bastion in the Levant, although there are reports that the jihadists are regrouping in Anbar province in Iraq, close to the Syrian border.

The humanitarian cost of retaking Raqqa is likely to be huge, and there are fears of a second war between the factions that are now united to fight Isis.

Thousands are streaming from Raqqa to the Ain Issa camp, north of the city in SDF territory. At least 800 people arrive each day, according to Médecins Sans Frontières, but the camp has capacity for only 6,000 people and conditions are further tested by the searing heat, which is reaching 40C in the daytime.

There have been multiple reports from Raqqa of dozens of people dying under coalition bombs as airstrikes intensify. Fifteen civilians were killed in airstrikes on five houses on Saturday, according to the monitoring group Raqqa is being Slaughtered Silently.

Residents of Raqqa are overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim Arabs, while the YPG follows the secular, leftwing ideology of Abdullah Ocalan, founder of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has been fighting in eastern Turkey for three decades.

Many Syrian Arabs are hostile to the YPG, accusing it of co-operating with the regime. Turkey, an ally of the US in the war against terrorism, is furious about Washington’s support for the YPG. Ankara disputes a distinction drawn by the US between the YPG and the PKK and claims that weapons are being sent from Syria into Turkey and used to attack Turkish security forces.

President Trump agreed last month to arm the YPG with heavy machineguns and anti-tank weapons, and the first shipment was delivered last week.

President Erdogan has warned that Turkey will act against the YPG in Syria should the group “provoke” it. Binali Yildirim, the Turkish prime minister, has taken a milder line, telling reporters that the US had shared information with Ankara.

“We expressed our discomfort. [The US] gave us assurance that there is no possibility that the weapons will be used against our security forces and civilians,” he said.

Analysis
For three and a half years Raqqa has been living in darkness. We have seen little of what life is like there under Islamic State apart from grisly propaganda videos and grainy footage shot secretly by dissidents. However, the coalition of forces advancing on the city knows what horrors it can expect (Hannah Lucinda Smith writes).

Mosul may have overtaken it as the de facto capital of Isis but Raqqa was the place where it bedded in first.

Since January 2014 the jihadists have been the uncontested power in the city, stamping out rivals and operating with an arrogant sense of impunity. Everything that Isis has used elsewhere it is likely to have duplicated to a greater degree in Raqqa.

In other towns that Islamic State has fled it has left behind booby traps for liberating forces to pick through. Those faced with that grim task say there is nothing that Isis will not turn into an IED, even a hollowed-out human corpse.

In Iraq Nato has been training specialist bomb disposal squads but the Kurdish militias leading the advance on Raqqa do not have that kind of expertise.

Isis will almost certainly have dug a network of tunnels underneath the city. In Mosul it managed to use its warren to devastating effect with fighters disappearing and popping up again to cut off and surround advancing forces. Although Raqqa is a far smaller city it could prove just as bloody and tricky to take if an extensive tunnel system has been dug.

Once the fighters and the booby traps are cleared, what will remain is the evidence of Islamic State’s atrocities — mass graves, prisons and documents. There begins the longest and trickiest challenge: unpicking what really happened during Raqqa’s darkest days.