Thread by @RojavaIC

[ON THE GROUND]

Two days ago we yet again witnessed huge numbers of people streaming out of #Baghouz, this time during the night.

The press pack were greeted by an eerie ambience on their arrival as hundreds of silhouettes moved across the desert and into custody of the #SDF.

These ghostlike figures, shadows of their former selves, made an apt metaphor for the failed state they had just left; exhausted and defeated but not without defiance, promising to renew the 'dawla' as soon as they can.

Yesterday evening another group crossed no-mans-land and spent the night in the desert, still waiting there when we arrived this morning. A significant number were foreign; we personally met women from Canada, Russia, Germany, and France with their young children.

We were forbidden from interviewing the French, possibly on the order of French forces here after Macron's declaration yesterday about the need for European states to take back their citizens.

Huge numbers of #YPG and #YPJ fighters were again present, processing people, and distributing food and aid. One military ambulance was providing vitamin injections to the kids.

Again most of them were seriously malnourished. One YPJ fighter told us that she has witnessed 11 dying in just the last few days, many of them arriving too late to be saved by the medical staff present.

One European woman amongst the arrivals told us that only very few women and children are left in #Baghuz, that they are mostly foreign and they are "afraid of leaving".

12 more trucks arrived in the afternoon, not fully loaded, mostly women and children with a group of 20 wounded men. One had a recent gunshot wound in his leg. We are hearing that the atmosphere inside the ISIS hold-out is panic with more that 5 thousand people remaining.