Last of ISIS fighters in Raqqa choose surrender over a 'ticket to paradise'

Times:

At the end there was no final, suicidal shoot-out. A few dozen Islamic State fighters retreated, first to Raqqa’s hospital, then to the stadium. The jihadists, all foreigners, English, Russian and French-speakers among them, dragged their families behind them.

One little boy wore a suicide vest. They were shooting, but the advancing Kurds held their fire because of the women and children. “They looked like professionals,” Bahoz Ocalan, 33, a Kurdish fighter, said. “The way they were fighting and defending their positions, they looked like they were with a professional army.”

The situation was hopeless though, and the will of the militants wilted. Ammunition was low and a surrender was offered. In the end, 28 fighters trooped out of the stadium, Mr Ocalan said.

A new form of war had triumphed in Raqqa, with the victors deploying an overwhelming technical advantage to methodically destroy a city.

This was done in the name of saving lives. The London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights estimates that about 3,000 people died in the four-month battle; civilians, Isis fighters and troops from the western-backed Syrian Democratic Forces. The western-backed coalition says that figure is too high — but given that there is barely a wall left standing in the city it seems remarkably low.

The quantity of munitions dropped is staggering: at one stage missiles were coming in every half hour.

The fighter’s closest friend was not his rifle but his walkie-talkie and his Google map. Delil Gamgeen, 20, a Kurd, showed me how it was done. On his Samsung notepad he brought up a week-old Google image of the spot where we were standing.

Individual houses were marked with dots; yellow for those occupied by the US-trained Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), red for those held by Isis. Whenever his unit came under fire he would phone in the location of the relevant red dot. A very short time later it would be destroyed in a coalition airstrike.

For some, it did not seem a fair fight or even a challenging one. Kimmie Taylor, 28, a British volunteer with the Kurdish women’s forces, described an encounter with the enemy. “There were three of them and ten of us, and we could have taken them,” she said. Her superiors insisted they withdraw. “An airstrike came in. It wasn’t really necessary. I mean, I’m not complaining — this saved a lot of our lives. But look at the place — it’s wrecked. What about the people who live here?”

That is a theoretical question at the moment: not a single civilian was alive in Raqqa yesterday. There were two cats and a dog, a few hundred Kurdish fighters and a few American special forces experts clearing booby traps.
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There is more.

As I have often said, you win wars by persuading the enemy that his cause is hopeless.  That is in fact what happened in Raqqa.  In the end, the enemy knew he could not win and could not escape.   Their choice was surrender or annihilation.  I doubt that Obama's policies would have ever achieved this outcome.  He was more into messaging and onerous rules of engagement.

Obama made many mistakes in teh war being waged by radical Islam against teh US.  One of his most disastrous was his retreat from Iraq which gave ISIS room to expand and launch a genocidal war against all who rejected its weird version of Islam.