Islamic State faced imminent defeat in its final enclave on Tuesday as hundreds of jihadist fighters and their families surrendered and the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces said the battle was as good as over.

A Reuters journalist in Baghouz saw hundreds of people surrendering to the SDF, which launched its final attack to capture Baghouz on Sunday, backed by U.S.-led international coalition air strikes after weeks of siege.

The enclave is the last shred of territory held by the jihadists who have been driven from roughly one third of Iraq and Syria over the past four years.

The ferocious assault continued late on Tuesday. Live footage broadcast by the Kurdish Ronahi TV showed a series of large explosions lighting up the night sky over Baghouz, apparently from an ammunitions dump blowing up.

Smoke billowed past burning buildings, lit orange by flares and raging fires, as tracer fire poured into the enclave amid the sound of constant shooting and blasts.

SDF official Mustafa Bali said on Twitter on Tuesday that the number of Islamic State members who had surrendered has risen to 3,000.

“Once our forces confirm that everyone who wants to surrender has done so … the clashes will resume,” he said, adding that the jihadists’ defeat was very near.

The coalition said in an email earlier on Tuesday there were an estimated “few hundred” foreign Islamic State fighters remaining in Baghouz who had decided to fight to the end.

The Baghouz enclave had been pounded on Monday with barrages of rockets, but the situation calmed on Tuesday morning before the intense bombardment resumed.

“The operation is over, or as good as over, but requires a little more time to be completed practically on the ground,” SDF spokesman Kino Gabriel told al-Hadath TV.

The SDF has laid siege to Baghouz for weeks but has repeatedly postponed its final assault to allow thousands of civilians, many of them wives and children of Islamic State fighters, to leave. It resumed the attack on Sunday.

Gabriel said 25 Islamic State fighters had been confirmed killed so far in clashes, in addition to an unknown number of militants killed by air strikes. Another SDF official said earlier 38 jihadists had been confirmed killed.

The SDF, which is spearheaded by the Kurdish YPG militia, has been advancing slowly into Baghouz to minimise its losses from sniper fire and landmines.

Three SDF fighters have been killed, Bali said on Twitter.

TUNNELS

Islamic State’s defences include extensive tunnels. The militant group’s most hardened foreign fighters are holed up inside the enclave, the SDF has said.

However the United States does not believe any senior Islamic State leaders are in Baghouz, assessing they have gone elsewhere as part of the group’s shift towards guerrilla tactics, a U.S. defence official has said.

Fighters surrendering from Baghouz are questioned and searched.

While Baghouz is the last populated territory of what was once the group’s self-proclaimed “caliphate”, fighters still operate in remote areas elsewhere. It is widely assessed that they will continue to represent a potent security threat.

Even as the last shred of its physical statelet crumbled, the group put out a new propaganda video, filmed in recent weeks inside Baghouz, insisting on its claim to leadership of all Muslims and calling on its supporters to keep the faith.

“Tomorrow, God willing, we will be in paradise and they will be burning in hell,” it showed an Islamic State member identified as Abu Abd al-Azeem saying.

Most of the people evacuated from the diminishing Islamic State territory have been transported to a camp for internally displaced people in al-Hol, in northeastern Syria, where the United Nations says conditions are dire.

The camp, designed to accommodate 20,000 people, is now sheltering more than 66,000. The World Health Organization said on Tuesday 106 people, mainly infants, have died since December on the journey to al-Hol, which takes at least six hours.

Many evacuees, particularly foreigners, still express obdurate support for Islamic State, posing difficult security, legal and moral questions for their countries of origin.

Those issues were underscored on Friday with the death of the newborn son of Shamima Begum, a British woman who left London to join Islamic State when she was a schoolgirl. Britain stripped her of her citizenship on security grounds last month.

An Islamic State fighter detained in Syria urged Italy on Saturday to let him come home to start a new life, saying he had abandoned the self-styled jihadist “caliphate” after growing disillusioned with its rulers.

Mounsef al-Mkhayar, a 22-year-old of Moroccan descent who grew up in Italy, spoke to Reuters in his first interview since surrendering to the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) two months ago.

He has been in prison since emerging from Baghouz, a tiny village in eastern Syria where the SDF is poised to wipe out the last vestige of Islamic State rule – which once spanned a third of Iraq and Syria.

Mkhayar gave an account of growing chaos among jihadists on the brink of defeat, and of disputes in the ranks as top commanders fled Syria.

But he said Islamic State was also planning for the next phase, smuggling out hundreds of men to set up sleeper cells across Iraq and eastern Syria: “They said ‘We must get revenge.'”

Mkhayar is one of thousands from all over the world who were drawn to the promise of an ultra-radical Sunni Islamist utopia overriding national borders. Kurdish security officials identified him as Italian, and he said he holds Italian citizenship.

“I wish to return to Italy to my family and friends … for them to accept and help me to live a new life,” said Mkhayar, who walks on crutches after shelling injured his leg. “I just want to get out of this movie, I’m tired.”

FROM MILAN TO MAYADIN

Mkhayar was sentenced to eight years in jail by a Milan court in 2017 for spreading Islamic State propaganda and trying to recruit Italians to its cause, according to Italian media. As a result, he is likely to have to serve this sentence if he does return to Italy.

Reuters interviewed him at a security office in northern Syria in the presence of an SDF official.

As it nears victory, the SDF has struggled with the dilemma of holding fighters who travelled from abroad to join Islamic State along with women and children.

Before the final assault on Baghouz, the Kurdish-led SDF said it had around 800 foreign militants in jails and 2,000 of their wives and children in camps. Since then, the numbers have ballooned.

The SDF wants them sent back where they came from. But foreign governments generally do not want to receive citizens who may be hard to prosecute, and who pledged allegiance to a caliphate that left behind of a trail of butchery.

Once an atheist with an affinity for rap music and a dream of moving to America, Mkhayar joined Islamic State at 18.

He said he had spent most of his life in Milan with an aunt he calls his mother, before being placed in a home for troubled youths overseen by an Italian priest. He spent a month in prison on drugs charges.

Then he began immersing himself in Islamic State videos on YouTube and speaking to recruiters on Facebook. It took him only a month to decide to move to Syria with a friend four years ago.

His friend was later killed on the battlefield. After military and religious training, Mkhayar fought on various fronts. As Islamic State lost its Syrian headquarters at Raqqa, he left for Mayadin on the Euphrates river in Syria, then moved further east across the desert, towards the Iraqi border.

“WE’RE GETTING OUT”

Amid a string of military defeats in eastern Syria, Islamic State leaders were in disarray, killing off rival clerics and commanders known as emirs, Mkhayar said.

He said he had tried to quit the fighting but had been imprisoned, and then dispatched back to the frontlines as attacks intensified.

He wound up in Baghouz, where he said the jihadists were split between wanting to give up or fight to the death.

Mkhayar said his wife, a Syrian Kurdish woman from Kobani whom he had married three years ago, helped convince him to leave.

“‘That’s it,’ we said, ‘we’re getting out.’ I saw my little daughter turning weak. I was scared my children would die.”

Mkhayar said he could not sleep thinking about his wife and two daughters in a camp for displaced people in another part of northeast Syria. His wife is due to give birth in a month.

He said he still believed in the idea of a caliphate for Muslims, but accused Islamic State rulers of governing their land like “a mafia”, seeking only to make money and violating their own rules with impunity.

Commanders had stolen money and fled to Turkey, Iraq or Western Europe while ordering people to stay and defend Islam, he said.

“This is my belief and I won’t change it, but here in Islamic State, in reality this doesn’t exist … There is no justice,” he said.

“Honestly, I came here too fast … When I arrived, I found another story.”