The ferocious battle for the Islamic State group’s last bastion in eastern Syria entered its fifth day on Wednesday, as exhausted families left the ever-shrinking scrap of land where holdout jihadists have been boxed in by Kurdish-led forces. Hundreds fled day and night from Baghouz, near the enclave where diehard IS fighters are making their last stand, as plumes of grey smoke billowed into the sky over the flat, desolate town. The extremist group declared a cross-border “caliphate” in Syria and Iraq in 2014, but various military campaigns have chipped its territory down to less than four square kilometres (one square mile) on the Iraqi border.
