Caliphate’s end game: trapped in this tiny Syrian village, Islamic State militants are making their final stand

More than 300 Islamic State militants surrounded in a tiny area in eastern Syria are refusing to surrender to US-backed forces and are trying to negotiate an exit, Syrian activists and a person close to the negotiations said on Monday.

The extremists are bottled up in the village of Baghouz, where they are hiding among hundreds of civilians and preventing them from leaving. The stalling tactics are likely to further delay a declaration of the end of the IS group’s self-proclaimed caliphate, which the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces were hoping to make last week.

A person familiar with the negotiations said the militants are asking for a corridor to the rebel-held northwestern province of Idlib, and demand that they be allowed to leave along with the evacuated civilians. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to speak about the talks, which he described as taking place indirectly.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an activist group that monitors the civil war in Syria, said another request by IS to be evacuated to neighbouring Iraq was also rejected. IS released 10 SDF fighters it had been holding on Sunday, but it was not clear what, if anything, the extremists would get in return, the Observatory said.

The speck of land in Syria’s remote eastern desert, near the border with Iraq, is all that remains of a self-styled caliphate that once sprawled across a third of both countries and included several major towns and cities.