US-Backed Kurds Say 500 ISIS Surrender in East Syria

Following Monday’s report from the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) that 200 ISIS had surrendered and 3,000 civilians fled the fraction of the tiny village of Baghouz that ISIS still holds, the SDF is now reporting an even bigger exodus on Tuesday.

On Tuesday, the SDF spokesman claimed 500 more ISIS surrendered, and that at least 3,500 more civilians were evacuated from an ISIS-held neighborhood that the SDF has previously estimated to contain no more than 1,000 people, and be no more than 700 square meters of mostly farmland.

To be clear, that’s over 7,000 people putatively removed from a 700 square meter area, with large numbers more still remaining. In two days alone, this is rapidly approaching the number of humans that could physically fit in that amount of territory, with no room left to move around, hide, or engage in insurgency.

While such large numbers of surrendering people allow the SDF to claim massive progress in sieging a territory that amounts to less than a tenth of the size of a soccer field, the sheer numbers at this point now suggest it’s less a village than a game of human Tetris played in a farm field adjacent to a desert, with a goal of credibly claiming that many people somehow packed in there to make the surrender sound all the grander.