Who wouldn't get out of Raqqa if they could?
They've left behind homes with no water and power, schools and hospitals in ruins.
For three long years they endured the vicious rule by Islamic State - Daesh as they call
it.
Now the slow, painful daily battle to defeat the jihadis has forced them to leave.
From yesterday evening until now, Daesh are firing mortars at us.// We've gone back and
forth from my neighbourhood many times.
Every time we get back home Daesh shoots at us again.
I lost one of my sons - he was only 12.
They're going to look for work elsewhere, wondering if anything will be left of their
homes when they return.
We drove the other way towards Raqqa, passing western special forces... engaged on the ground
more than they like to say...
into the city outskirts, the uneasy hinterland of war... held by largely Kurdish forces.
The fighters have American vehicles...
but they're only lightly armed...
In this battlefield American airstrikes make the decisive difference.
More than 3000 since June, the pace increasing, 400 already this month.
We went in further...
past the debris of people's homes and lives.
The fighters are closing in from the east and the west but the Islamic State militants
are still in the centre of Raqqa.
Around here it's ruins, but there are civilians - no one seems to know how many.
The Islamic State militants are using them as human shields and they can easily fall
victim to coalition airstrikes.
The fighters took us to a vantage point...it's taken them three months to get this far.
They advance building by building, foot patrols following airstrikes, squeezing their enemy
into an ever smaller space.
Now our comrades are around the national hospital - the frontline is about 4 or 500 metres away.
There are major clashes now.
Fighters hurtle towards the frontline... the Syrian Democratic Forces were formed just
to fight the Islamic State.
They're focussed on the mission.
The forward operating base is crude to say the least....
It smells of rotten food... the men sleep where they fight.
This is guerrilla style warfare, the primitive counterpart to the high tech drones and state-of-the-art
missiles deployed by the Americans.
They haven't yet made safe all the booby traps the IS militants left behind in the building...
danger is always inches away.
Comrades arrive from a position even further forward.
They need food, water, cigarettes...
some days they push the militants back, some days not.
Anyway, today they're still alive.
A fighting patrol...
The men know they may not all make it back.
They have to dash across the alleyway... all of them.
The IS sniper missed his target... but the next man to cross may not be so lucky.
So one fighter lights the fuse and throws an improvised grenade....
Smoke provides cover.
One tiny fragment of the long battle in the capital of the caliphate... fighting alleyway
by alleyway until the desperate cruelty of the Islamic State is obscured by time and
Raqqa can rise again from the rubble.
But where are the people?
Some who've managed to escape are on the outer edges, lives like the city in ruins.
Ibrahim Salah is grateful to the fighters...
time won't restore the eye he lost when an Islamic State bomb factory blew up by accident,
nor erase the memory of their capricious rules.
My niece came to the door wearing red, so they arrested my brother-in-law.
He had to pay a fine of 15,000 Syrian pounds.
($30).
They insulted and beat him and then forced him to work a week at the municipality for
nothing.
No pay at all, and he's an old man.
But at least one man we met, fleeing with his families, said they lived perfectly happily
under IS, seeing little problem with the restrictions...
It's the fighting that's forcing them to leave their homes.
We left because of the airstrikes.
The bombing is indiscriminate.
It's destroying everything.
They killed one of my wives.
Entire families have been killed.
Some are just victims of the whole disastrous mess: Fighting, airstrikes, Daesh.
They took my house from me so I moved to a tent.
Then I fled here when the airstrikes started.
I just need a place to stay.
First, Daesh took over my home.
Then it was destroyed by an airstrike.
So they leave Raqqa to the fighters and the remnants of the Islamic State.
And when that battle's over, there'll be another for who will rule the rubble of the homes
they've left behind.