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Article snippet: RAQQA, Syria — Every few minutes, a deafening boom. Then a whistle of artillery. Occasionally, the clatter of a pickup truck, piled with soldiers, advancing to the front line. This was the neighborhood, on the western edge of Raqqa, the Islamic State’s de facto capital, where I met Hassan Hashem Ramadan on a scorching Thursday in late August. He had been detained and flogged three times while the Islamic State ruled his city: Either his beard was too short or his pants weren’t short enough. When he tried to escape across the Euphrates River, he was marched at gunpoint into the city center. Finally, on a Tuesday morning in August, his brother was hit by shrapnel from forces fighting the Islamic State. Mr. Ramadan carried him in his arms, first to the hospital, then to the grave. Then he fled. “Last few days,” he said, “I was just taking the wounded to the hospital or burying the dead. That’s all I was doing.” He was one of dozens of people who described to me life in the waning days of the capital of the caliphate, the symbolic heart of the territory the Islamic State sought to turn into its brutal version of God’s rule on earth. American military forces and their allies have all but encircled the city, reclaiming, they say, more than half of it. The Islamic State, also known as ISIS, is retreating, but not without a tenacious fight, trapping civilians in their last few enclaves. Fewer than 25,000 civilians remain in what had been a city of 300,000. Those who fled... Link to the full article to read more