The woman’s face was hidden behind a black veil but her voice was full of defiance and pride for the caliphate that she had left just hours before.

“You're the first infidel I've seen in four years,” Umm Hamza said as The Telegraph approached.

She gestured back towards Baghuz, the village in eastern Syria that is now the last fragment of Islamic State territory. “The brothers are lions. They will fight on,” she said. “The Islamic State remains. We are weak now but we will come back again.”

The 21-year-old was one of hundreds of bedraggled women who emerged from Baghuz in recent days. They waited in a huddled mass in a clearing to surrender to the Kurdish fighters of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).

Mothers clutched dirty blankets and tugged suitcases through the mud while trying not to lose track of their exhausted children. A woman lifted her black abaya to defecate in a field. There was shouting as families shoved past each other to get to the trucks that would take them north to the refugee camps.

These are among the final citizens of the Islamic State, the last people to have lived in the jihadists’ failed experiment in empire. The SDF now estimates that around 5,000 civilians and 1,500 fighters remain in Baghuz, more than originally thought but still a fraction of the 8 million people who once lived under the jihadists' black banner.