Jihadi brides fleeing the last remnants of the ISIS 'caliphate' say they have left behind a 'catastrophic' hell, as the evacuation of civilians will be halted today ahead of a final battle.

One woman described how the town of Baghouz in eastern Syria was subjected to constant bombings and fires, saying: 'you would wake up and everything was destroyed.'

More than 7,000 - mostly women and children, as well as some suspected ISIS fighters - have been packed out of the town in the last two days.

The US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) say they will resume their ferocious siege on the last few hundred jihadists today after helping people to surrender.

A woman evacuated from Baghouz pulls a bag with a youngster on board as her other children trail behind on Wednesday

Children believed to be Yazidis - who were trafficked around Islamic State as slaves - are pictured after their evacuation

An SDF fighter is seen letting off rounds from the back of a pick-up truck at IS targets inside Baghouz

A map of the last remaining ISIS territory in Syria in the eastern province of Deir Ezzor, where US-backed coalition forces have held a brutal siege

'The last days were horrible,' said Sana, a 47-year-old Finnish woman among the thousands who fled the bastion on Tuesday.

'Bombing, shooting, burning all the tents... you would wake up and everything was destroyed.'

The operation to smash the last remnant of the 'caliphate' that IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi proclaimed in 2014 resumed Friday after a long humanitarian pause.

Veiled from head to toe, Sana mixed milk powder with water to feed her children.

The mother of four said she came to Syria with her Moroccan husband four years ago for the sake of Islam.

'In the beginning yes, everything was normal,' she said, beneath a face veil.

'Without bombings, everything was nice, we were happy.'

She lost her husband to a car accident and has followed jihadists across Syria's east and northeast, not settling in one place for longer than 16 months.

A veiled woman drags her baggage through the dirt as she arrives to be screened by SDF men

A small boy holding a bag walks in the holding area a safe distance away from the embattled town of Baghouz

A queue of veiled ISIS brides are loaded onto the back of trucks for transportation to holding camps

An SDF fighter in a balaclava stands guard as sand whips across the desert landscape outside Baghouz

She said she wished she could reverse her decision to join IS.

'But I can't change history, I can't change my past, that is my destiny now.'

Rudimentary tents and a small cluster of battered buildings, nestled in a palm-lined bend of the Euphrates, are all that remains of the IS proto-state.

Its last survivors seek shelter in underground tunnels and inside tents and cars to hide from the shelling.

'We dig tunnels underground, and we cover them with blankets, that's the tents,' said Abu Maryam, a 28-year-old Syrian man from the coastal province of Tartus.

Jihadists allowed women, children and the wounded to quit the bombed-out bastion in recent weeks, but it has prevented men of fighting age from fleeing, according to survivors.

But jihadists are now allowing men to leave as death and destruction take hold.

Abdul Jasem said conditions inside the jihadist encampment were 'catastrophic'.

A frail woman is hauled onto the back of a lorry by an SDF soldier to be evacuated from the last scrap of IS territory

A woman carries food supplies after she was liberated from the ISIS stronghold on Wednesday

A female SDF fighter with an AK-47 slung over her shoulder surveys a crowd of ISIS brides

Men - many suspected former IS fighters - kneel on the dirt as they pray while waiting to be screened

But the Iraqi woman waited until jihadists released her 20-year-old son before escaping, with him and her two daughters.

'Men under 40 who wanted to go out were imprisoned in a guarded tent,' she said. 'But only two days ago they let them go'.

Jihadists themselves are among those who have left.

Some 400 IS fighters were captured on Tuesday night as they attempted to slip out of Baghouz.

The SDF said the escape was organised by a network that had planned to smuggle them to remote hideouts.

A militia commander said the evacuation of people wishing to leave Islamic State's last enclave in eastern Syria will be completed on Thursday.

The SDF has said it wants to ensure all civilians have been evacuated from the besieged enclave of Baghouz before launching a final assault.

Baghouz is the last shred of populated territory held by the Islamic State, which once controlled almost a third of both Iraq and Syria.

An injured woman sits in a wheelchair with her four children close by after they fled the 'catastrophic' town

Civilians crowd the desert as they wait to be loaded onto the back of trucks for transportation to holding camps

An injured man suspected of being a member of the Islamic State lies at a screening area

Children believed to be from the Yazidi community, who were captured by Islamic State, are examined by SDF personnel

'The evacuation operations will continue today too and we hope they will be completed today,' SDF commander Adnan Afrin said.

Islamic State suffered its major military defeats in 2017 when it was driven from the Iraqi city of Mosul and its Syrian headquarters at Raqqa by local forces supported by a U.S.-led international coalition.

Even with its defeat at Baghouz looming large, the group is still widely assessed to represent a security threat with a foothold in patches of remote territory and the capacity to mount guerrilla attacks.