Militant says ‘tomorrow we will be in paradise’ in footage from final stronghold in Syria

Islamic State fighters have released a video purporting to have been filmed in the Syrian town of Baghuz, saying “tomorrow we will be in paradise” and urging their followers to remain steadfast as Kurdish forces edge towards the pocket of ruins that shelters the remaining Isis diehards.

The video is one of few released by the militant group in recent months and attempts to depict the holdouts as composed and resilient in the face of a five-year war that is now in its final days.

Footage of a small group of fighters gathered around a pot of food is in stark contrast to the slickly produced videos that marked Isis’s earlier years, in which it regularly rallied followers to join a utopia styled on seventh-century Islamic precepts.

In the two-minute film, apparently put together during one of many lulls in fighting as Kurdish forces have closed in, a militant who identified himself as Abu Abid al-Azeem claimed the group had been persecuted since it overran eastern Syria and western Iraq five years ago.

“What is our guilt? What is our crime?” he said. “Why are we bombed by planes, why do all the nations of the unbelieving world come together to fight us? Why are we besieged, why are we bombarded day and night, and the world is silent, instead gathering together to fight and make war on us? We wanted to apply sharia law.

“Tomorrow, God willing, we will be in paradise and they will be burning in hell.”

The footage revealed that at least part of Baghuz remains inhabitable, as the war to conquer it enters a fourth week. Men and women moved freely around what appeared to be a main street. It is unclear exactly when and where it was filmed, however.

Upwards of 30,000 people have fled the town in recent months, a number that has staggered Kurdish forces and overwhelmed camps set up to receive the war’s latest refugees, many of them family members of the group’s core followers.

Kurdish military leaders say as many as 2,000 people fled Baghuz on Tuesday, an exodus they claim brought them closer to an inevitable but much delayed victory in far eastern Syria.

As every city and town once held by Isis has fallen to the Kurds, its leaders have tried to recast their narrative from that of a group that could seize and hold land to one defending Islam from a constant war against it.

Explaining away the loss of the so-called caliphate has been a difficult sell to many of the group’s followers, who were drawn to it during the heady years of 2014 and 2015 before an international military campaign laid to ruin most of its goals.

A return to insurgency, which predated the years when Isis became an occupying power, has been widely predicted by regional security chiefs, and the senior members of the group who have melted back into communities in Iraq and Syria.