Emotional footage of women burning their burqas and men shaving off the beards ISIS forced them to grow has emerged as Syrians celebrated being liberated from Raqqa.
Distraught civilians who were freed from the terrorists’ reign of terror in the city in the north of the country could not wait to destroy any association with Islamic State.
Women were captured peeling off the black burqas militants forced them to wear and setting them on fire before cursing the terror group.
While the women were given strict dress codes, men were forced to grow beards which they shaved off as soon as they tasted freedom.
The families in the video were freed from ISIS by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), led by the People’s Protection Units (YPG).
In a video released by the YPG, a crying mother tells the camera ISIS killed her father and her husband when they were stood outside the family home.
Another says her father was burned to death by terrorists and one woman, peeling off her burqa, says: ‘Burn them. May Allah burn ISIS. They burned my father.
‘May these clothes they forced us to wear be damned.
‘May Allah but fire on their hearts.’
A Raqqa resident, standing with her son, tells the camera her son was killed by ISIS because he refused to pray and a man says he lost his daughter.
One man in the video is then tended to by a barber, who cuts off his beard with a pair of scissors.
The man being groomed says: ‘Cut it all off. Cut it all off just to spite them.’
The operation to liberate Raqqa hit a bit of a roadblock today.
While residents continued to flood out of the city to freedom, advances against the Islamic State group in its stronghold of Raqqa slowed down amid stiff resistance from the militants, the spokesman for the US-led coalition fighting the group said.
US Army Colonel Ryan Dillon estimates there are around 2,000 IS militants in the northern city, saying they are using civilians and children as human shields.
In one of the largest camps housing those who fled the northern Syrian city, survivors of the group’s terror machine explained how they cannot shake off the horrors they witnessed in the group’s self-declared capital.
Now in safety at the camp in Ain Issa, a town about 50 kilometers (31 miles) north of Raqqa, they described public killings, hangings, people thrown off roofs and other punishments for the slightest offences.
One girl around 12 years old described how women accused of stealing had their hands immersed in boiling oil.
A 10-year old girl said fighters scolded her for wearing a red T-shirt.
‘We were living under unimaginable psychological pressure, God only knows,’ said 39-year-old Fatima Mohammed.
‘There was a state of terror inside every home.’
Mohammed said one scene set the tone for her for the three years under ISIS rule – a 14-year old who had been accused of theft begging for his life as a militant raised a sharp knife over his head in a public square.
‘He kept saying I am innocent,’ she said.
The boy tried to fend off the knife with his hands, she said, then the fighter finally shot him twice in the head.
Halima al-Hamouda, a 32-year-old mother of four from Raqqa city, said her then-12-year-old daughter was harassed by an ISIS nurse who asked her to marry a fighter of the group.
Her son, now 12, was taken to the police station for wearing jeans and he and his father reprimanded.
She herself was flogged for showing her hands, breaking strict Sharia law rules that she cover from head to toe in dark colors.
‘It was a man that carried out the 20 lashes,’ she recalled.
But it was the story of her neighbors that broke her heart.
She said a boy was thrown off the roof after another neighbor reported him as being gay to the ISIS’ morality police.
The boy’s father is now working to save money to return to Raqqa to get his vengeance against the neighbor, she said.
‘He was a beautiful and wise 13 year-old boy,’ she said.