Their last Syrian bastion is levelled and burned, they are using rifles to battle warplanes and tanks, but the hardline jihadists holding out in Baghouz are still putting up a fight.

International donors on Thursday pledged nearly $7 billion in aid for 2019 for civilians caught up in Syria's bloody civil war but the total fell short of what the U.N. says is needed.

EU Humanitarian Commissioner Christos Stylianides announced the total at the end of a three-day conference of 80 countries and organizations in Brussels, on the eve of the eighth anniversary of the start of the conflict.

Bashar al-Assad has won his war for political survival but as Syria's conflict enters its ninth year, his country is fractured, cash-strapped, and prey to both friend and foe.

US-backed forces said Wednesday the Islamic State group was living its "final moments" after thunderous shelling on its last scrap of land in eastern Syria prompted 3,000 jihadists to surrender.

But the die-hard IS fighters who stayed to defend the remnants of their "caliphate" struck back with a wave of suicide bombings, according to the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).

Violence in northwestern Syria has killed dozens over the past three weeks and displaced tens of thousands, raising concerns a truce reached six months ago between Turkey and Russia is in danger.

The violence in Idlib comes as the world is focused on eastern Syria, where U.S.-backed Kurdish-led fighters are on the verge of defeating the Islamic State group in the last area they control.

Holdout Islamic State group fighters hunkered down in a riverside camp in eastern Syria Friday as US-backed forces pressed to expel them from the last scrap of their dying "caliphate".

Thousands of men and women have poured out of the pocket of territory in the village of Baghouz near the Iraqi border in recent days, their wounded, and dust-covered children, in tow.

Torched tents, a rain of bullets, the thunderous whoosh of warplanes muffling the call to prayer: survivors say life inside the Islamic State group's dying "caliphate" was a bleak catalogue of despair. 

US-backed forces prepared Tuesday to pluck more civilians out of the Islamic State group's last Syrian stronghold, after evacuating almost 3,000 people including hundreds of fighters over the past 48 hours.

Baseh Hammo was 38 when she was enslaved by militants of the Islamic State group. Raped and abused, she was sold 17 times among members of the so-called "caliphate," and moved from city to city across a vast stretch of territory IS once controlled in northern Iraq and Syria.

Her ordeal came to an end in January in the Syrian village of Baghouz, when an IS member took pity on her as the final battle loomed with U.S.-led Syrian Kurdish forces. He put her on a truck with his own family and allowed them to leave the village. She was picked up by Syrian Kurdish forces and reunited with her two daughters in Iraq a few days later.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday was set to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss how to prevent Iran from "entrenching in Syria".