One day that autumn of 2014, Sharmeena tweeted at @UmmLayth and asked if they could direct message.
* * *
—
THE OTHER THREE GIRLS WATCHED as Sharmeena took these first, searching steps into trying to understand why the world, for Muslims, was steeped in so much blood and loss. She told her friends everything and they followed her, loyally, curiously, tentatively.
After Sharmeena, Amira Abase was the most confident. “Bubbly. Sweet,” recalled a friend. “I don’t think there was one person who didn’t like her. Everyone liked her.” She was the only non-Asian girl of the group. Her parents were Ethiopian Muslims who came to Britain when Amira was a small girl. Her father’s path was particularly jagged: he left Ethiopia when he was sixteen, smuggled out after protesting the government’s war against neighboring Eritrea; he spent six years in a German refugee camp before making his way to London.
Amira was edgy, funny, with a face rather imposingly beautiful for her age, bow eyebrows over sloping cheekbones, and nostrils that flared when she grinned. She was kind too; kinder than a popular, pretty girl needed to be. London was expensive and her father struggled to find work. But money wasn’t everything, and he made clear it was a blessing to live in a country that took liberty seriously and welcomed expressions of dissent. Ethiopia, where he had grown up, was highly repressive, especially if you were Muslim; it was the kind of country where the government bought spyware from China, listened to people’s phone calls, and detained them for weeks, calling their religious ringtones “illegal.” In the evenings, her father sat bent over the table, writing letters to protest the treatment of Ethiopian Muslims. Some accounts hinted that the Abases’ home life was troubled; that Amira’s parents didn’t get along and that Hussen, her father, was physically harsh with his children. But others who knew him well said he was a sensitive man, devoted to his family, if cynical about the realities of global politics.
What is clear is that he was open about his views and didn’t think his daughter was too young to learn to protest and demonstrate. The conditions in Ethiopia for Muslims were and remain so dire that many fled to Saudi Arabia to work as migrants, encountering circumstances that were much like modern slavery: long working hours with no time off, beatings, passport confiscations, and other abuse. In 2013, Saudi authorities expelled more than 160,000 Ethiopian migrants, setting upon them with machetes and sticks. They dispatched the migrants back to Ethiopia, where many were tortured in detention, kept in underground holes for months. Amira’s father took her to a rally outside the Saudi embassy in London to protest the expulsions; people chanted, “Stop violence against Ethiopians in Saudi Arabia!” and “We want justice!”
When protests erupted in 2012 over an American film mocking the Prophet Muhammad, Amira’s father followed a crowd from the mosque in East London to the U.S. embassy. It was a Friday when Muslims across the world turned out to protest what they felt was a deliberate, racially motivated insulting of Islam, originating in a country, the United States, that appeared intent, in the guise of its war on extremism, to kill so many civilians it had given up even counting them. Like so many second-generation Muslim kids, Amira grew up in a home where global politics were intimately lodged in daily life. She had inherited her father’s sense of justice. Growing up in Britain taught her she had the right to speak up. At school, she was a strong debater, making the case for why Muslim women had the right to wear veils, or how rape should be prosecuted.
Not everyone in their group grew up with such exposure to politics. Kadiza Sultana, a girl with a shy smile and dark glasses, lived with her older sister and ailing mother in a household that was less preoccupied with politics. Her sister, who was living back at home after an arranged marriage at seventeen, was the authority at home. Sometimes the sisters clashed, but at school, where Kadiza excelled, she was well liked and admired. She was friendly to girls in younger years, and sometimes helped them with schoolwork. The school told her mother that Kadiza was one of the most promising students of her year; a teacher gave her a novel as a gift, praising her accomplishments in English. She watched The Princess Diaries and went to Zumba.
The fourth friend, a girl called Shamima Begum, was by all accounts the most quiet, a fan of the Kardashians. Her sister later told a journalist that Shamima was unadventurous and skittish, the type who “doesn’t like to go by herself to buy a pint of milk.” She was a typical teenage homebody who liked reading and watching television. “She was a brilliant student,” her sister said. As in most families, she measured Shamima’s well-being by how she was faring at school: “You don’t question a child who’s done her homework and has got straight As.” Shamima’s mother had asked her to start wearing a headscarf in Year 10, when she was around fourteen; Shamima hadn’t minded because her friends were all covering their hair, and she didn’t like feeling that she stood out.
By autumn, all four girls were dressing differently, favoring long skirts over trousers and looser tops. Kadiza, who had never worn the hijab and loved playing around with hairstyles, started wearing a headscarf. Like Sharmeena before them, the girls all began hassling family members for watching television that was haram, but in traditional Muslim families this was easy to mark as a dynamic of teenage power struggle. Like Sharmeena, Kadiza grew preoccupied with the Syrian war, and asked her older brother what he thought about it.
Sharmeena’s father remarried that same autumn of 2014. “He seemed completely in his own world,” said someone who knew the family. Everyone whispered that the rushed second marriage was unseemly; couldn’t he have at least waited a year after his wife’s death? But Sharmeena ironed a smile onto her face and invited Kadiza to be with her at the ceremony. She felt small, sad, and alone, forced to contend with a stepmother who spoke halting English, who was young herself and territorial about her new husband.
Sharmeena had her own bedroom at their flat, on a high floor in a Shoreditch council tower block. The apartment was one of those London council flats that made you know your place in the city, and showed you everyone else’s: soiled stairwells, poorly lit entryways with signs that warned, in Bengali, “Don’t Spit,” but with expansive views, London spread out below in all directions, the gleaming skyscrapers of Canary Wharf and the City. In their apartment, there was a textile with a Quranic verse hanging on one wall. Her father’s new wife had added some feminine touches, a few candles and a decorative pot of honey. The girls gathered often there, but they went straight into Sharmeena’s room. She would occasionally emerge and fetch snacks from the kitchen, but her father rarely spoke with the girls.
He was a traditional, aloof Bengali father. He wasn’t that old himself, not even forty, and was working hard to meet the needs of a new young wife. He didn’t watch the news or follow the Syrian civil war. He didn’t know that a transnational armed group called ISIS even existed, let alone operated fluidly across Instagram, Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook, spooling its indoctrinating half-truths and seductive promises right into his living room, spinning a web around his grieving daughter. He didn’t know there was a millennial honey-tongued blogger out in Syria, Umm Layth, prepping young women for the caliphate as though it were boarding school: “Regardless of how annoying and emotionally draining your parents can get—you have to keep ties of kinship and keep in touch with them….tags: enjoy Raqqah teamManbij bring me my perfume he hehe.”
On that December night in the Westfield mall, where Sharmeena was doing her shopping on the eve of departure, the girls finished quickly. Sharmeena’s aim was to be done by 6 p.m. and back to her grandmother’s an hour later, so she would have time to finish packing before dinner. She wasn’t going to return to her father’s place that night; his new wife was very young and very alert. It was not worth the risk of her noticing something.
Everything was in place to leave. Sharmeena had asked her grandmother for money, from the funds the family had been given around her mother’s death. It wa
s enough to cover the tickets. The rest of the girls, if they decided they were brave enough to follow their friend to Syria, would have to figure something out.
ASMA
2012–2013, Raqqa, Syria
The war formally entered Asma’s life when al-Hasakah University, where both she and her boyfriend had been studying, suspended classes. The boy’s well-off parents dispatched their son to Jordan to finish university. The day that Asma said goodbye to him, in 2013, was the last time she saw him. Asma’s family had decided to stay. They didn’t stay to fight or support the Assad government per se, or to do anything per se. They were among the many Syrians who were simply weary. Fleeing to Turkey or Europe was full of risks and unknowns: drowning, poverty, squalid refugee camps. They were trying to decide what outcome might damage them the least.
Every war has its stayers and leavers, and sometimes the staggering volume of the latter—the exodus from Syria formed one of the greatest mass movements of people in contemporary history—makes us think that everyone could have chosen that path. That somehow the only moral Syrian story, or the chief story of Syrian suffering, is that of those who left. But there were hundreds of thousands of families who were already barely surviving, or who were making it within the strictest of margins, who felt they had little choice but to stay. Taken together there would be 6.2 million Syrians displaced within their own country—the largest displaced population anywhere in the world.
By late 2012, what had started as a peaceful revolt against the Assad government had turned into a violent armed confrontation. The way it happened was simple: in the earliest days after the uprising, after the Syrian military finished terrorizing a town, storming houses in the middle of the night and assaulting men before their families, they left stockpiles of weapons behind. To “militarize” a conflict is to humiliate and stoke the rage of protesters with disproportionate brutality, to detain and torture innocent bystanders or peaceful activists, and then handily provide them the means for a violent response. There is no agreed timeline around precisely when this happened, but over the course of 2012 and 2013, the Syrian uprising transformed and splintered into a civil war, and then a proxy war.
Countries like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey, seeing an opening to extend their competition and project their influence in this chaotic sphere, began funding and supporting more militant Islamist factions. It created a strange incentive among the opposition: long beards and religious optics secured more funding. Iran, the Syrian regime’s only regional ally, began dispatching military advisers to bolster Assad. (Syria had been the only country to support Iran during its eight-year-long war with Iraq, a conflict that ended in 1988, in which Saddam Hussein liberally used chemical weapons and Iran lost a million young men.) These intrusions transformed the Syrian revolution into a proxy war, where regional powers fought for influence.
As though this proxy overlay were not complex enough, a further dimension developed. The U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003 had broken the country. When Saddam Hussein’s regime toppled, the new orders that arose in its place, first the U.S. occupation authority and then an Iraqi government dominated by Shias, essentially cast Sunnis out of public life; this marginalization provided a social opening for Sunni militants, many of them Saddam-era Baathist loyalists, to exploit ordinary Iraqi Sunni grievances and harness them to their fight against both U.S. occupiers and the new Shia-led government writ large. The radical, violent groups that emerged from post-invasion Iraq were distilled, by 2013, to the predecessor of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, what we know today as ISIS. Its aim was territorial: to secede from Iraq and occupy as much land as it could, pushing up through the collapsed border with Syria, to form what it envisioned as an Islamic state.
The Syrian uprising transformed into an even more intricate contemporary approximation of Afghanistan in the 1980s: a theater for the enactment of conflict between the West and Russia; regional proxy battles between Iran and the Gulf Arab states; a leadership competition among the Sunni countries of the region; intra-jihadist battles over competing views of tactics and the ultimate enemy; battles between Shia militias and Sunni jihadists. It was made even more intricate by the weaponization of information and social media on all sides, such that even basic questions—Was a group like the White Helmets really composed of brave medical first-responders, or were they actually al-Qaeda in ambulances? Did Assad use chemical weapons against his own people, or were these attacks false-flag operations?—ended up unnecessarily but wildly contested.
Throughout much of early 2013, the CIA-backed Free Syrian Army and the al-Nusra Front, composed of Syrian Islamists with al-Qaeda leanings, controlled Raqqa. By summer, Raqqa was alight with bombings and clashes, and al-Nusra rebels who saw ISIS gaining strength switched sides. Up went the black flags. The militants, some so young they barely had facial hair, stormed churches and took over municipal buildings.
During the early stretch of the Syrian civil war, Raqqa had been relatively safe compared to smaller cities and towns across the country. But now Syrians who had fled to Raqqa from other cities began streaming out. Well-off Raqqans cleared out their valuables, withdrew what savings they could, and joined the flow of Syrians into neighboring Lebanon, and, if they could afford it, Europe. Those who couldn’t, who didn’t have the contacts, the cash, or the conviction that one’s country could be left behind, decamped to relatives’ houses in nearby suburbs or surrounding towns, planning to wait out the worst of the fighting.
By the time the temperatures dropped to freezing in the winter of 2013, ISIS had wrested total control of the city from other rebels. Raqqa was now its bureaucratic command center. Like the Baathist regimes of Saddam Hussein and Hafez al-Assad, under whom many of the fighters had come of age, ISIS began systematically breaking down the local social order. As the group’s leadership moved in, it consolidated its hold brutally. Those community leaders who resisted, or whose family and friends had the wrong connections, faced arbitrary detention, torture, execution.
It had been possible to be apolitical in Raqqa under Assad, because politics was essentially forbidden, as risky as quicksand. But under ISIS, from the earliest days, it became clear to Asma’s father and his relatives that every spot in the new hierarchy, and any chance to survive, was utterly dependent on the group’s whim. It also became clear to Asma that their status in Raqqa—as middle-class citizens in a prosperous Syrian town—had fallen precipitously. Now when she went to the market, she heard chattering around her in Arabic or even French and German. Foreign fighters, known as muhajireen, or migrants, began streaming into town—answering the call to fight Assad, to build a state in God’s name, to find some dignity and purpose in the plains of Syria that had been absent in their lives in Europe or Tunisia or Morocco or Jordan. These foreigners became the leading lights of the transformed city.
At the beginning, the militants brought security, by then a relative novelty. For a short period of time in Raqqa, some residents said, there was little robbery or theft, no more shootouts in the street. Asma could walk to the market or visit friends without fearing for her safety. It was in the year that followed that ISIS began to use theatrical violence as a tool: to draw more recruits from abroad, to instill public terror in areas under its control, to hasten submission in areas newly taken. The strategy was highly manipulative and effective, cheap kindling for reporting that took the militants’ religious claims at face value. Slowly ISIS became, in the Western imagination, a satanic force unlike anything civilization had encountered since it began recording histories of combat with the Trojan Wars. Even The New York Review of Books, not known for its analytical inadequacy, ran a piece about ISIS that declared it was “not clear whether our culture can ever develop sufficient knowledge, rigor, imagination, and humility to grasp the phenomenon of ISIS.”
The whiff of exorcism and devilry made ISIS a popular intellectual fetish in American journalistic circles, one that overlooked th
e contributions of American policies and wars to the group’s origins in favor of tracing just how much Quranic scripture infused the militants’ aims and depravity. Much less attention went to the cold calculation the West had made: that the Assad government was preferable to whatever more religious, militant order that would surely rise in its place. The ISIS chroniclers remained obsessed with religion, vividly portraying every atrocity the group committed as some facet of Islam; rape, that longtime tactic of war used to humiliate the enemy, became a “theology of rape,” an Islamic sickness rather than a war crime. From the vantage point of the young Muslim women of Raqqa, women like Asma who heard frequent tales of regime massacres and sexual violations, there was no such hand-wringing about whether ISIS was the evilest of them all, whether it was really very Islamic. To them, at that moment, everyone was equally predatory, equally complicit in the rending apart of Syria. Everyone had blood on their hands. Everyone claimed an ideology to justify their violence. Did putting it on YouTube make it that much worse?
NOUR
Fall 2012, Le Kram, Tunis
One evening that fall, Nour learned from Karim that Walid had gone to Syria. She was stunned. Why hadn’t he told her? She quashed that thought quickly; there was no reason why he would have shared his plans with her, even if they were friends.
Following the sermon in central Tunis that led to the violent protest at the U.S. embassy earlier that year, the police cracked down on Salafi activists. The women in Nour’s group at the mosque were growing twitchy, worried about attracting police attention. But it was only when Nour heard about Walid’s departure that she realized how developments in the wider region were pulling some young activists’ attention away from Tunis.
Guest House for Young Widows Page 13