Guest House for Young Widows

by Azadeh Moaveni

  Dunya viewed many of the girls as inexperienced boy-band groupies, having understood ISIS as some kind of trendy rebellion. They watched ISIS videos on their phones and laptops, droning on about the delight of finally living under a caliphate. They huddled together on WhatsApp groups and Facebook groups. Dunya viewed herself as superior to these unsophisticated young women, who seemed only to memorize the words and concepts that had brought them to the Islamic State, without actually understanding what lay behind them. She had actually studied Islam over the months and years since her conversion. She had some ilm, or Islamic knowledge, whereas they mostly seemed to have hormones and attitude.

  She slept late. The summer heat made everyone in Raqqa nocturnal, staying up later and later to benefit from the evening coolness, and sleeping through as many hours of the searing day as possible. She eventually found some other German women in the city to befriend. Even though the caliphate was intended to erase the ties of nation-state and tribe, most women still preferred the company of those like them. Partly this was a matter of simple communication; exuberant pantomiming and Google Translate could take you only so far. But it was also true that no one shed their prejudices upon arrival in the caliphate. The racist superiority the Saudis felt toward Pakistani or Bangladeshi Britons (“they are not British British”), the superiority the British Asians felt toward the British Somalis, the superiority German Turks felt toward the local Syrians, the superiority the Lebanese and Syrians felt toward the Saudis, the superiority the Syrian Arabs felt toward the Syrian Kurds—none of these impulses dissolved. Indeed, they were harnessed into sweeping generalizations about who was most hapless in warfare and thus best assigned to suicide operations (Europeans), who was the most brutal (Tunisians), who was the most zealous (Saudis).

  About a month after her arrival, Dunya went shopping in the market in Raqqa and saw the bodies of about a dozen men lying on the street. Not even on the side of the street, or in the middle of one of the central roundabouts, but directly on the sidewalk. The shoppers and pedestrians were forced to step around them. Their limbs were splayed out, and their faces were frozen in some final expression.

  * * *

  —

  FROM RAQQA THEY MOVED CLOSE to Manbij, which in that late autumn of 2014 was the favored destination for Europeans seeking a leisurely, chill-out jihad. The town was quiet, surrounded by ruddy desert plains dotted with pine trees. There was round-the-clock electricity and there was no fighting for miles in any direction. The area was especially popular among British fighters who, depending on who was judging their motivations, were too squeamish to fight or preferred to gauge the caliber of the caliphate before deciding to give it their life.

  The Syrians viewed the British fighters as colonizers, and were bewildered by the insertion of these London-accented, brown-skinned Brits into what was, to their mind, their local civil or regional proxy war. The British fighters behaved like conventional overlords. They viewed their mission as legitimate and just. They thought it correct that they should appropriate the homes of Syrians who had fled, and to impose their rule on those who had stayed behind.

  Many of the British jihadists were descendants of South Asian Muslims who had lived under British colonial rule in India; their families had been displaced by the violence and instability that followed the 1949 partition. That the British fighters lived in such exalted comfort over the Syrians—their status in 2014 recalled that enjoyed by low-ranking English civil servants dispatched to colonial India in the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, experiencing for the first time the delight of structural superiority over others—was an unforeseen long-term colonial residue. Perhaps the colonial past endured by their families didn’t color their hatred for Britain, didn’t spur their escape into this nether region of Syria. But the racism they had contended with, the mocking in school or taunts of “Paki” in the street, fit within the scope of Frantz Fanon’s belief that the “indelible wounds” of colonialism—and the racism it engendered for the descendants of the colonized living in Europe—would take years to recover, and often resulted in acts of reactionary violence. The young overseers of Manbij imagined themselves to be there in benevolent solidarity with the local population, but in the eyes of Syrians who had lived there for generations, they were nothing more than colonial interlopers, despite their brown skin and Arabic names.

  When ISIS took over the city of Manbij in the spring, they painted the courthouse black and imposed the jizya on local Christians. This was a tax that Islamic states had historically imposed on their religious minorities, in exchange for various privileges and protections. Fighters and their families tended to live in apartments and houses on the outskirts of the city. The proximity to the Turkish border, just thirty miles away, meant that foreign goods streamed into local stores. Dunya was pleased that she could buy Raffaello chocolates, Nutella, superior Turkish potato chips, and American cigarettes. The Saudis, nearly always somehow wealthier than everyone else, would often glide up in their gleaming SUVs and clear out these shops. Selim was away for long stretches, sometimes three weeks at a time. At the beginning, he was able to keep a cellphone with him, but as the coalition air strikes began, then became a perpetual buzzing-and-exploding part of the night sky, phones were forbidden.

  The very beginning of that first year was special. Everyone agrees on this, even those who later renounced the caliphate for its wanton brutality, its devotion to earthly power and indifference to Islamic procedure and values. At the very beginning, when the men were fresh from military training and the women were freshly arrived, those who migrated to the Land of Islam felt it was the best decision of their lives. The foreign recruits, who were illiterate to local dynamics of the civil war and intoxicated by the compelling, sophisticated videos the ISIS media arm steadily produced, believed that everyone behaved mostly with goodness; the fluttering of the black flags still inspired a heady feeling of righteousness.

  In the small village house Selim had secured on the far outskirts of Manbij, Dunya was much happier. Not because the house was physically nicer—some of the spoiled German girls had secured more comfortable flats in the city and said things like “Finally, insulated windows!”—but because it was more peaceful. Each day went the same way: clinging to sleep for as long as possible, cooking, tidying, going to sleep again. The internet connection sustained Dunya, and the indolent lifestyle was not, to her mind, altogether disagreeable. There was a procurement man, a sort of virtual personal assistant, charged with dropping off pillows, duvets, anything that was lacking in the homes that had been occupied. You could send in your request by text message and he would drop off the items that same afternoon, leaving them behind the door. No need to ever speak to or lay eyes on the man. Sometimes checking WhatsApp, to monitor the status of quarrels being waged among the local German ISIS women, seemed the most taxing part of her day.

  It was a Kurdish village; the surrounding land was dotted with waterfalls and brick-colored ridges. Its inhabitants had no wish to be ruled by the Islamic State, which had banned the simple pleasures that enlivened their rural existence: smoking water pipes outdoors, playing cards in cafés, listening to music. Dunya felt the locals’ animosity every time she bought milk or a kilo of tomatoes. She saw it in how the women turned their heads when she walked past, how the produce seller left it to her to put all her small bags into one big bag, a task he performed for the other women.

  In larger cities where ISIS had established a municipal presence, local residents had learned to be fearful and deferential. But in small villages like this one, where the group’s administrative presence was light and there were fewer or no public displays of violence, locals were more openly hostile. One day, Dunya visited a doctor in the village to get some migraine pills. The woman examined her brusquely, her face tense with anger. “Where are you from, anyway?” the doctor finally asked her. “Why don’t you go back to your own country? You’re a young woman fro
m Europe, what are you doing here in Syria? What have you to do with us?”

  Dunya’s face felt hot. She gathered her things and hurried out, and later considered saying something to Selim. Such talk was very dangerous—didn’t the woman know she could get into trouble? The idea that Dunya could mess with the woman’s life gave her a satisfying sense of power; deciding not to gave her a satisfying sense of benevolence. Selim was worried about her staying alone for long stretches, surrounded by villagers hostile to ISIS. But Dunya didn’t want to move. She enjoyed the solitude and fresh air of the countryside, the farm animals and the groves of olive trees and the scent of the night-blooming jasmine in the garden. It was true that the utter stillness of the evenings, punctuated only by cricket song or a rustle in the fruit trees, made the roar of the warplanes more terrifying. In the city, their sounds were muffled by the cars and city noise. But even this she got used to. She agreed to stop going out on her own and limited herself to a twenty-meter radius around the house.

  The cat arrived late one morning, ambling down the dirt lane that ended at their house. Her fur was matted in places, but she moved her head from side to side energetically and licked everything in her path with much curiosity. Dunya leaned down to tickle behind the cat’s ears, pleased to be interacting with a creature that didn’t shrink from her. The cat followed Dunya toward the house and wandered around the back garden as she searched for scraps in the kitchen.

  Dunya and Selim wanted a baby. They had talked about it many times, but agreed that it was not the time and place. They were too new, and the conflict was too uncertain. Many of the wives were pregnant or had small children already, and this filled their time with caretaking. But Dunya did not mind her days requiring little of her. She liked the cat’s company and named it Simsim, Arabic for “sesame seed.”

  There were evenings so romantic that she tried to etch them into her memory: the great expanse of the sky and the smell of the trees and the dirt after the rain. Because the safest place was often in a car, and because both she and Selim had watched enough road trip movies to appreciate the appeal of driving simply for the sake of it, they started going for long evening drives. Dunya loved the little she had seen of Syria and wanted to explore more of it.

  “Can’t we do something?” she asked plaintively one evening. “Can’t we drive into the city and get a burger?” And so that’s what they did, stopping to buy fried chicken at a fast-food place in the city. They did this many evenings, alternating the chicken with burgers, all of it excellent, and in those moments, with her handsome husband at her side and the desert stretched out before them, it felt like a glorious adventure. It almost felt like a life.

  LINA

  Autumn 2014, Tal Afar, Iraq

  For about six months, Lina and Jafer’s early married life in Tal Afar was tolerably safe. The small Iraqi town sat on a dry desert plain near the border with Syria, and before falling to ISIS, it had been mostly populated by Iraqi Turkomen, who spoke a language close to Turkish; it made the area a good match for the couple, as Jafer spoke Turkish. Jafer had left Germany for Syria in 2013, before the emergence of ISIS, and his reasons were the typical ones: indignation at the atrocities being committed, a desire to live among brothers in a more religious milieu, and an eagerness to commit himself to a project that helped his fellow Muslims.

  Lina and Jafer were content enough with their new marriage, but the war around them grew more intense by the day, and Tal Afar was witnessing increasingly heavy bombardment from the U.S.-led coalition. The jet planes streaking across the sky each night terrified her. She was pregnant by then, and wanted to cross the border back into Turkey, but Jafer said leaving was far too dangerous. If ISIS were to catch them, it would be certain execution for him. “Don’t you want our child to have both parents?” he asked her. And she did. That’s what she wanted more than anything.

  Jafer did not fight on the front lines, but worked in the ISIS communications center on the outskirts of the city. These sites, which usually gathered intelligence, ran radio broadcasts, and oversaw command and control of the local front, were frequently targeted by air strikes. About eight months after they arrived in Tal Afar, one such air strike ripped through the building where he was stationed. Jafer was pinned under the rubble from the collapsed walls and ceilings, one leg so badly crushed that it had to be amputated at the mid-thigh.

  The injury kept him at home for months. Lina found herself once again a caregiver, as if this were the role God had ordained for her: changing bedpans, administering medication. Two months after Jafer was injured, their son Yusef was born. Lina’s days revolved around cooking and cleaning, and looking after baby and husband, both dependent on her for everything. Sometimes Jafer’s friends from Germany came to the house with their wives, and then Lina would have women to chat with. She had her mobile phone and very occasionally there was internet, but she had been a lonely woman in Germany before she was a lonely woman in Syria; she didn’t really have anyone in the outside world to contact, apart from Jafer’s parents. Most of the time it was just the three of them, husband and wife and baby, keeping each other company, pretending that within the walls of their house their lives were normal.

  When Yusef was just a couple months old, Lina fell pregnant again. Time passed more quickly here, she thought each night as she fell asleep, her hand grazing Jafer’s forehead. His leg was not healing properly and he was in constant pain, the lines in his face making deep furrows. The only thing that eased it was Tramadol, a heavy-strength opioid painkiller that was highly addictive and intended only for immediate postsurgical pain. But Jafer needed it all the time.

  He couldn’t sleep without it, and on the few occasions when there was none to be had from the local pharmacy, he writhed till dawn. Sometimes Lina felt that the opioid took him into some distant land of fog and forgetfulness. His eyes were open, but he wasn’t there. Sometimes he became aggressive and said terrible things to her, but when she asked him about it the next day, he wouldn’t even remember having said the words.

  She pressed them to leave and return to Germany. “I’m scared they will put me in prison,” he would say. To be imprisoned with his body in that state of pain and addiction was unthinkable to him.

  EMMA/DUNYA

  Fall 2015, Manbij, Syria

  For a time, the Tunisian gynecologist’s office was the place to go in Manbij. There weren’t many outings for women permissible under the Islamic State, save going to the doctor. For Dunya, who spent long days waiting for Selim to return from fighting, superfluous doctor’s visits became a mode of socializing and clinics became de facto social spaces where women gathered, lingered, chatted, gossiped, and took the measure of other women in their city, distilling all the casual human interaction they were meant to have in the course of a week into a couple of voracious hours at a medical office, pretending to have a mole examined.

  Dunya heard about the Tunisian doctor through the local expat-wife network, a German friend who had heard about her through a French friend. Being in this network carried some appeal, the frisson of having interesting friends and acquaintances from across the whole world. For young people who lived so predominantly online, social media cultivated an aspiration to be cosmopolitan. This desire was savvily exploited by ISIS, which realized it had that in abundance. And because moving to the Islamic State required no actual capital for initiation—unlike cosmopolitanism in Western societies, which was predicated on being able to afford travel and lifestyle goods—in its own unlikely manner, the caliphate dream was the very height of accessible cosmopolitanism.

  In the West, the Islamic vision of a state centered around social justice—the idea that society should be ordered such that every citizen has access to a decent quality of life—shared some commonalities with other political currents. In America and Britain, young voters were flocking to politicians who described themselves as socialists, who called for an end to austerity and promised to p
lace education and home ownership within everyone’s reach. The financial crises in Western societies, and the democratic erosion that came with the revelation of the extent of financial misdeeds and the inability of states to regulate or penalize such behavior, encouraged young people to look for alternatives to the systems that were failing them. Just as some millennials were realizing that socialism wasn’t necessarily an ideological evil, some young Muslims were drawn to the idea of an Islamic caliphate out of similar motivations. Social media helped crystallize and connect young people across both these impulses. It is said that everyone wants freedom most of all, but if the Arab Spring and the bewildering appeal of the Islamic State suggested anything, it was that freedom meant quite little if unaccompanied by dignity and meaning. In the months and short years before it became clear that the Islamic State was a morass of atrocities and gratuitous violence, there were elements of its overture that resonated with young Muslims around the world.

  The women who had come to Syria were told that they would receive advanced medical care. And for long stretches, before the assault on major ISIS strongholds began in earnest in 2016, many women in many areas could access a doctor. The Tunisian gynecologist’s office occupied a large sitting room of a substantial villa in Manbij. The doctor was a den mother, a polyglot true believer with genuine faith in the idea of caliphate; she viewed it as her duty to provide medical care to women, to make them feel comfortable and welcome. She spoke French, Arabic, and English fluently, along with a smattering of German, and chatted with each patient, inquiring after their sleep and whether they had everything they needed. When she laughed, her teeth flashed white in her square olive face.