Guest House for Young Widows

by Azadeh Moaveni

  Rezgui was not from a religious family. He was a break-dancer; he admired leftist politicians; he drank alcohol and had a girlfriend. He lived with his family in a one-bedroom house in Sousse, not far from where Olfa lived with her children, and was finishing a master’s degree. His family were stunned. They remain stunned to this day, and believe Seifeddine was brainwashed or set up.

  His friends tell a different story. Here was a man who, like them, was young at the time of the revolution in 2011 and expected change to come quickly. With the fall of Ben Ali, he believed that society would move away from its authoritarian secularism and embrace more religious values and social justice in governance and public life; when that didn’t happen, when even the narrow openings for Islamist politics closed off, he began spending time with some local young Salafi men, who shared his fierce disappointment. Bashar al-Assad’s war in Syria, friends said, tipped him over the edge.

  His transformation was slow, and happened on the inside. He became a religious young man with sharp political grievances. He developed the conviction that violence was the only way to express them. The local Salafis put him in touch with militants in Libya, who ran a training camp. His father said these young men infected Seifeddine with “evil thoughts” and that he was a victim of “radicalization.” But in the words of Olfa, who struggled with this question every day, “What is the difference between an extremist and a very upset Muslim?”

  There was a thin invisible line connecting Olfa with Seifeddine. He had been dispatched to the beach that day by Noureddine Chouchane, an influential senior figure with the Islamic State in Libya. There was a hub of Tunisians in Sabratha, in Libya, where Noureddine sometimes sheltered. It was there that a newly arrived Tunisian sister caught his eye: Rahma.

  Two months after her arrival in Sabratha, Rahma finally condescended to speak to her mother, despite her status as unbeliever. Like many mothers who receive phone calls from daughters who have absconded to ISIS and are ringing from conflict zones, Olfa kept in character and elected to vent, screaming at Rahma for a full five minutes. When she finally calmed down, Rahma apologized. She said it had been her duty to come. She hoped one day Olfa would understand.

  “What of Ghoufran?” Olfa asked. Apparently one man had proposed to Ghoufran not long after her arrival. “When she met him in person, Mummy, she thought he looked weird, so she said no!” Rahma said. “You know Ghoufran, she always thought she was going to marry some handsome guy. So she waited until she found a prince,” Rahma said. Ghoufran married this second man. It was another layer to her heartbreak. Olfa had thought many times about the sweetness of planning or approving her daughters’ marriages.

  When she put the phone down, Olfa consoled herself with the belief that Ghoufran must be happy. No other mother and daughter could have been as close; they were more like sisters than parent and child. The part of her that ached for Ghoufran knew, on some level, that if her daughter didn’t miss her, she must truly be contented. At least this is what Olfa told herself.

  LINA

  March 2016, Tal Afar, Iraq

  That spring, they each had their tasks. Lina’s was to give birth and bring their second child into the world. Jafer’s was to travel to Mosul and undergo a second operation to remove a further piece of his injured leg. The doctor in Tal Afar had advised this, saying, rather ominously, that it appeared the first surgeon “had been unfamiliar with such cases.”

  In March, when the labor pains started, Jafer had already gone, so Lina went alone to the hospital. As an ISIS wife, she had priority over civilians; hospitals operated on an ISIS-first basis, regardless of triage, and basic hospital infrastructure was still intact. But over half the city’s residents had fled, emptying the ranks of competent doctors; of those who remained, many chose not to practice, or practiced privately, outside the public hospital system that had been commandeered by ISIS.

  It was Lina’s fifth time giving birth, so she knew what was coming. But when it came time to push, something felt wrong. The baby wasn’t moving and the pain was different. There was a lot of shouting, and Lina clung to the sides of the bed. She tried to focus on the cracks in the ceiling above her head. Finally he was out—they said he was a he before they whisked him away—and she kept asking for him and asking for him, lying there drenched in sweat.

  After an hour the doctor brought him back, a tight smile plastered on her face. “He’s in perfect health, thanks be to God,” she said, handing Lina the baby. But she knew instantly that her son was not fine. There were purple bruises along one side of his head and near one eye. Because they hadn’t held him up to her as he came out, she suspected that they had done this to him. She decided they must have injected something into his face with a syringe. “This baby needs oxygen!” she shouted. But the doctor ignored her and kept repeating that he was fine. Lina put him to her breast, but his mouth was listless. The doctor huffed in irritation when Lina pointed out that he wasn’t suckling. She told Lina to take the baby home and that when she was more relaxed, he would latch on.

  But a woman knows when her baby is very ill. She knows it as surely as if it were her own body, because only moments ago it was. Lina decided to go home; they weren’t going to do anything more for her here. They were the ones who had hurt him in the first place.

  At home, she wiped the baby’s body with a wet cloth. He was hot with fever, and coughed little spittles of blood. She fanned him as he slept. She awoke in the night to find his body burning with a fever that must have been over 105 degrees. She had no medicine at home, certainly no infant medicine, and ran to the next-door neighbor’s house. She pounded on their front gate, but it was the middle of the night and they couldn’t hear her. When Lina got back, the baby’s arm was sticking straight out at a ninety-degree angle. He was slowly stiffening. She tried to massage his arm; she thought if she could just keep him supple he would make it to morning, and then she would find another hospital. He must not go stiff. He must not go stiff. She whispered in his ear and massaged his miniature, perfect feet. Eventually he took two deep, shuddering breaths, and then he was still.

  She stared at the blue tube of hand cream on the bedside table, the tin of hard candy Jafer sucked on when he couldn’t sleep, the striped rug between the two beds. Two impulses tore at her: the first to be perfectly composed and wait for the baby’s spirit to return to God, who must have loved him so much that He immediately wanted him back; the second, to be entirely certain that he was dead. She needed someone else’s confirmation. She banged again on the neighbor’s door, this time screaming and screaming until finally the husband came to the gate. “I need you to come see if my baby is really dead,” she said. “Please go get your wife.”

  In the morning she wrapped the baby in a bedsheet and, together with her neighbor, took him to the morgue.

  Lina spent the afternoon at the home of another German woman, but she suddenly had a feeling that Jafer might have come home from his surgery. When she returned, she found him lying on the couch, pallid and weak. He was meant to stay in the hospital at least two days to recover—the surgery had involved cutting into his femur—but he had come back to see his wife and their new baby.

  Lina perched next to him and told him what had happened. Jafer wept, and she held her husband’s face in her hands. It was a turning point for her. After a lifetime of caring for others—her children, her first husband, her in-laws, the abandoned pensioners of Frankfurt, her invalid second husband—now, finally, she needed someone to take care of her.

  ASMA, AWS, AND DUA

  January 2015, Raqqa, Syria

  To the outside world, the territory controlled by the Islamic State seemed hermetically sealed. But the routes into and out of its capital, al-Raqqa, were porous and regularly crossed by both ISIS fighters and the ordinary people interacting and doing business with them. Its territory was still a market, and Raqqa, perched on the banks of the Euphrates, had been a sign
ificant commercial and geographic crossroads since the eighth century. Truck drivers streamed in and out of the ISIS caliphate daily, supplying the militants with everything from gasoline to chocolate wafer cookies and energy drinks.

  It was this porous commercial normalcy, especially up to and around the end of 2014, that enabled Dua, Aws, and Asma to escape. Dua, the farmer’s daughter with the rose tattoo who married the wealthy Saudi, left first. She discussed leaving with her father and brother, and both agreed that if she could not accept another marriage, as the caliphate wanted her to do, the only choice was to go.

  Her brother started making calls to Syrian friends in southern Turkey, people who had experience with the border crossing and could meet Dua on the other side. It was a frosty January night when Dua and her brother boarded a small minibus for the two-hour ride from Raqqa to the Tal Abyad crossing. At that time, refugees were streaming across the border daily into Turkey. Dua and her brother passed through easily.

  When Aws, the feisty, romantic English literature student who hated her second husband, decided to leave four months later, it was getting more difficult. Turkey had tightened security at the border. Aws contacted her cousin Dua, already in Sanliurfa, a Turkish city about sixty miles north of the border, and asked for the phone number of the man who’d smuggled her out. He was part of a network that specialized in extricating people from within ISIS, men affiliated with one or several rebel groups, often with the cooperation of someone inside the organization. The man dispatched someone to escort Aws to the border. She emailed him a picture of herself, and when her escort arrived on the appointed night, he had fake identity cards for both of them, bearing the same last names; that night, they were brother and sister. They took a taxi to the same crossing, Tal Abyad, but the checkpoint guards did not ask her to show her face. The identity card, unused, stayed in the front pocket of her black handbag.

  By early spring of 2015, when Asma, the marketing student whose boyfriend was still in Jordan and who refused to marry a fighter, was agonizing about what to do, the city had been transformed. Most days she went around Raqqa without seeing a single familiar face. Everyone who could afford to had fled, even many of the families who had initially collaborated. In the market, people spoke Arabic with North African and Gulf dialects. It was common to hear French-accented English, people speaking a third language, trying to conceal their identities, as though spies might be lurking amid the produce.

  When Asma and a cousin plotted their escape, they told no one, not even their families, and took nothing but their handbags. A friend inside ISIS agreed to get them out. They drove to the border under the blanket darkness of a new moon, a journey Asma had made so many times to ferry women into the caliphate that she could tell, from the pacing of the bends in the road, how long was left to go. Her body felt itchy with fear, mostly for her friend inside ISIS, the fear of what could happen to him if it was discovered he had helped them. When she handed her ID card to the ISIS border guard at the checkpoint, she was convinced he knew they were trying to escape. She felt short of breath and bit her tongue, trying to control the adrenaline that was coursing through her body. The more frightened she looked, the more suspicious she would seem. She tried to remind herself that her thoughts and terrors were inside her head, not visible outside her like free-floating ticker tape. The Turkish guards on the other side were having a tea break, and waved them through. The car waiting for them, a modern Korean four-door, glinted gray from the light at the checkpoint.

  * * *

  —

  URFA, THE TURKISH CITY FORMALLY called Sanliurfa, sits sixty miles north of the border with Syria. The dry grass plains on its outskirts are dotted with almond and plum groves, pines and olive trees. The housing boom of recent years has seen low-slung apartment blocks rise up on its outskirts, providing the cheap accommodation that made it possible for so many Syrian refugees to slowly rebuild their lives. The Syrian war had permanently changed the face of the city, just as it had done to cities like Istanbul and Beirut; its central boulevards and thoroughfares teemed with impish, rumpled Syrian children begging and selling packets of Kleenex. But there were opportunities for work, and the rent on a two-bedroom apartment in Urfa was not staggeringly out of reach, as it was in those bigger cities.

  As cities went, it was provincial and understated. Its mixed Kurdish and Arab-origin populace tended to social conservatism, most women covered their hair, and there was no great political Truth hanging over the place—no giant Assad statue bearing down or black flags whipping in the wind. The local squares contained statues of things like giant red bell peppers. The pool adjacent to the ancient mosque swarmed with fat carp that were considered sacred, swimming in the spot where King Nimrod was believed to have thrown the Prophet Abraham into the fire. The fort of Sanliurfa loomed from above. The gleaming new mall, Piazza, seemed out of place, as though airlifted in by the Turkish state to tutor local residents in buying shoes from air-conditioned shops, rather than the shoe heaps spread out on blankets at the mouth of the bazaar.

  By the time Aws, Dua, and Asma arrived in early 2015, there were enough Syrian residents to run and sustain Syrian restaurants and baklava shops in the center of town; there were Syrian men who had cooked molokhiya, a green, clingy stew served with rice, for years in their hometowns of Aleppo and Homs, and were now doing the same in Urfa. The merchants in the bazaar were practiced in saying, in Arabic, “This price is just for your sake!”

  For the women, what they had done back in Raqqa was a tightly guarded secret. They were exiled, dislocated, hiding pasts they knew could hurt them. They missed their families and felt alienated and out of place in Urfa, which felt about three generations behind Raqqa before the war, and they hoped to move on to a more lively, modern part of Turkey. They attended English- and Turkish-language classes, knowing they would need some proficiency to help them chart a future elsewhere. They lived with Syrian families whom they knew from home, who had arrived earlier and were more established; Asma even stayed with distant relations. The families helped cover much of their living costs, and they used what they brought from Syria to cover their language courses and daily expenses.

  Aws woke up each day to the same reviving ritual: coffee and the Lebanese singer Fairuz.

  Her two Raqqa marriages had not dented her light spirit; she was resilient and young, she was an educated woman who loved reading novels, and she still wanted those babies wrapped in cabbage leaves. The Urfa album of her cellphone gallery approximated her life in Raqqa before ISIS: handsome friends posing by rivers, endless shisha cafés. She managed to speak to her family about twice a month. The family she lived with treated her like a daughter; they even paid her mobile phone bills. She wanted to find a way to finish her university studies, but most of all, she wanted to be normal again. In Urfa, no one ever let you forget you were a refugee. Once, while walking with a Syrian male friend in town, they had been stopped by an angry Turkish man. “If you were a real man, you wouldn’t have left your country,” he shouted at her friend.

  Asma was more fearful and rarely went out. Urfa was crawling with intelligence agents from various countries. ISIS militants transited in and out, and sometimes hunted Syrian dissidents. She had severed all contact with her family, worried that ISIS would punish them for her escape. Once a week, Asma emailed and called a friend in Raqqa to complain about her heartless family and how they had spurned her. This was untrue, but she hoped that ISIS intelligence would hear it—they monitored the phone communications of many Raqqa residents, especially those who worked with them—and that it would protect her family from blame.

  Asma felt reduced to her melancholy. She was not the Asma who had studied marketing and wanted to work in hospitality, who had a Galaxy Note II and wore musky perfume and revered Taha Hussein; she was not the woman who had turned down the love of her life over wearing the hijab and yet had ended up working for ISIS. Here in Sanliurfa, she was only a refug
ee. When she wore stylish clothing or made an effort with her hair, she felt reproachful eyes on her. It was as though she was not allowed to be happy or laugh, as though the only permissible way to act was sober or, more ideally, distraught. She found pleasure where she could; she had recently had a Brazilian blow-dry that took three consecutive days of treatment at the hair salon. She saved up enough to spend a couple of days in Antalya, on the Turkish coast. Every day after her trip, she watched the clips she had recorded on her phone: the nightclub with its anonymous darkness, flashing lights, moving bodies.

  Asma, Aws, and Dua sometimes had lunch together. Occasionally they argued about Syria and the future, even though none of them knew when the war would end or what would come after that. Aws saw no place for the intolerant sectarian armed groups in power. Syria was too mixed, had too many religious minorities—Christian, Druze, Alawite, Shia—to make a Sunni Islamist government an option.

  But Dua, more pious and conservative, had learned about Islam only when ISIS took over, and wished to see religious politicians—moderate and genuine ones, certainly not these fanatics who used religion as flourish—in power. Her problem with ISIS was not that it had sought to establish an Islamic state and impose Islamic law, but that it showed disregard for basic Islamic legal tenets. ISIS had instrumentalized Islam, made it a means to its political ends; it had hollowed the faith out of everything it stood for and reduced it to a tactic: takfir, designating opponents as enemies whose blood could be spilled.

  Dua had come to prefer Jabhat al-Nusra, or the Nusra Front, one of the most prominent rebel groups fighting in the Syrian war. It was Syria’s avowed al-Qaeda affiliate, but it was also mostly Syrian in membership, and it was at the forefront of the opposition’s armed struggle against the government. Unlike ISIS, Nusra had not imposed a jihadist “state” on local populations. Instead, it cultivated popular support and coexisted with other currents of the Syrian opposition.