Guest House for Young Widows

by Azadeh Moaveni

  “No, no, Nusra is not an option,” Aws said, annoyed at what she saw as her cousin’s naïveté. This point of view was shared by many Western states, which ultimately calculated that a jihadist rise to power in Syria—either ISIS itself or the most extreme of the rebels—was a greater strategic threat than Assad. Many Syrians agreed. Whether enough agreed to tip the balance in Assad’s favor, absent Russia’s military intervention, is a question people will argue for years to come. But Assad had cultivated an opposition so radical that the world would be obliged to side with him—that was simply a truth, a tactic that insulated his rule, however unjustly, against real challenge.

  The women avoided discussing the future, because when they did, as was the case one sweltering afternoon in the summer of 2016, their conclusions made what felt like a shabby, temporary existence seem permanent. In the apartment of the Free Syrian Army man who had helped them escape, where they gathered, a sour, salty smell wafted up from the sheep-brain restaurant on the ground floor of the building.

  So much had changed since they had joined the early demonstrations in Raqqa, when they had chanted alongside their neighbors for the fall of the regime. Now they all three said they would never go back to Syria, because there was nothing to go back to. Their Raqqa existed only as a collection of memories in the photo galleries of their phones, to run a finger across in the dark before falling asleep.

  “Who knows when the fighting will stop?” asked Asma. “Syria will become like Palestine; every year, people think next year it will end, we will be free. And decades pass. Syria is a jungle now.”

  “Even if one day things are all right, I will never return to Raqqa,” said Aws. “Too much blood has been spilled on all sides. I’m not talking just about ISIS, but among everyone.”

  LINA

  Spring 2017, Raqqa, Syria

  The caliphate suffered an abundance of widows, and widows, as everyone knows, are especially prone to envy. If the widows were widows twice or even thrice over, as was the case with many women, the problem of envy took on monstrous dimensions. To be a widow in the Islamic State was to be condemned to a rough, deprived existence in a guest house for widows. In the midst of the turbulent war, these women coveted the protection of a husband who would provide them a home. They shamelessly angled to become the second wives of already married men, indifferent to whether the first wives accepted this. Such was the state of things in Raqqa in 2017 that a woman like Lina could be envied for a one-legged man. As she walked down the street with Jafer limping along, she could feel the eyes of other women on them, actually feel them, even through the black flaps of cloth the women were now obliged to wear over their eyes.

  They had moved away from Tal Afar in the early spring of 2017 in anticipation of the city coming under attack. Lina was pregnant again, and she and Jafer wanted to start over, to erase the memories of their baby boy’s death. In their village on the outskirts of Raqqa, life was preternaturally good at first, as if they had landed in some bucolic German village. The evenings were cool and families went out to the park. The night sky was littered with stars; so many, in fact, that shooting stars were commonplace and soon lost their wonder. Jafer’s family sent money from Germany and he bought a new car and a whole new kitchen—a fridge, a stove, a brand-new washing machine. They bought new clothes for their son. And best of all, it wasn’t Daesh money. The distinction mattered to her. She would have felt tainted having such comforts supplied by the organization and would have preferred to go without.

  But as the local women witnessed Lina and Jafer’s comfort, they began inflicting them with nazar, the evil eye. This was not mere superstition. The Quran acknowledges the evil eye, and includes a reference to seeking refuge “from the evil of envying enviers.” Many hadith narrations of the Prophet describe the evil eye as an arrow that soars straight from the heart of the envious into the body of the envied. Lina and Jafer went to see a local sheikh for a recitation of the Ruqyah al-Sharia, an incantation of the Quran meant to ward off or dispel the evil eye. The portly, wispy-bearded sheikh announced that their condition was quite serious. Someone had cast a spell on them. “I’ll take care of it,” he promised, and asked them to return the next day.

  On that second visit, his waiting room smelled of sweat and unwashed clothes, and overflowed with other families suffering from evil-eye afflictions. The sheikh started what was apparently a group incantation. In her chair, Lina closed her eyes. Partway through, she sat bolt upright. Lina had read the Quran many times. What she was hearing was decidedly not from the Holy Book. Was the sheikh a charlatan? Were they hearing voices? Jafer also shifted uncomfortably in his seat, noticing something was odd. The moment the sheikh was finished, Jafer grabbed her hand and their son’s and said, “Let’s get out of here.”

  Whatever had transpired in the sheikh’s house that day, it seemed evil and unnatural. At home, Jafer held a bottle of water to the baby’s lips and Lina recited the Quran, the proper Quran, over his head.

  * * *

  —

  LINA WAS AN ADEPT COPER, too adept, perhaps, in that she coped so hard and so well that usually when she decided it was time to extract herself from a situation, it was well past the point of deadly. So it had been with her abusive marriage; so it had been with her depressed solitude in Frankfurt; and so it was now with the final months of the caliphate. She had survived since the death of the baby by narrowing her world down to the island of her household.

  But now, in the summer of 2017, a clear, unambiguous voice told her it was time to leave. Perhaps the birth of the new baby infused her with some courage, or perhaps the encounter at the sheikh’s house made it apparent to her that the Islamic State was collapsing; in times of desperation, people’s behavior would only grow more dark and unpredictable. Perhaps amid the crumbling there would be a chance to flee, with fewer chances of being caught.

  No matter how annoyed Jafer looked, Lina worked on him about leaving. His mother back in Germany, whom Lina had never met, turned out to be an ally. She begged them over the phone to come back. She told Lina she was like a daughter, that they would all be a family if they came back to Germany. The words were like a soft caress. No female figure had spoken to her in such caring tones since she was a little girl in Germany, before her father had kidnapped her back to Lebanon, after which she never saw her own mother again.

  Jafer’s position was impossible. If he was caught escaping, he would be executed or imprisoned. And in prison, would they give him Tramadol? Unlikely. But Lina kept insisting. If they tried, at least they would have a chance; if they stayed, they would die in an air strike or be captured by the Iraqi army or the Shia militias, which were now rapidly closing in and reportedly executing ISIS detainees on the spot.

  Once Jafer changed his mind, things moved quickly. Lina would go first with the children, and he would follow. Jafer gave her four thousand dollars and told her to give half to the smuggler, a friend, upon reaching the border between Syria and Turkey. The smuggler would take Lina and the children to his house; when the road was safe and open, he would drive them into Turkey.

  When she met up with him, the smuggler asked Lina to let him hold on to her cash, for safekeeping—not just his half, but all of it. He was a friend of Jafer’s, she reasoned, so she didn’t think not to trust him. The next day, as they prepared to leave, everyone in the car had a role to play. Lina was to be the smuggler’s wife; her children would be their children; an old man they were taking along was to be his father, her father-in-law; and a fleeing fifteen-year-old was to be a deaf-mute cousin. They were posing as an ordinary civilian family from Raqqa, people who had no ties or sympathies to the Islamic State. If all went well, they would be allowed to pass into Turkey, where they would be free.

  But the smuggler wasn’t driving north. Instead the car went in the wrong direction, through empty brown plains, past shattered remains of buildings hit in air strikes, collapsed walls a
nd twisted rebar. The smuggler stopped the car a hundred meters from a checkpoint, ordered everyone to get out, and drove away, taking all of Lina’s money with him.

  This wasn’t the Turkish border. This was the border with northern Syria, the area under the control of the Kurdish militia known as the YPG, or the Syrian Democratic Force, SDF. Two female Kurdish soldiers with AK-47s slung over their shoulders approached her. They were part of the Kurdish force that was creating casualties each day in the battle for Raqqa, the fresh graves in nearby cities multiplying. They had no reason to treat fleeing ISIS women kindly. Lina trembled, and the two children clung to her.

  EMMA/DUNYA

  Spring 2015, Manbij, Syria

  Every time Dunya went to the produce market, little children noticed the rifle slung over her shoulder and shrank from her, reaching for their mothers’ hands or hiding in their skirts. At first she averted her gaze, pretending not to see that she had become something that scared children. Many of the foreign women thought that this, this fear they struck into Syrians, was the correct response to their authority as ISIS women. But Dunya could not adjust in this way; all these little things, the frightened stares of the children, the snubbing behavior of the local vendors, hummed inside her, reminding her she was despised and that ISIS might not always have the upper hand.

  Going out unarmed was unthinkable. She had a scare, one day, walking just two blocks to the home of another German woman for coffee. It was prayer time and the streets were empty. A car slowed behind her, trailing her with the engine running; she had steeled herself not to run, to stay calm and walk straight ahead until she reached the house.

  Selim taught her how to shoot a rifle after that, and told her never to leave the house without it. But the stares of the children distressed her. She wanted a small handgun, but Selim said they couldn’t afford it, the little guns were expensive. Eventually she borrowed a handbag-sized gun from a German friend, who had an extra.

  Selim too was changing. He was frequently ill and his commander refused to give him time off from fighting, because more and more foreign fighters were feigning sickness to avoid the front line. Many recruits had not expected that the Islamic State would ask them to fight against and kill other Sunni Muslim insurgents. But even the faint suspicion of not wanting to fight—or worse, wanting to leave—could result in severe punishment. One German fighter told his friends he was considering going back home; within a week the organization took him into custody. He was waterboarded and given electric shocks, and then sent back out with the hooded, grave look of one who has been tortured. He would serve as an example to others.

  The Islamic State leadership disappointed Selim—he recognized its brutality and unfairness, but he seemed to be internalizing its extremism all the same. When the authorities ordered women to cover their eyes and hands in public—to wear face veils that obscured the eyes and black gloves in the heat—Dunya thought he didn’t seem as distressed as he should be. He had started using pejorative terms for the Syrians.

  One evening Selim walked into the house and peered over Dunya’s shoulder. When he noticed that she was downloading an app onto her cellphone, he exploded. “Don’t you realize by agreeing to the terms and conditions, you’re consenting to American law? Kuffar law?”

  She couldn’t believe he was serious, and tried to make light of it. “Selim, do you actually read web agreements? The whole thing? Who does that!”

  But he was genuinely angry. “I don’t need to read them to know that you’re contractually agreeing to terms under their laws. Man-made laws.”

  “I need to use this app. It’s useful to me. At what point are you going to stop making takfir of everything? Are you going to make takfir of the spider crawling on that wall?”

  It was one of their first major arguments, and it marked the point when she began to realize that—apart from the hardship of living in a war zone, apart from the stretches of time he left her alone, without her knowing whether he was dead or alive—he was turning into a different person. They had supposedly come here because Selim wanted to defend the Muslims Assad was slaughtering. But as time passed, his personality grew more rigid; the austere rules of the Islamic State infiltrated their daily life.

  It was like walking across a minefield without a map, her body permanently clenched. Dunya felt as though she had coped with a great deal; she could endure the uncertainty and threat of air strikes, but the emotional toll of enduring Selim, constantly hearing that everything she was doing was wrong, was now the hardest of all.

  * * *

  —

  THE GUEST HOUSE FOR WIDOWS was a place of such deliberate torment and uninhabitability that few women could stay long without going mad. This was precisely the intention. Every town or city controlled by ISIS had one or several of these guest houses, depending on its size, but they all resembled one another in condition and atmosphere. The Guest House for Widows was a state of mind. Across the caliphate, women passing through them were made to understand that a female ISIS member’s place was at the side of her husband, any husband, and that refusing to marry was recalcitrant behavior that would not be enabled by a comfortable private room with en suite bathroom.

  Sleeping arrangements were usually several women to a room. Trips out to the market were tightly controlled by ill-natured house wardens, usually Moroccans, who barked at the residents and withheld toiletries and other necessary items as punishment. One German woman Dunya knew was widowed when her husband blew himself up with a car bomb. When the ISIS commanders came to the house after three or four weeks to ask her to remarry, Mildred refused, and was sent to the local Guest House. After a week there, she changed her mind. Mildred married another man, but after three days concluded that she could tolerate neither the second marriage nor a return to the Guest House. When he was out one day, she arranged to meet up with a smuggler, who helped her get to the Turkish border, where she turned herself over to the border guards.

  When Dunya had first arrived in Raqqa, the hostels weren’t called anything in particular; they were sometimes referred to generically as maqqar, base, or a modafae’eh, a guest house. With time, when there were no single women left at all, some women began calling them the Guest House for Widows.

  Dunya knew she didn’t have much time. Many women she had met upon arriving in Syria were dead, and many others were leaving. The early days in Manbij, of relative safety and sunset road trips, were a faint memory. Now everyone was terrified; every day, there were tales of someone who had been accused of being a spy and thrown into prison. Behavior that had in the past been acceptable—being in contact with your family, being on the internet when you weren’t supposed to—was suddenly grounds for intense suspicion. Not fighting was not an option. Not fighting other Syrian rebel groups, composed of Sunni Muslims, was not an option. Being a private citizen who stayed at home was not an option. The only option left to her looked to be escape.

  June 2016, a Small Village Northwest of Raqqa

  There was a darkness at the center of their marriage. No matter what happened to the Islamic State, no matter what ultimate fate awaited the Syrians themselves, Selim wanted to live an austere, orthodox Islamic lifestyle forever. Ideally they would settle in Turkey, where he could live among Muslims, hear the call to prayer five times a day, and nurture the hope that one day, a better caliphate would rise from the ruins of the one he was fighting for. Selim seemed to hold out some hope that with time, things might improve; if ISIS fighters managed to get the upper hand and al-Baghdadi didn’t feel so besieged, if recruits continued to arrive and swell their ranks, then perhaps the leadership would behave more correctly.

  Dunya felt his hope and loyalty were naïve. She no longer entertained these conversations. She let him believe what he wanted and told him simply that she was too scared to stay, that she would try to leave and wait for him in Turkey.

  Leaving required connections, and being well connect
ed was something Dunya was good at. She spent hours in the evening bouncing between WhatsApp chats, setting everything up. An acquaintance connected her with a mid-ranking figure in the Free Syrian Army (FSA), the so-called moderate anti-Assad rebel group that received CIA funding and arms. Because ISIS viewed the FSA as traitors for working with the Americans, she could not tell Selim who was helping her. She told him nothing, actually, about her plans, because she feared ISIS intelligence was monitoring his phone communications and would punish him for letting her escape.

  The night of her departure, she packed carefully and made sure to tidy up after herself, so that Selim could return to a neat house. She filled the fridge with juice and fruit and put the unwelcome thoughts, of him coming back from the front lines to an empty house, out of her mind. She ran her fingers over the sofa and said a silent goodbye to this last of so many temporary homes.

  It was past eleven when there was a rap at the door. She turned the lights off and grabbed her purse. Outside stood a man and behind him, a motorbike. Dunya said, “A motorbike? No one told me anything about a motorbike. There’s no way I can bring my stuff along on that thing.” The man surveyed the hulking suitcases in the doorway, the duffel bag, a basket that was mewing furiously. “What’s that sound?” he asked. She opened the basket to show him the cats, staring up with their glinting eyes.

  He was flummoxed. “Fucking hell, lady, are you kidding me?”