Guest House for Young Widows

by Azadeh Moaveni

  At university, Ayesha also studied English literature. “We did everything—poetry, criticism, translation,” she says. She read Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe, Dostoyevsky and the Iliad. She had romantic dreams of a husband who would be sensitive to her “needs and feelings,” but ended up marrying an unimaginative engineer named Mohammad, with whom she was unhappy. “He wasn’t attractive at all. He looked exactly like him,” she says, nodding at her oldest son, Mohammad, who moves around the room with a slight shuffle, due to having only one flip-flop.

  The couple lived together in the capital, Damascus, with their children. A few months into the uprising against Assad, her husband was killed by a sniper shot to the head while praying at the mosque. As a newly single mother, Ayesha taught English to support her children, relied on neighbors for babysitting, and suffered from the uniquely lowly position occupied by widowed or divorced women in traditional societies. Eventually, Ayesha decided to move near her sister, who was living at the time in Turkey. The direct northern route she would normally have taken, she says, was blocked because of the fighting, and she had to travel circuitously east across the country, to approach the Turkish border north of Raqqa. She happened to overnight in Raqqa, staying with a teacher friend. “And in the morning the ISIS police came to the house, and told me it is forbidden to live in the Land of Unbelief,” she says. “I was forced to stay.”

  Getting stuck in Raqqa, however, reversed her fortunes. “The first time I saw him, I thought I was dreaming. He was tall, handsome, thick hair, wide shoulders….He was living in the house next door all alone, with no woman to even make him tea! I made him a tea and had the children take it over next door. He asked them, ‘Where’s your father?’ And they said, ‘We have no father!’ ”

  The man next door was Moroccan, a gold trader from the medina of Tangiers, who was “persuaded by Facebook friends” that Assad was killing Muslim women, that he should come to their aid and join the fight; that he could practice his Islam freely in Syria. One day the Moroccan man took Ayesha and her children to the park for ice cream, and there, among the trees, confided that he wanted to flee. “Where is this Assad that I came to fight?” she recounts him saying. Also, the ISIS salary was measly; he complained it could be wiped out by buying just one pair of shoes and a pair of sunglasses. Despite all this, the Moroccan proposed. If they were stuck, they might as well be stuck together. Who was to say you couldn’t find love in a time of brutality?

  Under normal circumstances, a handsome single man would have commanded a younger, less constrained bride than a widow like Ayesha with three children. Ayesha was love-starved enough to consider herself fortunate. “All my life changed after that,” she recalls rapturously. “When you finally feel someone loves you. We stayed up all night laughing, smoking…looking into each other’s eyes. We both kept saying to each other, ‘I wish I had met you earlier!’ ”

  Ayesha seems aware that parts of her story sound implausible, and she moves briskly on to other topics where she sounds more persuasive: “ISIS was really preying on young Europeans’ vulnerabilities, the ones who already had problems with their families. They were very clever to prey on the Europeans like this.” She mentions that a journalist who works for a Dubai-based television network recently visited the camp, and wonders what has been said about her and the other women.

  “Nothing very positive,” I tell her. “She wrote about how you complained that your husbands spent too much on makeup for sex slaves.”

  “Really?” Ayesha looks crestfallen. “But she was so nice to us.”

  Oddly, despite her excellent English, her wily escape plans, and relatively sophisticated education, she is the least good at projecting any shame or regret.

  She says things like “They never serve fish here. Not even fresh vegetables.”

  As her kids surround her in the concrete room where we are talking, they appear conspicuously cleaner than some of the other ISIS women’s children. Their clothes fit, her daughter’s hair is cropped short to avoid lice, and her baby sleeps quietly in a car seat, in a clean diaper. Earlier, one of the other women’s toddlers had wandered into the room and squatted, emitting a stream of diarrhea across the floor.

  “Why don’t they have diapers?” I asked Commander Salar.

  “They have enough diapers for two months,” he sighed. “They sell them for money at the kiosks.”

  The camp is starting to receive visits from international aid groups, military intelligence officials, and journalists. Everyone has a few euros in their wallet and will feel sorry for a diaper-less baby forced to poop on the floor.

  “Have you met Hoda yet?” Ayesha asks brightly. When the company of the ISIS women grows unbearable, she calls on Hoda, a nineteen-year-old Indonesian, who, along with the rest of her twenty-two-member family, lives in a capacious tent at the head of the camp. The tent is organized carefully, with separate areas for tea making, cooking, and sleeping. There’s a recycling corner, piled high with empty water bottles. It is cozy and tidy, a reminder that people seem to do very different things with nothing.

  Hoda has smooth skin, a delicate nose, and speaks quickly, smiling often. Back in Jakarta, she had been a normal high school student, pious and inquisitive, and like a true millennial, felt the most alive and comfortable while online. It all started when she encountered a Tumblr blog called Diary of a Muhajirah, written by a Malaysian woman who called herself Bird of Jannah. She was like the Asian version of the Scottish Umm Layth, the blogger who transfixed the London girls.

  Bird of Jannah was a doctor who traveled on her own to Syria in 2014, with the eventual support of her parents, to work and contribute to the project of Islamic statehood. She chronicled her experiences on her blog, detailing the free health care, education, jobs, and largesse that were on offer in the Islamic State, calling on fellow Muslims to join her. She posted still-life photos representing herself and her new husband—a stethoscope with a Kalashnikov—and wrote amusingly of the foibles of communicating with him through Google Translate.

  Back in Indonesia, Hoda’s father was desperately in debt. The family was tense with worry. Hoda thought she had found the solution. She told them about a place in Syria where devoted Muslims were building an Islamic state. She contacted ISIS officials through Bird of Jannah, and received assurances that they would cover her father’s debts. Health care, their travel costs, housing—everything would be paid for. They all packed up, her parents and two sisters, aunties and cousins and uncles, all twenty-five of them, and headed for Turkey. Commander Salar says Turkey, which initially supported the uprising against Assad, covered the family’s travel costs from Istanbul to Raqqa.

  What about the gory and violent acts the media showed ISIS committing? The beheading of the aid worker Alan Henning, and the reports of Yazidi women being forced into sex slavery? Hoda bows her head. “Do you know what it’s like when you love the idea of something so much you’re willing to overlook the bad in it?” The truth that lurks behind her sentences is that if the Islamic State had actually formed a proper state, if it had upheld its obligations, behaved justly, and provided its citizens with security and livelihoods, the violence might have been forgiven—regarded as a means to an end, the brutality required to achieve independence. Hoda and her family seem guileless to the point of dangerous naïveté, the kind of family who’d be the first in any town to fall for the local pyramid scheme.

  Once the family was in Raqqa, ISIS fighters quickly tried to hustle the men in the family into military training. “Fight? No one said anything online about having to fight!” Hoda recalls. They were all indignant. The men refused to be trained, refused to go to the front line. Meanwhile, Hoda and the women were confined to a dormitory, waiting to be housed. Getting anything out of the Islamic State, she soon found, was like trying to cajole a drug cartel into following the rule of law. ISIS kept coming up with reasons why Hoda’s fa
mily didn’t deserve anything. “They called us hypocrites and cowards, because our men wouldn’t fight. They said to us, ‘What have you done for the State? What have you done for Islam, that we should support you?’ ”

  Hoda spent her days writing argumentative emails to the Islamic State authorities, laying out why her family’s demands were legitimate. She tried exegesis. She tried being litigious. Nothing worked. She befriended only civilian Syrians, rather than ISIS women, because she found the latter overwhelmingly catty and prone to shrieking and gossip. The Islamic sisterhood that Bird of Jannah had so movingly described seemed, in reality, more like an especially vicious season of Real Housewives. She felt bad for her madani friends, the civilians. They lived in a state of permanent fear, and the ISIS municipality also charged them three times more for electricity.

  Worst of all, though, were the coarse and pushy fighters trying to pick them up all the time. They would come by or send emissaries asking Hoda and her sisters for marriage. “They would want an answer that same evening! Isn’t that silly? They would say, ‘He’s from this or that place.’ One sentence! Not even, ‘He’s an architect or a doctor’!” she says, her face puckering in disapproval. “The men, they were just completely obsessed with women. They talked about women in their chat groups, on the street, walking with my dad, they would stop him and ask us, ‘Do you know anyone else who has daughters for us?’ ”

  The men in Hoda’s family eventually went to prison for refusing to fight. One uncle disappeared, and another died in an airstrike. The others spent three months in detention while Hoda worked the internet, trying to get help. She contacted the Indonesian embassy in Damascus; she sent messages to Raqqa Is Being Silently Slaughtered, a clandestine organization that sent news of ISIS atrocities into the world. Twice they hired smugglers to get them out, and both times the smugglers abandoned and robbed them before the border. The third time, the smugglers stole their cellphones, but at least got them across.

  Hoda and most of her family no longer wear the black abayas. They are back to the pristine white hijabs favored by women in Indonesia; they attract less attention when they leave the tent to collect water or food. At one of the cisterns in the center of the camp, people stop to chat under a sky that is starting to blush at the horizon; more people slowly come out of their tents to talk and stroll in the precious two-hour stretch of time, before and after sunset, when the heat gradually softens and the mosquitoes do not yet prey.

  * * *

  —

  NAHLA AHMED, FIFTEEN, LIVES IN one of the tents along with her brother and parents. The family is from East Raqqa. Her father had worked odd jobs as a handyman and kept a few sheep; they were the sort of people who couldn’t afford to flee anywhere at all. Nahla says the women in the cement compound were ISIS “punishers,” and swears she recognizes them from Raqqa. Once they cut up one of her flip-flops because it wasn’t black. That was back in the early days, before the cages and the crucifixions, before the militants’ methods became like those of Mexican drug cartels, who sent threatening messages with mutilated corpses in conspicuous public places.

  Nahla’s cousin was an electrician at an auto repair shop in Raqqa. One day an ISIS commander pitched up with his car and demanded it be fixed immediately. Under the two-caste system of ISIS rule, militants and their families always jumped to the front of the line. Her cousin told the commander to wait his turn. For this, he was beheaded. By that evening, everyone in the neighborhood, including the young man’s new bride, had heard the news. When I ask if Nahla thinks any of the ISIS women in the camp might have also suffered at the hands of men, men rabid enough to execute mechanics for minor impudence, Nahla narrows her eyes and laughs. “Have you ever heard of a criminal admitting his crime? They have no other choice than to say these things to you.”

  Other women from nearby tents have dropped in to visit Nahla. They talk of something they call the biting machine: a device with grips of serrated metal used by ISIS morality enforcers to punish women for dress infractions. The biting machine, they say, was whipped out and clamped onto a woman’s breast, inflicting a pinching bite. The descriptions of the machine vary widely and keep to the tones of a dark fairy tale: “It had terrible sharp fangs” or “the sharp teeth of a small shark.” Nahla’s friends are settled on the floor of the tent, nodding their heads at the accounts of the biting machine, which seems a figment of a collective imagination turned gothic.

  They describe punishments I have never heard of before: rubbing severed heads up against the bodies of women; grilling people alive in hot oil; holding women in cages in graveyards from nightfall till dawn. Did these things actually happen? It almost doesn’t matter. Their stories reflect the point at which the human mind can no longer tolerate the scope of actual violence and trauma to which it is exposed, and so the mind begins to disassociate, inventing darker, ever more grotesque tales in order to make the daily ones seem more tolerable. As we’re talking, Nahla’s older brother lies motionless on a mat, his back to the family, his face inches away from the tent fabric. He stays that way for a very long time.

  Around two hundred new people arrive at the camp every day. That evening, a man approaches the entrance carrying an injured child. He has walked the thirty-mile stretch from Raqqa. His red plaid shirt and long beard are caked with dust. His eyes are hollow and he takes slow, halting steps, holding the child with outstretched arms, as though he has reached a place of safety, as though there were someone there to take the child.

  * * *

  —

  AS AYESHA AND THE TURKESS are mounting their escape, Commander Salar retreats to the two-story, gutted-out municipal building in Ain Issa where he and his soldiers sleep. It is guarded by several rows of concrete barriers, whorls of barbed wire, and numerous checkpoints. A generator powers a television set that is tuned to a Kurdish network. Soldiers file in and out, arranging themselves on the cushions that line the walls.

  The ISIS women’s situation preys on Salar’s mind. Their presence in the camp is disruptive and precarious. He smokes cigarette after cigarette. “Some of these women have already been on television. Why aren’t their governments asking about them? Why don’t they take them back?” he says, shaking his head. “What am I supposed to do with them?”

  The fact is, no country wants its ISIS citizens back. To afford them due process is costly and time-consuming; evidence is often inadmissible or hard to come by. This makes it difficult to prosecute every ISIS woman or fighter who has committed atrocities, and the risk is that courts will have to allow many to go free or to impose light sentences. But equally there is no mechanism to account for the violence and coercion many members endured themselves at the hands of the group. How to sieve out the regretters and the dissenters, those who were appalled at what they found in the Islamic State and tried to escape but could not? Most Western countries have been content to make their ISIS citizens the problems of others—the Syrian Kurds, the Iraqi Kurds, the Iraqi criminal justice system. To inflict this on fragile countries already deeply securitized and struggling to recover from years of war is immoral; it also runs the risk of allowing ISIS members, men and women alike, to receive vengeance-as-justice or perhaps even worse, no justice at all.

  It was perhaps clear from early on in the conflict that Western nations had ceased viewing their ISIS citizens as their citizens at all. States like Britain, France, and the United States passed on “kill lists” early in the war to the Iraqi military. A British official said openly that “unfortunately, the only way of dealing with them will be, in almost every case, to kill them.”

  “It’s too difficult to take them back,” I say to Commander Salar. “Would you do it?”

  “If they were mine, yes. I would take them.”

  * * *

  —

  ONE OF THE ONLY ISIS women at ease in the camp is Khadija Omri, twenty-nine, a sturdy and olive-skinned Tunisian. S
he understands that the civilians in the camp see her as a blight, and that she has the first thirty seconds of each encounter to conquer that. She often manages to. Commander Salar has a high opinion of her. “She’s the intellectual among them, the only one who’s really thought through what happened.” When the soldiers need to convey directives to the ISIS women, they talk to Khadija.

  Khadija grew up in a dense, conservative neighborhood in Tunis, in a large, tight-knit family that was both pious and worldly. As a teenager she spent her time doing hip-hop dance and theater. Her brothers left for France as soon as they could, knowing there was no future for them in Tunisia. Their neighborhood was full of young men with no jobs, who sat around “helping” at kiosks selling tissues and nuts. For her brothers, turning their backs on Tunisia paid off: one became a successful chef, the other a prominent kickboxer.

  Khadija married a distant cousin, Mohammad Ali, who had a university degree in mathematics and was trained as a teacher, but who—lacking the right connections in the corrupt political system—sat at home, jobless, for a full six years. When they got married, he started working on construction sites, making little more than what an accomplished beggar might earn on a good day. One day, an old friend from university saw him working as a laborer and pulled him aside. “How come your situation is like this? Why don’t you pray more, and spend some time with us?” That’s when Mohammad Ali fell in with a local group of jihad-minded Salafis. He gave up on any prospect of a future in Tunisia and decided it was his duty to fight for God in Syria, to lend a hand to the brothers trying to establish a state.