When Mohammad Ali left Tunis in late 2013, there was no ISIS yet. Just Jabhat al-Nusra and other rebel groups who were fighting back against Assad. Khadija eventually followed him, against her family’s wishes. She traveled with her one-year-old daughter, and was pregnant already with her second. A few short months after her arrival, Mohammad Ali was killed fighting against the Free Syrian Army in Aleppo.
Like others, she ended up in a Guest House for Widows. The house matron was a brutal and powerful woman, the daughter of Abu Luqman, the ISIS Emir of Raqqa. If a widow offended her, she would ban her from the common rooms in the house, and keep her locked up in a small room with her children the whole day. Food would be passed through the door. She refused to refer to Khadija’s daughters, Barra and Sajida, by name, and designated numbers for them, 99 and 88, instead. When a young British Somali woman hurt her foot, the matron accused her of faking injury and refused to take her to the hospital. When her husband, also British, returned from his military training to pick her up, she could barely walk. He filed a negligence complaint that went nowhere. A Syrian woman went into labor in the middle of the night, and the matron couldn’t be roused to take her to the hospital. The woman gave birth in the bathroom. Her baby didn’t survive. “By then, I hated the State,” Khadija says.
By the time Khadija remarried, in early 2015, the cities ISIS controlled were littered with men who had been seriously injured in battle and were handicapped at home, addicted to opioid painkillers. Some were organizing a rebellion against Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. They would write openly on Facebook about the injustices and brutality they saw around them, sharing posts by prominent Islamist scholars speaking out against ISIS. They wrote, “We are here on the ground and we can tell you there is no way the Prophet, peace be upon him, would do something like this, the things that we are seeing.”
At first, Khadija and her second husband, Abdi, didn’t trust each other enough to reveal their real views about ISIS. He worried she might betray him if he told her what he really thought; she worried the same. In their circle of Tunisians, many men had been executed for refusing to fight or trying to escape. Some Tunisians tried to move to the distant countryside, where ISIS had little or no presence.
Eventually Abdi and Khadija came to understand they had the most important thing in common—their only aspiration was to get out of ISIS territory alive. Abdi forbade her from talking to any ISIS women and from going to the mosque. “He didn’t believe it was Islam anymore, what they were doing,” Khadija says. In the end, they moved to Mayadin, one of ISIS’s most important strongholds near the Iraqi border, and Abdi joined a gang of fighters trying to raise money to escape by stealing ISIS cars and selling them in nearby rural towns. In those final weeks, Khadija witnessed things that would remain lodged in her mind until her time on God’s earth was over. Not long after she gave birth to her first child with Abdi, Khadija and a friend visited an acquaintance’s house. There was a Yazidi girl there, from Sinjar, being kept in the family as a slave. Her eyes were dull, as though she were anesthetized. When she saw Khadija, she jumped up and asked if she could hold her baby. Once the infant was in her arms, she cradled it to her chest, rocked back and forth, and cried silently.
“What’s with this girl? Did her baby die?” Khadija whispered to her friend. The friend explained that the Yazidi girl had recently given birth and that her ISIS captor had taken the baby away and given it to his infertile wife. Khadija even heard tales, as the city was close to crumbling, of a brothel off Tal Abyad Street. It was a house where fighters visited kept women, because they were tired of polygamy and squabbling co-wives, tired of the WhatsApp groups with pictures of Yazidi girls for sale, tired of having to bear responsibility for a woman through formal possession and subjugation.
“A lot of us left our families and came to this place, because we wanted to live in a country that follows the real Islam,” Khadija says. “I lived under the Islamic State for four years. I didn’t see a single thing that resembles real Islam. All they cared about was women, pleasure, money, and power. Many of the Tunisians, we doubted whether Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi even exists. If he does, why doesn’t he show his face?”
There are Kurdish soldiers continuously passing through the cement room where Khadija sits, recounting these stories. One young man stops and says to her, “If it was so bad, why didn’t you leave earlier? How do we know you’re not just saying these things now that ISIS is defeated?”
“I will speak for myself,” she says. “If ISIS was real, I would not have left it. I would’ve preferred to die there, rather than leaving. But it was not easy, leaving the State. If you disappear even for a little while, everyone starts asking about you. Everyone watches you. It was almost impossible. Even my husband feared speaking to me about leaving, at first.”
In June 2017, they managed to get smuggled out. In the smugglers’ safe houses, there were anxieties about crossing, fears of getting raped by the Kurds or the Iraqi army or Assad’s military. Soon after they reached the border, they were arrested by American and Kurdish soldiers. Khadijah wept, convinced she would be raped. But the Kurdish soldier next to her in the car squeezed her hand, and told her to calm down. It was the month of Ramadan, the heat bearing down like a furnace, and at dusk, the Americans brought them food and drinks. An American soldier brought her something to lay the baby down on. “How come he did not rape me? It completely changed the way I thought.” She felt humbled that unbelievers would treat her with such decency.
Khadija likes walking near the kiosks and talking to other women in the camp. She is hungry to speak and be spoken to. Life in the camp would be easier if she stopped wearing her black robes, but she clings to them, defensive about their meaning. “Let me tell you, this is not ISIS clothing! This is the clothing of the wives of the Prophet, the clothing of the women of Islam. It is an Islamic outfit. I have also heard that the queen of England wears dark clothing and sometimes covers her hair. Is this true?”
I don’t have the heart to tell her yes, but only when she is driving her Range Rover around the highlands of Balmoral.
* * *
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THE COALITION OFFENSIVE TO RETAKE Raqqa is razing the city to the ground. The American, British, and French planes strike thousands of times, deploying tens of thousands of rounds of artillery. These strikes are conducted by a command center 1,200 miles away in the Persian Gulf state of Qatar, based on scant seconds of observation and often outdated intelligence. Journalists who visit sites of coalition strikes in Iraq find that one in five result in civilian death, a rate thirty-one times that acknowledged by the coalition.
In Raqqa, the U.S. military operates on the belief that Raqqa is no city for civilians anyway; that to be in Raqqa is to have asked for death. The city is pulverized, street by street. Raqqa, like much of Mosul, becomes a city of rubble.
At the Ain Issa refugee camp, the night is sometimes quiet, sometimes punctured with the sound of aircraft. They are soaring toward Raqqa city, just thirty miles south of the camp, where we sit outside under the dark night sky frantic with stars. It is the closest I have been to Amira, Sharmeena, and Shamima in the months and year that have passed since I went in search of them. Since arriving, I wonder if they will have tried to escape among the final exodus from the city. Could they not have slipped in among the women who made it to this camp?
* * *
—
HAJAR. THE NAME MEANS ONE who migrates, and it is apt for this woman, her eyes roaming and hard with contempt. Hajar is in her late twenties, with skin white and translucent like paper. She is reluctant to talk, because she is the only one of these women who is neither regretful nor willing to lie. Commander Salar says her father-in-law is an important senior ISIS figure and that during the first few days of her detention, Hajar threatened his men with torture and beheading, were they to harm her. That was two weeks ago. In the interim, no one has come to rescue her, and her tone
is softening. Salar says she won’t speak to anyone, but tells me I’m free to try, as she is free to continue saying no.
She wavers for a second, deliberating whether to speak to us. Mahmoud, who accompanies me, is a Syrian Kurd, and I realize she wants to ask him for information. To the ISIS women, every Kurd they meet is a YPG soldier. To Mahmoud, every ISIS woman is a liar.
She does not know that Mahmoud is from Ain Issa itself, the town that houses the camp. That he moved there from Homs to teach school, contending with the domineering local Ba’ath Party members. That his son was born in Ain Issa, that he and his wife bought their first house there, a house he eventually had to flee with his little son on his back, leaving everything behind. The three of them had to travel through a snowstorm across the mountains into Iraqi Kurdistan; his son was almost lost on the way. The very morning I met Mahmoud, he returned to the Ain Issa house for the first time after three years away. It was pocked with bullet holes, one corner of the roof collapsing over the living room. He peered through the bars on the door and pointed at the flowered red cloth his wife had hung at the end of the corridor because she said it blocked smells from the kitchen. “It’s still there,” he said, smiling broadly.
Hajar’s older children are lost, or at least lost to her. She left them with a neighbor to go collect her husband’s ISIS salary in Raqqa, and then she was captured by Kurdish fighters en route back to Mayadin, where they were living. She had her baby, Jihad, with her, but has not been able to speak to her son and daughter. They are seven and five.
“If someone was killed, would they burn him?” Hajar asks Mahmoud. She is really asking, If Kurdish soldiers killed my ISIS fighter husband, as I suspect, would they then have thrown him into a ditch or set him on fire, or wrapped him in a shroud and given him an Islamic burial?
Mahmoud recoils at this question. “Who knows? Last week they burned an imam to death in front of his mosque.” He is really saying, How dare you impute such a punishment to us?
“ISIS?” she asks.
“Who else? No one else burns but ISIS.”
“I am asking about the Kurds. He was taken by them.”
“No, they don’t kill detainees. They are organized. They take the injured to hospitals.”
“I asked one of the commanders,” she says, nodding her head toward the outpost where the Kurdish soldiers sit. “He told me, ‘Your husband is in hell.’ ”
“We don’t know where he is.”
“I need to know if he is alive or not. And I need to know what will happen to me. Do you know? Will there be a court hearing for the women?”
Hajar. In a sense, she is the ISIS woman I have been waiting for, all these months and years. A true believer; a real female jihadist. Not some fatherless teenager groomed and manipulated by slick propaganda. Not some lost soul who fell for a smooth-talking brother with pious swagger. Not some naïve, forlorn sister following a brother, a loyal-to-a-fault wife following a husband. Not some narcissistic drifter looking to rebel and live in comfort on the pain and misery of others. Not some mentally unstable divorcee. Not some sincere but insufficiently skeptical believer who thought a kingdom of heaven, forged in the middle of bloody war, would save her husband or family from debt and joblessness.
Hajar is none of those things. She believes it all. She believes in the coming apocalypse that al-Baghdadi prophesied and the already apparent signs of the end of times. Her language is replete with scripture about the land blessed in the Quran itself. She says, “There will be a lot of blood. When you walk, you won’t find a place to put your feet, there will be so much blood.” Hajar is meant to be the personification of the apocalyptic darkness at the very heart of ISIS, stripped of explanations and grievances and justifications.
But even Hajar has a story, and it is the story of Syria itself: the authoritarian rule of the Assad dynasty, and the lengths it has always been willing to go—massacres, oppression, and bloodshed—to retain absolute power. Hajar was born in 1990 in the city of Hama, to a mother and father who had lost their spirit and dignity well before she was even born. She is the daughter of a family, like so very many others, whose early inheritance was loss.
When the city of Hama rose up against Hafez al-Assad in 1982, Hajar’s father dropped out of the military to join the revolt, as did most of the men of the city, including many who had nothing to do with the Muslim Brotherhood. When Assad dispatched his troops to raze the city, four in Hajar’s family were killed: two paternal uncles, one maternal uncle, and a cousin. The cousin died stupidly, shot in the back while riding his motorcycle.
Hajar’s father had been training to be a pilot, but after the massacre there was clearly no future for him in the military. For a long while, he stayed at home, depressed, and then finally set up a shop selling doors and windows. Hama in those years was a traumatized city. Its residents walked through streets cleared of the corpses, past new busts of the president emblazoned, insultingly, with the creed of Islam, There is no God but God, and Mohammad is his messenger. There was a cemetery not far from the playground near her house, where many of those killed in the uprising were buried. Her family, she recalls, were devastated by the events. “Many of their relatives were killed, many went missing. There were some people we knew who stayed in prison for twenty years. My parents were very angry.”
Mahmoud listens to Hajar impassively. Being asked about Hama, about the past, has relaxed her and she is now speaking more openly. She describes her family as “committed, not extremist.” Mahmoud whispers to me, “No one in Hama is moderate! Their moderate is extremist.”
Hajar grew up wanting to be a doctor, but her father ended her education early and asked her to get married. “I didn’t want to, but I agreed for his sake. I had to obey him.” She was a young mother and housewife when events in the poor southern town of Dara’a sparked the 2011 protests against the government, now in the hands of Hafez al-Assad’s son, Bashar.
Hajar’s father came alive again, as though awakened from a three-decade stupor. “We thought this time, Bashar would fall quickly,” she says. “We never thought there would be so many factions, that it would expand and expand.” Every day, her father left the house, helping the wounded. The Syrian military raided their house daily, usually around five in the morning. They came with armored vehicles and tanks. They brought green passenger buses and rounded up men, cars, motorbikes, indiscriminately. “Assad or I burn the country,” the president declared, meaning, It’s either me or destruction.
And what it meant for Syrians was this: 500,000 killed, 11 million refugees including the internally displaced, cities of rubble. Young men and young women with stellar educations, who once dreamed of cosmopolitan careers and happy families, now impoverished and stateless, focused only on subsistence.
It is arguably the most defining conflict of our time, and yet, has there ever been a modern conflict so readily misunderstood? The Syrian civil war, now drawing to a close, is most often viewed as a sectarian war between Shia and Sunnis, a proxy conflict between Iran and Gulf Arab states, and a contest for the upper-hand among those Arab states themselves. Those who wish to excuse America’s role in exacerbating the conflict call it a war of Iranian aggression, abetted by Russia; those who wish to challenge U.S. hegemony minimize Assad’s war crimes and paint his opposition as al-Qaeda fanatics.
All these descriptions carry whispers of truth, but they elide Syria’s many other divides—the fractures among Syrian Sunnis themselves, along class and geographic lines, degrees of religiosity and secularism; the frightened early turn of Syria’s other religious minorities, the Christians and the Druze, in favor of Assad, whose decades of familial authoritarian rule seemed safer than any alternative that might replace it; the decision of millions of Syrians to simply stay put, not out of loyalty but because they wearied of fighting, or chose the regime as a lesser evil.
Then there is the
fluid nature of the opposition, which includes men like Hajar’s husband, so intent on bringing down Assad that they moved pragmatically between whatever groups seemed best poised to accomplish that goal. Hajar’s husband started out with the CIA-backed Free Syrian Army, then moved to the Nusra Front, which was called an al-Qaeda affiliate. Then, finally, to ISIS.
One day Hajar’s father left the house, as usual, to organize with other men in the city. He never returned. Two months after he disappeared, a man called Hajar’s mobile phone, claiming to be a friend of her father’s from the FSA. She asked to speak to him and the man told her it was not possible, that her father was injured. But she never saw him again.
* * *
—
IT WAS IN AL HOL, on the western flank of Syria, about two hundred and fifty kilometers west of Ain Issa, in that fetid, freezing camp brimming with people, that Shamima Begum surfaced again, in the eyes of the world. “I’m a sister from London, I’m one of the Bethnal Green girls,” she told the British journalist who found her, and splashed her face and interview on the front pages of The Times.
* * *
—
AT THIS POINT, THREE OF the Bethnal Green girls—Amira, Shamima, and Sharmeena—were still alive. A month earlier, in late January 2019, as the Syrian Democratic Forces pressed down on the final remaining sliver of territory ISIS held in southeastern Syria, in an area known as Baghuz, the girls weighed what to do. The husbands of Amira and Sharmeena had been killed in previous bouts of fighting. They were single and alone, but still zealous and determined to stay with the caliphate to its final end. The winter was freezing cold and they were now continually on the move, scarcely eating, sleeping under trees. Shamima’s husband was still alive. He still believed, for no reason seemingly beyond blind faith, that the group might prevail.
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