Guest House for Young Widows

by Azadeh Moaveni

  Social and political specificity is essential to understanding any conflict, and policies that seek to deal with extremism in toto by imposing generic language and policy ideas on a range of societies are deeply misguided. They will at best fail and waste resources, and at worst may aggravate conditions by imposing punitive and wrong-minded solutions. I hope, after having spent time in the lives of these women, you will understand instinctively why this is the case.

  There is a shortage of accounts that consider how ordinary women in the Middle East are drawn to militancy as a last resort—after having sought peaceful, civic, alternative ways to negotiate themselves out of circumstances of poverty, instability, lawlessness, discrimination, corruption, state repression, and abuse. While recognizing how their gender shaped their choices, I do not see how we can disentangle their circumstances from the society around them, and indeed, from the condition of the states they lived under, and how those states interacted with the global order and marketplace, dominated still by the United States.

  Women may certainly experience wars, volatility, and state repression differently than men. But ultimately gender does not define their experience, it simply particularizes it; the women of this book have far more in common with the men around them than they do with women of wholly different countries.

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  LATE ONE AFTERNOON, ASMA, AWS, and Dua gather for lunch in an anonymous second-floor flat in the narrow back alleys of Urfa. A sour, salty smell wafts up from the sheep’s brain-and-tripe restaurant on the ground floor of the building. Asma and Dua haven’t seen Aws for a while, and she shows them a new butterfly necklace she had bought at the bazaar. None of them is working, because there were no jobs available in Urfa that even a semi-respectable Syrian woman could contemplate. For men, it wasn’t so bad to wash dishes in a restaurant or service cars; they were still bringing in some income, providing for the family.

  For women, such menial work clung to you somehow, and sullied you in the eyes of your fellow Syrians. Five years later, no one would remember what a man had had to do to get by, but they would remember forever if a woman had entered a Turkish family’s home to work as a cleaner. It was partly why the three of them thought constantly about leaving this world of Syrian refugees behind, to try to slip into some European city where they could start over again. In Europe there would be work that didn’t steal your honor; women wouldn’t stare at you viciously as some cheap prospect luring away their husband; and you could try to avoid other Arabs and Syrians and begin to forget what had been done to your country.

  It was striking, Asma thinks, how in Syria itself so much of that old clinging shame culture had started to ebb; women in cafés, women in universities, women inhabiting the public sphere as if they had a right to be there and had been there all along, all that had been becoming more commonplace in their lives. But here, in Urfa, it was as if a generation’s progress had been washed away overnight; everyone’s circumstances so reduced that all those more decent ways of being active, present, involved in life were once more out of reach; amid all the strain and dislocation, the old taboos were somehow rejuvenated and in the ascendant, even though women worked harder—as everyone was working harder—just to get by. It is said that war transforms women’s status in a society faster than any other sort of change. But it was not clear such a force would exert itself on the refugee diaspora that was now their home.

  With distance, they could see that they had participated in that regressive destruction themselves. Asma says she could not forgive the foreigners who had shown up in Syria, disrupting the revolution with their own designs. She moves closer to the window, though it offered no breeze to soften the heat. Aws shakes her head, disagreeing and recalling the black flags draped across Raqqa so shortly after the opposition took the city. She is still stunned that many in her community, the boys she had grown up with, had wanted a future like that, so inward-turning and orthodox, an Islam of sharia and little more. “The point is, all the sides who fought in Syria were Syrian. It was a fight amongst ourselves. No one was really a stranger.”

  But it was almost as if all the mistakes had long been written in advance. What strong, bright current could really have emerged from a murky sinister rule like that of the Assads, distinct and untouched by the industrial-scale brutality, ready to take a different course? There was no faction in the Syrian conflict that had ennobled itself, that hadn’t descended into a raw craving for power and had refrained from hurting others.

  That is what the girls tell themselves, at least, even though they know they could never look their Raqqa neighbors in the face again. Who could forget what had been done to their loved ones, and who was responsible? That community that had existed before the war, so humdrum in its habits, but in hindsight so innocent, was destroyed now, and irretrievable. People carried war wounds into their old age, handed memories and enmities down from generation to generation. Who could even think their little world could begin to recover now, when the suffering was so fresh? There was a slow trickle of Syrians heading back to their home cities and villages, but the very idea of normality, whatever that was, felt like a grand aspiration that would now forever be denied them. “Even if one day things are all right, I will never return,” says Aws. “Too much blood has been spilled on all sides. I’m not talking just about ISIS, but among everyone.”

  In the European cities that beckon in the distance, promising some better days on this earth, there remains an enduring fear of precisely this: that women like Asma, Aws, and Dua, as well as men who carried guns in Syria, would arrive as refugees and walk the streets, awaiting residency. It was said that an entire local command of Nusra, Syria’s al-Qaeda faction, were now gathered in the same German town.

  This residual fear is all that lingered of the Islamic State caliphate in the eyes of those who had never longed for one. For Sabira in London, reflecting on all that had transpired since the fateful day her brother stopped at the dawah stand on the high street so many years ago, the experience had left some part of her permanently adrift. Some people who had lost sisters and daughters to al-Baghdadi’s project mocked it caustically. “Land of borrow someone else’s car. Land of loser dying as a shaheed.” She still chafed at those who sweepingly described the brothers who had gone to fight as zombies; for some, her own, had been propelled by valor and principle, and though she herself had been young and foolish, and would live with the consequences forever, she would maintain that forever too.

  No one even said the words anymore—caliphate, khilafa, the abode of the faith, the land of Allah and his Prophet, Dar al-Islam—terms that had entered their conversation for a time like precious jewels. It had been enchanting just to have cause to say them, as though some window had opened up in the middle of their twenty-first-century lives, offering a glimpse of a way out, a glimpse of some kind of homeland, a future, a nation, a realm that fit. What to do now with all the hope and longing those words had held within them? Sabira imagined it would all just recede, back into whatever recess had existed before.

  That darkness had held much inchoate pain and longing, emotions much easier to bear when they were blunted and in the shadows. More than any, disappointment: Was this bleak present, this civilization, this fate, their only inheritance? To live as perpetual others within the West, within it but never of it, part of it; increasingly reviled; marked as different by their religion, even if that religion was only one thread of their identities; disconnected from any power; obliged to watch one Middle Eastern state fall after another. What has it to do with you? she had asked her brother again and again, before he left. He had tried to explain, but eventually gave up. As it said in Sura al-Baqarah of the Holy Quran, “But perhaps you hate a thing and it is good for you; and perhaps you love a thing and it is bad for you. And Allah Knows, while you know not.”

  NOTE TO READERS

  All of the women in this book are s
ingular, real people. I have changed the names and some minor biographical details of some, in order to ensure their privacy and security. The majority of their stories are drawn from extended in-person interviews conducted between 2015 and 2018 in the United Kingdom, Turkey, Tunisia, and Syria. In some cases, I sketched accounts and scenes based on conversations over the phone and in text messages with family members, friends, and other associates, and drew on reporting in the public domain. Where possible, I consulted as many sources as possible surrounding these stories and events as well as alternative perspectives, in an attempt to verify the truthfulness of the accounts.

  I spoke to more than twenty women associated with ISIS in the course of my reporting, and the families of several more. It was challenging to decide whose stories to include, because the women whose experiences most neatly reflected distinct aspects of ISIS’s appeal and recruitment weren’t necessarily the women to whom I had strong or consistent access. At the time I began my research, anyone touched by this subject was wildly skittish. It could take weeks to persuade even distant friends and relatives to talk, who then needed weeks of persuading to consider making further connections. The women themselves, regardless of place, were understandably frightened; they knew they were closely watched by security services and had little incentive to call attention to themselves. Some met with me once, got spooked, and then refused to meet a second time. Some simply disappeared. There was the Tunisian beaux arts student with the Communist tattoo who had fallen into what I can only describe as a subculture of Salafi hedonism; the London girl who grew enamored of the decidedly wrong footballer; the Iranian woman from a Kurdish village who claimed to have wandered into the caliphate in pursuit of IVF. If I had written a play, I would have sent them onstage in cameo roles, but on the page the already crowded cast of characters seemed to demand enough of the reader.

  In sections where I portray a wider social and political context in significant detail, I spent months and years, in some cases, reporting the background story myself. In Tunisia, for example, I interviewed imams, lawyers, jurists, activists, journalists, Western diplomats, academics, politicians, militants of various backgrounds, trying to re-create the recent past and assess the present context, as it was recounted to me. I spent time in the neighborhoods that became characters themselves, and lingered for hours in people’s living rooms. I watched video footage of protests and demonstrations that arose in people’s stories, and looked through many cellphone photo albums, catching glimpses of moments and people that my characters had described. In London, I spent years investigating and writing about the complex backstory to the Bethnal Green girls’ disappearance, which is foregrounded by the evolution of the British Muslim community itself and its increasingly tense relationship with a political and media establishment sympathetic and tilting to the far right.

  The intimacy of some of the accounts reflects two things. First, the closeness I felt to the places, characters, and story. Sitting with a Tunisian mother railing against her loose daughters, an impulsive British Pakistani girl railing against her stuffy parents, sitting with young Syrian women negotiating marriage demands amidst a dark new order that had descended overnight, the seductive appeal of political radicalism brewed together with religion, the disdain of the educated Tunisian liberal for the veiled or bearded opponent, all of these dynamics felt deeply familiar to me. While I don’t appear in this narrative at all, I could hear my adolescence, my mother, our family and national history, echoing through all of it.

  Second, though I often relied on a translator, given the range of Arabic dialects and social backgrounds I was working across, I conducted interviews that touched on intimate matters alone with sources, without the awkward presence of a man or any third party in the room.

  The question may arise as to whether my Iranian background might have complicated my research. I was heartened that it did not. Like any reporter, I judged when to share personal information based on the relationship and degree of rapport and trust I established with sources. Being able to blend in physically and sharing a basic religious literacy certainly helped.

  I am acutely aware that these stories do not tell the comprehensive story of all ISIS women, and that many engaged in atrocities that amounted to war crimes. That fact stands starkly as its own truth. I have tried to write most closely from the perspective of the women themselves, while providing background that might make their actions intelligible. The context is there to illuminate not to justify, and judgment remains the prerogative of the reader.

  Ethical considerations matter, even with ISIS suspects. I will state openly, and wish more colleagues would do the same, that women associated with ISIS being held by Kurdish or Iraqi security forces consent to interviews in the context of civilian detention, but detention nonetheless. They may not feel safe disclosing their real views about anything, from ISIS itself to the conditions in which they are being held. The things they say, whether truthful, false, or simply coerced, may put them at risk of abuse. This must be acknowledged when writing and reporting about them, along with the ethical and legal concerns it raises. Journalists dart back to the safety of Western capitals, their front-page stories or podcast material in hand, rarely thinking about the fate of the female sources they leave behind, whether they are now more vulnerable to abuse or wrongful prosecution because of things they have said, their identities almost never protected. I elected not to include the experience of at least one interviewee in the narrative, because I felt the conditions of her detention were too securitized to consider her nominal consent freely given.

  I relied on a number of publications by academics, journalists, and researchers in the course of my writing, including work by Nadia Marzouki, Hamza Meddeb, Fabio Marone, Rory McCarthy, Youssef Cherif, Habib Sayah, Darryl Li, Thomas Hegghammer, Shadi Hamid, Max Weiss, Stéphane Lacroix, Shiraz Maher, Joas Wagemakers, Guido Steinberg, Madawi al-Rasheed, Michael Ayari, Sam Heller, and Richard Atwood, as well as the following books: Arun Kundnani, The Muslims Are Coming: Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror; Lisa Wedeen, Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria; Hanna Batatu, Syria’s Peasantry, the Descendants of Its Lesser Rural Notables, and Their Politics; Lisa Stampnitzky, Disciplining Terror: How Experts Invented “Terrorism”; Mohammad Abu Rumman, Hasssan Abu Hanieh, Infatuated with Martyrdom: Female Jihadism from al-Qaeda to the “Islamic State”; Mohammad-Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou, A Theory of ISIS: Political Violence and the Transformation of Global Order, Global Salafism: Islam’s New Religious Movement, edited by Roel Meijer; Rania Abouzeid, No Turning Back: Life, Loss, and Hope in Wartime Syria.

  For Nader

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book originated in a story for The New York Times, and for that I owe thanks to Terry McDermott, Dean Baquet, Michael Slackman, and Doug Schorzman. Also to Tara Tadros-Whitehill, for her images.

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  Thank you to Ann Pitoniak, my editor, who brought such keen intellect, vision, and devotion to this book. Also at Random House, thanks to my shepherding editor Hilary Redmon, and to Molly Turpin and London King. Thank you to my agent, Natasha Fairweather. I am grateful to the support of the New America Fellows program, as well as to Arizona State University: Awista Ayoub, Peter Bergen, and Daniel Rothman.

  In Germany, Turkey, and Syria, thank you to Yasser al-Hajji. Also, Björn Stritzel and Abu Ibrahim Raqqawi of Raqqa Silently Slaughtered. I am indebted to Mahmoud Sheikh Ibrahim, for his integrity and for keeping us safe. Thank you to the Ain Issa/Raqqa command of the Syrian Democratic Forces. In Iraq and the KRG, thanks to Shilan Dosky and Aziz Ahmed.

  In Tunis, thanks to Habib Sayah, Youssef el-Sharif, Seifeddine Farjani, Laryssa Chomiak, and Moenes Sboui. I am grateful to Hassan Moraja. To the encampment of Naveena Kottoor, Joachim Paul, and Magda Elhaitem, for offering me space, and later for being readers. For Rad Addala, who opened all the doors—I cannot
begin to gather all the thanks I need.

  Thank you to a great many people in London: Salman Farsi, Ben Ferguson, Fatima Saleria, Yasminara Khan, Tam Hussein, Sajid Iqbal, Jemima Khan, Moazzam Begg, Ibrahim Mohamoud, Mohammed Rabbani, Asim Qureshi. Thank you to Melanie Smith and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue for access to their archive. Special thanks to Tasnime Akunjee, for updates over the years. At the Kingston University Department of Journalism, for support and great encouragement, thanks to Beth Brewster, Maria Ahmed, Fiona O’Brien, and especially Brian Cathcart. Thanks to Dan Townend, for help finding things. At the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, thanks to Simon Shercliff and Jenny Pearce. And to GR, for a religious education of sorts and patient answers to many questions.

  Thanks to reporter friends for operational advice: Lindsey Hilsum, Owen Bennet Jones, Richard Spencer, Jim Muir, Lyse Doucet, and Leena Saeedi.

  For research help, thanks to Alice Wojcik, Ameet Ubhi, Lindsey Allemang, and Asha Hussein.

  Thanks to the editors I have worked with along the way: Alicia Wittmeyer, McKenna Stayner, David Shariatmadari, Jonathan Landman, Joanna Biggs, and Toby Lichtig.

  Thank you to friends who read early and late: Joseph Logan, Mohammed Bazzi, Rifat Siddiqui, Lisa Beyer, Adam Shatz, Kareem Fahim, Zahra Hankir, Scheherezade Faramarzi, and especially Bassem Mroue. Thank you to Rozita Riazati and Sarah Weigel. Extremely belatedly, thanks to Khaled Dawoud.