Black Wave

by Kim Ghattas

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  In Raqqa, Yassin pondered the strange fate of his city, which could have been the capital of free Syria, or the headquarters of the IRGC. When Yassin was released from prison in 1996, he had returned to Raqqa to embrace his parents, brothers, and sister. Deep in the Syrian hinterland, both neglected and exploited by the state for years, the city of his youth was conservative but not Islamist. Society was patriarchal and traditional, but men and women mixed somewhat freely; more women were going to college. They wore T-shirts and dresses, or long flowing abayas and a loose veil if they were more conservative. But Yassin also noticed something he had never seen during his youth: women covered in a black cloak from head to toe, their faces behind niqabs. One of his relatives was among the thousands of Syrians who’d worked in the Gulf. A failure at school, this man had amassed a bit of wealth and Saudi customs: his wife, in turn, had adopted the Saudi garb. At the time, Yassin didn’t pay it too much mind. It all felt like a fashion that people would grow out of, just a passing fad.

  What felt very permanent was the construction site funded by Iran. A huge new structure was rising on the southeastern edge of the city, where the cemetery used to be. In 1988, local residents had been given three months to move the tombs of their loved ones to a new location. Left behind were two simple concrete tombs, long believed to be the burial site of two companions of the prophet, both killed in battle in 657. For centuries, the tombs had been a site of veneration by Raqqawis and local tribesmen. Sufis came too, and women prayed to be granted husbands and children. Over centuries, Shias and Sunnis had alternated claiming the saints as theirs. The new project was funded by Iran, and the architecture was typically Iranian: two square structures, each topped by a dome and flanked by a minaret, on either side of a fifty-meter-long esplanade with arches. When the mosque was completed in 2004, it was not just the largest Shia shrine in Syria, bedecked in beautiful, Persian blue tiles, but also an Iranian outpost in the Sunni hinterland, complete with portraits of Khomeini and Khamenei. Raqqawis had tried to stop the construction—these were their saints, their pilgrimage sites. The complex deprived them of their traditions and collective memory. There were no Shias anywhere nearby, but Iranian pilgrims began to flock to the site, clerics from Hezbollah spoke at the mosque, and the Iranian cultural center in Aleppo organized rallies there. There were attempts to convert locals to Shiism as well. Iran’s efforts to invest and lay claim to Shia religious sites in Syria—even going as far as reinventing them—were all part of a strategy to expand its authority beyond its borders. Some of this effort had started as early as May 1979, just months after the Iranian Revolution, when a huge piece of land adjoining the Sayyeda Zaynab shrine in Damascus had been expropriated and turned over to a joint Iranian-Syrian construction company that would build hotels in the vicinity of the shrine to accommodate an ever-growing number of Shia pilgrims. Visited by Sunnis for centuries, the shrine became an exclusively Shia experience, an Iranian project.

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  In January 2014, ISIS declared Raqqa the capital of the new caliphate. In March, ISIS blew up the Iranian outpost in Raqqa. It had long been desecrated, with graffiti on the walls declaring it a Sunni mosque; the portraits of Khomeini and Khamenei were removed and destroyed. After the explosions, Hezbollah and Iran could justify their involvement in the war in Syria by claiming they had to protect Shia shrines. Groups like ISIS and other Islamists could brandish sites as proof that Iran was trying to take over Sunni land. A religious war had been invented by men hungry for power, land, and guns. Sunnis across the Arab world, especially in the Gulf, began donating to support fellow Sunnis fighting against Assad and the Iranian project. Much of the money made its way to jihadist groups. Iran began recruiting more fighters from farther afield: hundreds of Shias from Pakistan and Afghanistan made their way to Iraq and Syria.

  Meanwhile, the two hundred thousand inhabitants of Raqqa were suddenly given a gruesome lead role they had never asked for. Yassin’s hometown would make global headlines and become synonymous with inhuman suffering. The reign of terror began with a crucifixion: two people shot and crucified in the city’s public square, left for days for all to see. Another crucifixion followed. Then came a group execution of men who appeared to be defeated rebels from a rival group. The executioners cut heads off bodies and planted them on fence posts. Raqqa had never seen public violence of this kind; no one in Syria had. Even Assad conducted his torture and executions behind walls. ISIS wanted to instill fear so extreme as to elicit obedience. Women were required to veil and cover their faces. Soon they would hardly dare leave the house. An all-female morality police, the Khansaa brigade, which included foreigners, began to patrol ruthlessly. Schools were closed for months and reopened only when ISIS had redesigned the curriculum to mirror its ideology. ISIS promoted its violence as a spectacle, with a media operation that produced slick videos, grabbing the headlines in the Western media, while Assad’s secret industry of torture and executions continued to swallow thousands of Syrians.

  That spring and throughout the summer, Baghdadi and his men launched a spectacular offensive that took the world by surprise—especially President Obama and his administration, who had dismissed ISIS as a minor player on the scene, thereby justifying America’s lack of intervention. Months of preparation went into the plan as Baghdadi’s men fanned out across Syria, setting up local governing infrastructures, hunting down FSA rebels, and recruiting more men. In Iraq, ISIS freed some five hundred prisoners, many of them from the Zarqawi days, men who would swell the ranks of a rapidly growing force. Baghdadi fueled the flames with a wave of shocking bomb attacks that would drive Sunnis into the arms of his organization, seeking protection as the state continued to fail them. The big offensive began on June 5, from Baghdadi’s hometown of Samarra. Within days, columns of men, packed onto the back of pickups, or driving military vehicles stolen from the Iraqi army, overran land from Mosul in northeast Iraq across the border and into Syria. The Iraqi army collapsed as Baghdadi’s men took town after town, seizing control over territory that stretched from just outside Baghdad all the way up to the Turkish border. It was a stunning defeat: several thousand lightly armed men facing down a national army twenty times larger, much of it equipped by the Americans. The loot was worth millions. The control over oil fields brought in even more. But victory in the name of a caliphate was invaluable for the zealots; it was a victory against history.

  The territory had a rich cultural past. Far from re-creating it, Baghdadi brought with him a sledgehammer to smash history into smithereens, trying to eradicate the collective identity of millions. Iraq and Syria, cradles of ancient civilizations, were losing not only their future but also their past. In Mosul, ISIS burned down or ransacked centuries-old libraries, destroying invaluable manuscripts and maps. In the ancient Assyrian city of Nineveh, a pneumatic drill was used to gouge out the eyes of a nine-ton winged bull statue, once a symbol of the power of Assyrian kings. In Syria, ISIS destroyed an ancient Greek settlement that included the world’s oldest known church and synagogue. The site had been so well preserved through the centuries that it was referred to as the Pompeii of the Syrian Desert. ISIS destroyed two of its temples and later beheaded the archaeologist who had looked after the site for forty years. There is always looting and wanton destruction in war, but this was purposeful, ruthless, and relentless vandalism. ISIS justified these brutal acts by claiming it was fighting polytheism and idolatry. Baghdadi was also turning his back on the long tradition of caliphs who had encouraged art, history, and literature.

  Not since the founding of the modern Saudi state had there been such a cultural rampage in the Middle East, such bizarre, misguided obsession with breaking statues and shrines. And not since the days of Muhammad ibn Abdelwahhab and the first Saudi state had there been such fanatical zeal in eliminating those who were outside the narrow confines of an extremely puritanical worldview. The comparisons with Wahhabism and Saudi Arabia, identified early by Ahmed, the novelist in Egypt,
began to abound. In Saudi Arabia, many watched with deep anguish the destruction of Syrian and Iraqi heritage, a violent gesture that was all too common in the kingdom. The Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi recognized much of what was happening in Syria from his time covering the Afghan jihad: the eagerness of young men to join a cause, the desire to defend fellow Sunnis against an enemy, a haphazard effort by the government to help, guns flowing freely, extreme ideas taking hold.

  Jamal looked at ISIS and he saw Wahhabism untamed, in its purest form.

  Indeed, members and supporters of the group wrote pamphlets describing Baghdadi as walking in the footsteps of Ibn Abdelwahhab, continuing his mission of upholding extreme monotheism while fighting idolatry and imposing Islamic law on seized territory.

  Saudi Arabia vehemently rejected the comparisons with ISIS and pointed out that the group had in fact declared war against the kingdom. It was true that Saudi Arabia had neither funded nor armed ISIS, and it was also true that ISIS had the kingdom in its sights—but this was because the zealots believed the House of Saud had strayed from the true mission of Ibn Abdelwahhab. ISIS was Saudi progeny, the by-product of decades of Saudi-driven proselytizing and funding of a specific school of thought that crushed all others, but it was also a rebel child, a reaction to Saudi Arabia’s own hypocrisy, as it claimed to be the embodiment of an Islamic state while being an ally of the West.

  Yassin did not spend much time studying the nuances of ISIS’s theological differences with other Salafist militant groups. This was primarily because more than 90 percent of the half million people who had died in Syria had been killed by Assad, while the West was obsessed with the phenomenon that was ISIS. But Yassin also saw most violent Islamists as mere nihilists intent on destruction. So while he understood why Syrians or Iraqis might have joined out of despair after being abandoned by the world, out of necessity, or perhaps out of conviction that this was a righteous path, he had no time for foreign Muslims from Europe or Arab countries who swarmed places like Raqqa, acting like the new colonizers or settlers. And he cared nothing for Saudi Arabia’s efforts to distance itself from ISIS—the kingdom may not have directed the rise of this cult of fanatics, but it had done more than enough to feed the various Islamic nihilists who were hijacking the revolution and destroying Syria. One of the men that Saudi Arabia had backed in the Syrian war had ripped out Yassin’s heart.

  On December 9, 2013, at 10:40 p.m., a group of masked, armed men had barged into the office in Douma where Samira was working along with three friends: Razan Zeitouneh, Wael Hamada, and Nazem Hammadi. Razan was one of the founders of the Violations Documentation Center, which tracked human rights abuses. She had received threats before from a group calling itself the Army of Islam, Jaysh al-Islam, but no one took them seriously. For a while after Samira and her colleagues were kidnapped, Yassin was in denial, hoping they would be released quickly. But days, then weeks, then months passed—and nothing. Yassin was already in exile; in October, he had fled to Turkey. Samira had been worried about his safety in Raqqa and had pressed him to leave. They had been looking for ways to get her out of Syria as well. Now he had lost his homeland, his brothers, his soul mate. He may have felt broken, but he didn’t buckle. He kept writing, calling out the monsters. “[Samira’s] abductors represent an Islamist re-creation of the cruelty against which the revolution originally erupted,” Yassin wrote a few months later in a newspaper article. “The case of Samira and her colleagues represents the case of Syria, trapped between the regime, the embodiment of brutality, and the Islamists, the embodiment of inhumanity. For the two, the prisons were the first thing they cared about in whatever area they control.”

  The leader of Jaysh al-Islam was Zahran Alloush, son of a Salafist preacher from Douma, who had trained in Saudi Arabia, where he remains to this day. Alloush himself had studied at the Islamic University of Medina. Back in Syria, his Salafist activism landed him in jail in 2009, but he was one of the many Islamists that Assad had released in 2011. Alloush started his own faction, which slowly grew into a brigade and then a small army, thanks to generous funding that flowed to him from his family contacts in Saudi Arabia. He, too, wanted to build a theocracy ruled by Islamic law, an Islamic state, just a bit less brutal than ISIS. He called for a Syria cleansed of Shias. But he had no ambitions outside Syria and he did not behead Westerners, so he made fewer headlines. When it became clear at the end of 2013 that the United States would not intervene on behalf of Syrian rebels, Saudi Arabia decided to throw its weight and checkbook behind Alloush, spending millions to train and arm his group. Alloush even traveled to Saudi Arabia to meet with officials. But while the Saudis knew how to throw money at a problem, they had no real ability to follow through on their strategy. Money was flowing to Syria from other Gulf countries, like Qatar and Kuwait. Instead of working together toward a common goal, rivalries emerged among the Gulf countries as they fought for influence in Syria. America’s disinterest in helping bring down Assad continued to function as a rallying cry: hundreds of jihadists and wannabe jihadists, but also losers of all kinds, flocked to Syria. Some joined al-Nusra, others joined ISIS. They came from Europe, from Russia, from Egypt and Jordan. After Tunisia, the largest number of Arab fighters came from Saudi Arabia—although the number was lower per capita in relation to the size of the kingdom’s population.

  In exile, Yassin watched as these foreigners laid claim to his country and stole the Syrian revolution, not just the Sunni ones but also the Shias—the biggest group of foreign fighters was in fact on Iran’s side. Iran had been recruiting actively all the way in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Estimates put the numbers of Shia fighters in Syria anywhere between twenty thousand and eighty thousand. They were Iran’s very own transnational army. Iran was also chipping away at its project to build a contiguous area of influence from Iran through Iraq into Syria and all the way to Lebanon. In Syria, it was forcing demographic changes by implanting families of Shia fighters of various nationalities or displaced families from Iraq in areas around Shia shrines; there were population swaps, and Syria’s few Shias from villages deep in Sunni areas were moved to villages in areas under Assad and Iran’s control. Hezbollah was using the template that had served so well in Lebanon to build a “resistance society” in Syria, setting up Islamic Mahdi scouts, offering public services, and caring for families of martyrs.

  In a few more years, Yassin’s hometown and vast areas of Iraq, including large parts of Mosul, would be little more than a pile of rubble, devastated by a US-led bombing campaign to defeat ISIS. The destruction would defy belief, with whole city blocks flattened. The toll on civilians was shocking: hostages of ISIS in their own city for four years, they would die in air strikes meant to liberate them. Whole families were wiped out in an instant; sixteen hundred civilians were killed during months of shelling. But by October 2017, America could claim victory against ISIS. The Iranians would be quick to come back to Raqqa, to rebuild the shrines ISIS had blown up.

  In the end, the most emblematic confrontation between ISIS and the IRGC happened not in Raqqa but seven hours away on the southernmost point of the Syrian border with Iraq, at the crossing of al-Tanf, in the summer of 2017. ISIS launched a surprise attack against a Syrian government border post where IRGC advisers were positioned. The battle lasted over two hours, leaving only one Iranian alive, Mohsen Hojaji, a twenty-six-year-old officer who was captured and paraded in front of the cameras. He looked stoically at the lens of his captors, resigned to meet his fate. An ISIS fighter with blood on his cheek held Hojaji by the arm, a knife pressed against his skin. Two days later, the young Iranian was beheaded, in a gruesome video that ISIS made public.

  In Iran, resentment had been rising about the country’s costly involvement in wars outside its borders. Hundreds of Iranians had died in the fighting in Iraq and Syria. Hojaji’s death, his haunting face and stoic look, briefly united Iranians. His body was given a hero’s welcome. Then Hojaji’s widow, clad in a black chador, said the strangest thing: Hoj
aji had died to preserve a woman’s right to wear the veil. He had lost his head, she said, so Iranian women could continue to cover theirs. As though, since 1979, the Iranian Revolution had been about one thing: a woman’s modesty. For some in Iran, it certainly was beginning to feel that way.

  18

  ACHILLES’ HEEL

  IRAN

  2014–19

  I think about it and yet I know

  I’ll never be able to leave this cage

  Even if the warden should let me go

  I’ve lost the strength to fly away.

  —Forough Farrokhzad, “Captive” (1958)

  Masih Alinejad had long since removed her veil and embraced her mane of curls, untamable—just as she was. Hers had been a long journey, from the girl born in 1976 in a poor village near the Caspian Sea, whose father had joined the morality police, the Basij, during the revolution, to the rebellious teenager who asked too many questions, to the confident forty-year-old woman revolting against the system, first in Iran and then in exile since 2009. Growing up, she had been taught that she would have molten metal poured into her ears on Judgment Day if she listened to music—the same threat seared into the brain of Sofana Dahlan, the young woman in Jeddah. Worlds apart, separated by the abyss of the Saudi-Iran rivalry, they had grown up in very different circumstances. They didn’t know each other and probably would never meet, but they were the same age, facing similar restrictions on their choices, their minds, and their bodies. They were both a product of 1979, their lives shaped by the intractable dynamics that year had unleashed. In Iran, Masih had also learned that her honor and her family’s honor were tied to the piece of cloth covering her hair. Even at school, her teacher had made clear, in no uncertain terms, that she would go to hell if she didn’t wear the veil. So she wore it, dutifully, wrapped so tightly around her head it felt like a second skin. She wore it while she slept. All the women of the family kept it on even inside the home: a two-room mud house with no toilet and an outdoor fire pit as a kitchen.