Guest House for Young Widows

by Azadeh Moaveni

  Aws found Dua a bit severe, but she loved her nonetheless. As cousins, their social lives were intertwined. There was enough to do together that didn’t strain Dua’s tight finances. There was Qalat Jabr, the eleventh-century fort on Lake Assad, for walking, and al-Rasheed Park for taking coffee. There was al-Raqqa Bridge, where you could see the lights of the city twinkling at night, and gardens and amusement parks in the town center. Aws and Dua were woven into each other’s memories of childhood, all those summers of waiting until the cooler evenings to go out and roam the city together. Their lives were a portrait of a single extended family that encompassed both liberal and conservative strands, living aside one another with acceptance.

  * * *

  —

  THE DAY ABU MOHAMMAD, A Turkish fighter for ISIS, walked through Aws’s front door to ask for her hand in marriage, her father and grandfather greeted him with warmth and respect. The militants had now controlled the city for almost a year and were sweeping across large swaths of both Syria and Iraq. In June 2014, they captured Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city after Baghdad. Until then they had mostly taken smaller towns and more rural areas, but Mosul was a metropolis of two million, and a coup. The people of the Sunni-majority city, resentful of long years of neglect by the Shia-run central government, were left defenseless against the invaders. The Iraqi army melted away. By October, the militants raged through Anbar province, making spectacular gains, and came within fifteen miles of Baghdad. It was only outside intervention that halted the group from taking most of Iraq. From the vantage of Raqqa, the seat from which ISIS ruled and coordinated this breathtakingly fast spread, the militants’ occupation appeared entrenched.

  As under any occupation, reality was a muddle, the ethics of not collaborating clanging against the instinct to adapt and survive. During wartime, ideals were a luxury. The Nazi officers who occupied Paris during World War II wanted women, and the women—from brothel sex workers to Coco Chanel herself—eventually complied. So too did the ISIS fighters settling into the homes of abandoned Raqqawis want wives. And so they went calling throughout the community of those who had stayed, making their wartime proposals.

  Aws’s family had told her she could see her suitor at a second meeting if he offered a suitable mehr, or dowry. But Aws was too much of a romantic, and had seen too many Leonardo DiCaprio films, to consider meeting a man whose face she had not seen. When she kneeled down to leave thimbles of coffee behind the living room door, she peered in for a moment and caught a glimpse of him. He had winged eyebrows, light eyes, and a deep voice. As she waited for the discussion to conclude, she flicked through her cellphone photo gallery, the sunset images of couples by the beach and babies swaddled in cabbage leaves, imagining what her life with this man might be like. When her father called her in, she felt a flutter of nervousness, but she was prepared to say yes, ready to begin her new life as a wife and, God willing, a mother.

  * * *

  —

  THEY WERE MARRIED WITHOUT FANFARE because it was wartime. Abu Mohammad often didn’t come home at night and was sometimes gone for three- or four-day stretches. Aws minded these absences, but she tried to keep busy socializing with the other fighter wives. Among them, she felt lucky. Some were married to fighters who were abusive; everyone had heard of Nahla, who slit her wrists, and there was the Tunisian girl next door who burst into tears every time someone mentioned her husband’s name. But Aws’s marriage felt real. Abu Mohammad liked to trace the two moles that made a constellation on her left cheek; he teased her about her accent when she tried to pronounce Turkish words. She disliked his absences and would pout upon his return, and he would have to make silly jokes and cajole her into forgiving him.

  At home, her days had become a void. Sociable and lively, a young woman who had grown up studying English literature and reading occult adventure novels, Aws chafed at having nothing to do. She finished her housework quickly, but there was nowhere to go and nothing left to read. ISIS had purged the bookshops and local cultural center of “immoral fiction.” The group was even casting its long shadow over the most intimate interiors: marriage. ISIS was determining matters that she thought would be for her and Abu Mohammad to decide.

  Aws was desperate to have a baby. It was those baby images on her phone that had nudged her to say yes in the first place—the naked dimpled babies with their plump arms and crinkly smiles, arrayed in flowerpots, curled up in pea pods. But he asked her to start taking birth control pills, still readily available in Raqqa’s pharmacies; he said his commanders had instructed their men to avoid impregnating their wives. New fathers would be less inclined to volunteer for and carry out suicide missions. At first, Aws couldn’t believe he’d be willing to allow his commanders to make such a decision. She would raise the subject lightly, in passing, as well as seriously, gently—she brought it up in every manner she could think of. But her interventions upset him. She could see how he struggled not to get frustrated with her. His patience with the discussions began disintegrating.

  It was one of the early, bitter moments when Aws saw that there would be no normalcy; ISIS was like a third partner in her marriage, there in the bedroom. She asked herself whether she would still want children if her husband were to become a martyr, and knew instinctively that she would. She didn’t know how she would cope with a child on her own, but the desire inside her was so strong it overcame these thoughts, as reflexively as oil pulled itself above water.

  Without any work to do, without a baby to prepare for, without anything to study or read, Aws started looking forward to her daily trip to the market. One day she saw fighters lashing an old man in a public square. It was late afternoon and passersby crowded around to watch. The old man, about seventy, frail, with white hair, had been overheard cursing God. The ISIS fighters had him kneel in the center of the square. Tears streamed from his eyes the whole time they lashed him. It was lucky that he had cursed God, she thought, because God shows mercy. If he’d cursed the Prophet, they would have killed him.

  * * *

  —

  DUA’S FAMILY, LIKE MOST OF Raqqa’s poor, survived by cobbling together scraps of income from disparate work. There was the little plot on their land that they farmed, and her father worked in construction as a day laborer. But now most building work had stopped. They relied on what they earned from farming, but so many people had lost their jobs when ISIS took over that suddenly everyone was selling fruits and vegetables to get by. Some professions, like the practice of secular law, were simply dissolved; other jobs, like that of MRI technicians, became irrelevant in a land where hospitals lacked electricity. The militants had started levying taxes, which cut further into many families’ already reduced incomes, and they charged the civilian community for electricity or gas at higher rates. Dua’s family was scraping by, just barely.

  When a Saudi fighter came to ask for her hand in February 2014, Dua’s father pushed her to accept. The Saudi, Abu Soheil Jizrawi, came from a wealthy construction family in Riyadh. Saudi Arabia was one of the leading sources of early ISIS recruits, just as many of the fighters who had traveled to join the insurgency in Iraq in the mid-2000s were also young Saudi men. Saudi citizens also largely financed al-Qaeda in Iraq, one of the insurgent groups that eventually evolved into ISIS. The most prominent and influential female ideologue within ISIS, a woman of Syrian origin called Imam al-Bugha, spent fifteen formative years teaching religion in Saudi Arabia before she migrated to join the Islamic State. The year of her migration, she wrote a booklet for ISIS arguing that the group had simply put into practice the theological ideological worldview she had always had, declaring: “I am a Daeshite before Daesh even existed.” Al-Bugha’s young daughter Ahlam accompanied her to Syria, and married Abu Osama al-Gharib, the Austrian jihadist who moved in the same circles as Dunya, from Germany. Ahlam wrote poetry and was an influencer to millennial ISIS recruits; her accounts had thousands of followers. Both women’s for
mative intellectual years had been shaped in a Saudi environment where classical Salafism and jihadist doctrine blurred; between them, they shaped and inspired thousands of ISIS women and girls.

  For the Saudis, raised in an intolerant Wahhabi Salafi environment that viewed Shia Muslims as enemies and unbelievers, pushing back the influence of Shia Iraqis and the influence of Iran in both Syria and Iraq was an existential and ideological fight. Their contentions were different from the earthly grievances of Sunni Iraqis, who largely opposed the Shia central government in Baghdad because it discriminated against them politically and economically. The U.S. occupation of Iraq provided an opening to the ideologues who were looking to harness these chauvinisms to legitimate and widely held grievances. When a Sunni insurgency eventually developed in response, the Americans incarcerated militants in detention centers like Abu Ghraib, the site of storied horrific abuses. Were the Saudis fighting out of hostility to Iran, out of bigoted hatred for the Shia, or in defense of their genuinely marginalized Sunni brothers, or all of these impulses combined? Either way, the wealth of these Saudi men contributed greatly to the uprising in Iraq. Here in Raqqa, that same wealth promised an auspicious match for Dua.

  “If she agrees to marry me, I’ll transform her life,” he promised her father. Dua was no great beauty; she had no university education like her cousin Aws or other middle-class Raqqa girls. She thought about her life as a farmer’s daughter and whatever prospects she might have marrying a village boy or a local laborer. The word that flashed through her mind again and again was weathered. Her life was weathered. Her hands often ached from tilling the vegetables; her skin was coarsened; her clothes faded from being washed so many times and dried under the sun. Her purse, her shoes, her spirits—all were weathered. She wanted to lean into someone and know she was taken care of. She deliberated, and eventually agreed.

  She met Abu Soheil for the first time the day of the wedding, when he arrived bearing gold for her family. She liked what she saw: he was light-skinned with a soft black beard, tall and lanky, with charisma and an easy way of making her laugh. He never said no to anything she asked for, never raised his voice or looked at the wall when she told him about what she had done during the day.

  He set her up in a spacious apartment with new European kitchen appliances and air-conditioning units in each room. No one in Raqqa had air conditioning in each room, and she showed off her new apartment to friends and relatives. Her kitchen became the place where the other fighter wife in the building, a Syrian girl married to a Turkish fighter, stopped in for coffee. Each morning, Abu Soheil’s manservant would do the shopping in the market and leave bags of meat and produce outside the door. In the evenings, Dua and Abu Soheil would linger over dinner, and he would compliment her cooking, especially the Syrian kabsa he loved, a spiced rice dish with meat and eggplant. Dua, with her round moon face and thick eyebrows filled into an arrow, had ended up marrying well. Abu Soheil didn’t even mind the rose tattoo on her hand, though permanent tattoos were forbidden in Islam. He had transformed her life completely, and for that, she loved him.

  Abu Soheil didn’t want children, but Dua, the pragmatic farmer’s daughter, did not mind. She knew how hard life could be. She was enjoying the respite.

  * * *

  —

  IN THE SPRING OF 2014, two months after her marriage, having failed to persuade Abu Mohammad to let her get pregnant, Aws joined the al-Khansaa Brigade. Because ISIS maintained a strict separation of genders in its territory (it upheld the view that women should not have contact with any men but their immediate relatives), it used a special all-women branch of the police to provide security, and enforce dress codes and controls on women’s movement. Many residents called it simply the hisbah, or morality police. Al-Khansaa reflected, in various institutional forms, the growing and widening place of women in administrative, educational, health, recruitment, and propaganda wings of the Islamic State. The al-Khansaa Media Unit, which merged with another media arm in 2015, produced and disseminated its own bespoke campaigns and messages that catered directly to women. Its major tract, “Women in the Islamic State: A Message and a Report,” reviews the degraded status of women under secular feminism and Western culture (“Women did not reap anything from the myth of ‘equality with men’ except thorns”) and then outlines women’s rights, potential, and duties under the caliphate. It centers women at the very heart of the jihadist movement—“Know that the Ummah of Muhammad (PBUH) will not rise without your helping hands”—and raises the possibility of women in combat, in cases of extreme military need or even simply a woman’s desire for martyrdom.

  Dua joined al-Khansaa around the same time, and the two cousins started their compulsory military and religious training together. For both Dua and Aws, already married to fighters, working with the brigade filled time and created a parallel with their husbands’ lives in the group, a semblance of normalcy. Instead of thinking about what to cook that evening straight after breakfast, now they could spend much of the day outside, and still return home in time to prepare dinner.

  The outside world might have branded them terrorists, or terrorist wives, but Aws and Dua felt themselves to be military wives. They heard justifications each night for the bloodshed: the fighters had to be more brutal when taking a town; this would minimize casualties later. Assad’s regime forces were targeting civilians, sweeping into people’s homes in the middle of the night, assaulting men before their wives, raping women in detention centers. ISIS had no choice but to respond in kind; it was the regime’s violence begetting their own. They heard these things from the mouths of the men they had cooked for, waited up for, would go to bed with. How much of it they believed is something they could hardly say themselves.

  Dua, Aws, and Asma all attended the compulsory military and religious training for new recruits. Roughly fifty women took the fifteen-day course that taught them how to load, clean, and fire pistols, and practiced on targets in fields. It was more an introduction to the simple handgun than preparation for the front, even though there were rumors that some of the foreign women who had traveled to join ISIS were getting trained on russis, Kalashnikovs.

  Dua liked the religion classes best. They were taught mainly by Moroccans, Algerians, and Saudi women, and focused on religious laws and principles of Islam. She’d never had the chance to learn about her religion properly before. And her teachers were extraordinarily learned; many, but especially the Saudi women, had doctorates and years of advanced learning in jurisprudence and religious sciences. Because these veteran ideologues moved between the caliphate’s religious and media departments, they deployed their religious learning, digital skills, and capacity for persuasion all at once. Dua was dazzled by them. She appreciated that someone was bothering to teach her, that she was deemed worthy of education. She found herself attracted to the idea of a real Islamic state.

  * * *

  —

  DUA HAD ONLY BEEN WORKING for the al-Khansaa Brigade for a couple of months on the day her friends were brought to the station to be whipped. When she heard the voices she knew from childhood speaking heatedly near the entrance of the station, she stood up from her desk.

  Her colleagues escorted the women in, a mother and her teenage daughter, both distraught and speaking volubly. They had been picked up for wearing overly tight abayas. When the mother saw Dua, she rushed over and asked her to intercede. The room felt stuffy as Dua weighed what to do. Their abayas really were very tight. It upset her that they hadn’t been more careful, and were now expecting her to bail them out. “You’ve come out wearing the wrong thing,” she said quietly.

  The woman looked stunned. Dua watched as her colleagues took the women into a back room for their lashings, which were usually administered with a whiplike instrument by one of the more senior figures in the brigade. The intensity of the lashing, whether the woman was lashed through clothing or asked to bare her skin, depended on the whi
m of the person in charge. Some were vicious and foul-mouthed, screaming reproaches about shame and relishing the spectacle; others were milder, since they knew that being lashed, even without great force, was traumatic. When the mother and daughter took off their niqabs, they were found to be also wearing makeup. It was twenty lashings for the abaya offense, an extra five for the makeup, and another five for not being meek enough when detained. Dua tried not to listen when she heard their cries. They weren’t very intense lashings, she told herself. It was more humiliation than actual pain.

  In the weeks since she had joined al-Khansaa, the brigade had grown more stern in its policing. Mandatory abayas and niqabs were still new for the women of Raqqa, and the brigade, at first, had wanted to give the community a chance to adapt. The patrols would pick up women for wearing abayas that were too short, transparent, or tight, and take them back to headquarters. But the fines were small, less than five Syrian lira. The offending abaya would be burned and a more appropriate one donated in its place. The women of Raqqa found the consequence so light that they openly flouted the rules. Many young women were becoming repeat offenders, calling their fathers to the station to pay and get them released. This state of affairs was making the rules ridiculous. So the brigade decided to increase the fines and started punishing women with lashings, twenty to forty, depending on the severity of the infraction and whether the woman resisted.

  That night, the mother and daughter came to Dua’s parents’ house. The two families had known each other for years, with a shared history of Eid gatherings and children’s birthday parties. The woman was furious. She railed against ISIS. “Everyone hates them, we wish they had never come to Raqqa,” she said reproachfully.

  Dua explained she worked for them, she had to follow orders. “I can’t play favorites, can’t you understand?”