The woman could not. She left without even looking at her, and their families never saw one another again.
* * *
—
BY MARCH 2014, AWS AND Dua were out every day working the brigade’s street patrols, driving around the city in small gray Kia vans with AL-KHANSAA stenciled on the sides. There were women from across the world on their unit—British, Tunisian, Saudi, and French girls—but ISIS had issued a strict rule to its Syrian recruits: no talking to foreigners. Aws would have liked to speak to the foreign women, but tensions were already high between Arab and European fighters; each suspected the other of allocating cars, salaries, and housing by nationality, favoring their own countrymen. Less communication, the thinking went, might bring more harmony to the occupied city, at least among the occupiers.
Status within Raqqa—how it was derived, and how it was enacted—was slowly becoming a grievance among women as well. In the female hierarchy, Dua enjoyed more status than most, to her gentle satisfaction. Her Saudi husband was not only senior in ISIS security, but also independently wealthy. But she, Aws, and other Syrian women began noticing that the foreign women, especially the Europeans, had more privileges. They appeared to have more freedom of movement, more disposable income, and small perks: jumping to the front of the bread line, not having to pay at the hospital. Their manner in the market, in shops, was often brash and high-handed.
“Why do they get to do whatever they want?” Aws complained. They really were completely spoiled. It was appalling to her that a European teenager should have more power than she, an educated and formerly middle-class woman of Raqqa, in her own hometown. But Dua, the good military wife, always reluctant to criticize the militants, offered a justification: “Maybe because they had to leave their countries to come here, it was felt they should be treated more specially.”
* * *
—
AS MIDNIGHT DREW NEAR, ASMA dressed for the night’s work, pulling on her black abaya and the niqab that covered her eyes. Her role in al-Khansaa involved meeting foreign women at the border and accompanying them into Raqqa. With her smattering of English and cosmopolitan air, she was suited to this task. She would receive a slip of paper with names and, along with the driver and sometimes a translator, would start up the highway toward the border crossing. The road to the border was smooth and clear, and she leaned her forehead against the car window, imagining the olive trees and pines hidden in the darkness. At the border crossing, she drew a shawl around her shoulders and waited, clutching the slip of paper in her hand.
The girls she was meeting that night came from London, a city Asma associated with Agatha Christie and good-looking English soccer players. When the girls emerged from a white car, their bags lugged by a Syrian man who hurried them along, Asma was startled by their youth. Most of the women she met and escorted back to Raqqa were young, but these three looked like children, barely sixteen. “Tiny,” she said later, to her mother. “They were just tiny.” They were wearing Western clothes and their eyes were twitchy bright with fatigue and fear and excitement. Once inside the car, speeding toward Raqqa in the darkness, the girls talked quietly and laughed.
At this moment, they were still deferential and polite, but Asma suspected that within a month they would behave like the rest of the Western women who arrived in Islamic State territory—brassy and bold, believing themselves superior to local women like Asma. One girl’s headscarf slipped back, and the driver snapped at her in coarse Arabic to fix it. The girl perhaps did not understand his words, but his meaning was clear. She pulled her headscarf up obligingly, her smile steady.
How happy she is to obey, Asma thought, and how naïve. Where does this conviction come from? Where do they think they have come to, these London girls? She couldn’t understand everything they were saying, they spoke so quickly, but she picked up snatches. They were anticipating introductions to husbands and acquiring their own long black abayas. They thought they had arrived at the gates of Dar al-Islam, the land ruled by the Prophet’s law, where they would finally belong.
She looked at the girls in the shadows of the backseat, as they drove past grain silos whose towering outlines were visible in the dark. How little they knew what awaited them. They would soon find out that the caliphate ruled by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi troubled itself little with the Prophet’s law. That his men used the ancient punishments meant to instill an otherworldly fear—the chopping off of hands, of heads—as bloody, nihilistic gang rituals. The girls seemed to imagine they were en route to some Romeo and Juliet scenario in the desert. How could they not know? Asma wondered what or who had bewitched these girls, that they would travel all the way across Europe and cross this desolate stretch of border in the dead of the night, in order to voluntarily become citizens of the place that, every day, made Asma question the existence of God himself.
She accompanied them to a private home and helped them get settled, providing the loose black abayas and niqabs the command kept in stock for new arrivals. Eventually, once they had been observed, they would go to a guest house for women in Raqqa. As with most of the foreigners she escorted, she did not see them again. It was only later she saw their faces plastered across the internet, identified as Amira, Kadiza, and Shamima—the three schoolgirls from Bethnal Green, in East London.
That night, at home in her bed, she powered up her phone and saw a message from her boyfriend, now in Amman. He teasingly asked her whether she had budged yet on wearing hijab. She didn’t even respond. She hadn’t told him she was working for the brigade, that she had become a collaborator. The lie, or the absence of truth, made their exchanges feel inauthentic and brittle to her. She felt intense spurts of anger at him that she couldn’t even voice. Anger for being safe in Amman, for not being able to protect her, even if just from herself. She fell asleep listening to Evanescence on her phone, mourning how disappointing men were, to judge a woman’s faith in inches of skin covered.
* * *
—
ONE MILD SPRING DAY, THE women in Dua’s brigade went to one of the city’s main squares to watch two local women get stoned for alleged adultery. Dua stayed back, uneasy. The religion classes in her training course had dealt substantially with jurisprudence, and she had learned about the evidence required to apply this punishment: four eyewitnesses to the adulterous encounter, four eyewitnesses to the act itself. Evidence that was in the overwhelming majority of cases unattainable, impossible.
Her instructor had explained the intention of these old hadd punishments, reflecting the Islamic approach to jurisprudence: the horrific penalty for such acts was meant to underscore their reprehensibility and prevent them from ever being normalized as “just human”; at the same time, the evidence demanded was so outlandish as to make the punishment virtually inapplicable. In this way, she learned, Islamic law regulated the public sphere: if a couple committed adultery, they knew to keep their own betrayal private, so as to avoid gradually tearing away at the sanctity of marriage for others. It was inconceivable to her that a judge would have been able to meet the evidential standards required to correctly implement the punishment for adultery. She hated how the group prized slickness and spectacle over proper justice. It was in this strange way that the Islamic State instilled in Dua the awareness with which to repudiate it.
Within hours, word spread that one of the women had not been involved with a man at all. Instead, she had showed up outside the main police headquarters holding up a sign that read Yasqot al-Tanzeem (“Down with the Organization”). Could it be true? It almost didn’t matter; everyone believed her to be innocent one way or another. By the time the trees were blossoming that spring of 2014 it had become commonplace to see heads hanging in the square, near the clock tower. Bodies sometimes lay in the street for a whole week. The militants, Dua thought, were growing openly sacrilegious. Islam forbade the mutilation of bodies.
The brigade itself was deteriorating. At firs
t its remit extended only to holding up dress codes, the rules around abayas and niqabs and makeup. The brigade’s role was to sow distrust and resentment, minimizing the likelihood that people’s dissent would coalesce into defiance. But now, the young women of the al-Khansaa Brigade had started using their authority to settle petty quarrels or enact social revenge. Even girls who weren’t employed by the brigade turned up to accuse their social enemies of some infraction. Sometimes women who had done nothing wrong were brought into headquarters.
The social fabric of Raqqa had collapsed. That everyone was probably two-faced was the only reliable assumption. “Many times, I saw women I knew smiling at me when they saw I’d joined. But I knew inside they felt differently,” Aws said. “I knew because before I joined myself, when I saw a girl I knew had started working with ISIS, I didn’t like it.”
* * *
—
ONE ESPECIALLY WARM WEEK IN July 2014, around the time when the terebinth trees could be cut for their sap, Abu Soheil did not return for three nights. Dua grew restless, and on the fourth day, a knock came at the door.
It was a fighter, there to tell her that Abu Soheil was now a martyr; he had blown himself up in an operation in the battle for Tal Abyad, fighting the Syrian army. The fighter didn’t even come inside to tell her the news; the car he’d arrived in was idling just outside, with another militant inside it, waiting. Dua was devastated. The tears came fast. “He asked for the mission himself,” the fighter said, awkwardly turning away. Abu Soheil had never told her about such a plan, and this made her break down and shut the door.
She was too loyal to feel he had betrayed her, and she considered him a shaheed, a martyr. But days later, she learned something that made her honorable widowhood harder to bear. Abu Soheil hadn’t killed himself in an operation against the Syrian army, as the fighter had told her, but against opposing rebel forces, the Free Syrian Army. Many armed factions viewed the FSA as traitors and unbelievers for receiving support from the United States, and believed they were permissible targets. But for Dua, this news was the greatest part of her grief. She called her sister-in-law in Riyadh and they cried on the phone together. Abu Soheil had not died fighting the Assad regime, but other Muslims. She struggled to sleep for many nights, in a stupor of shock and sadness.
Ten days later, another man from her husband’s unit came to the house. He told Dua she could not stay at home alone and would need to marry again, immediately. Islamic law, under all universal interpretations, holds that a woman must wait four months before remarriage, after widowhood or divorce. This is mainly to establish the paternity of any child that might have been conceived, and the period, called idaa, is not only required of every Muslim woman, but is also her right, to allow her to grieve. But even here, in the realm of divine law, ISIS was disregarding the tenets of Islam. Dua was wearing her face veil and her tears made the fabric cling to her cheeks. “Can’t you see I can’t even stop crying? I’m very sad. I want to wait the whole of the four months.”
The commander seemed impatient to get away, and spoke tersely, as though she were a child who couldn’t understand simple things. “You’re different than a normal widow,” he explained. “You shouldn’t be mourning and sad. He asked for martyrdom himself. That makes you the wife of a martyr! You should be happy.”
She said nothing in the moment. She nodded her head, as though assenting, and rose for him to leave. Dua felt a sliver of loyalty to the Islamic State as an extension of the loyalty she felt to Abu Soheil, who had been an upstanding husband to her, even if only for a few short months. She felt changed by her relationship with him and the world he had brought her into; she had enjoyed the feeling that she was worth educating. But she saw that ISIS was claiming the mantle of Islam as a means to justify its own ends; the same way it was willing to stone a woman without any evidence, it was willing to dispatch her into another marriage before it was time.
She knew at that moment that she was done. She knew it instinctively and also spiritually: she could not remain in Raqqa to become a permanent temporary wife, passed from fighter to fighter. She walked from room to room of the beautifully decorated house that should have been her inheritance, committing the curves and whorls of the wood furniture to memory. It felt like the simplest thing to mourn, this air-conditioned house that had surrounded her in brief, plush comfort. The loss of Abu Soheil, her neighborhood, the city, the whole country to a never-ending war of mercenaries and madmen—that was too much to carry.
* * *
—
THE NEWS CAME FOR AWS not long after it did for Dua. Abu Mohammad had also killed himself in what Aws, like Dua, considered a martyrdom operation.
To be an ISIS widow was to experience loss so anonymously that Aws sometimes dug her nails into her palm to remind herself that she was alive, capable of feeling pain, that Abu Mohammad had been real. There was no funeral to attend, no in-laws to spend long hours grieving with; there was no wardrobe full of clothes to go through or mementos to organize, no dinners to plan for visiting family, no chance to fill those stunned first hours with cooking and mindless chatter. There was just a sudden blaring emptiness. Aws curled up in the same leggings day after day, alone with her thoughts: Had he been brave at the end, or terrified at the impending explosion that would rip all his flesh and organs to shreds? Had he thought of her in the final seconds?
Soon, the commanders came knocking at her door as well. The one who spoke was stocky, with a slight limp; he gestured for her to pass through the doorway into the living room first, a strange gallantry, she thought. “Abu Mohammad is now a shaheed, thanks be to God, so he obviously doesn’t need a wife anymore,” he began.
It was such bizarre phrasing she had to fight back a bark of laughter. Abu Mohammad, due to being a martyr, also didn’t need pajamas and a cup of tea anymore. And a wife. The commander continued: “There’s another fighter who does need a wife. He knew Abu Mohammad well, he was his friend, there with him when he died. He wants to protect you and take care of you, on his friend’s behalf.”
Aws was one month short of her widow’s mourning period. She wasn’t sure how she could take on a new partner, sit with him in the evenings, be intimate with him, feign concern for his well-being. But she agreed reluctantly. She thought she would be safer with a man around, and perhaps this other husband would be decent as well; perhaps he might want a family.
He was Egyptian, and unpleasant from the beginning. She hadn’t anticipated she would so dislike his chalky smell, his indifferent attitude to her. Unlike Abu Mohammad, he didn’t notice or observe anything about her; not her Levantine pronunciation or her cooking or her morning curls. Nothing between them clicked. Thankfully, he turned up at home even less than her first husband had.
When Dua asked her cousin about him, she shrugged off everything about him—his looks, his manners, his personality—with a sour expression and a single word, aadi, “regular.” He didn’t even brush his teeth. She discovered this when it became clear that he simply had no toothbrush. Was it because he anticipated imminent death, and so what was the point? Was he just slovenly? When he fled back to Egypt with his salary two months later, without even a goodbye, at least she could conclude it was the latter.
Back at her parents’ house, Aws touched her old photos and books, thinking about the life she had had before, the evenings lingering over nargileh, the days at the beach, and how it all seemed light-years away from where she found herself now.
Late Summer 2014, The Caliphate Ascendant
ISIS releases a video called “Message to America” that shows the beheading of American journalist James Foley. At its end, it warns that the group will kill another captive, the American journalist Steven Sotloff, if Obama doesn’t halt American air strikes.
At its height in 2014, ISIS controls a stretch of thirty-four thousand square miles across Syria and Iraq, a territory roughly the size of the United Kingdom, reachin
g from the areas east of Damascus all the way to the western suburbs of Baghdad.
In September, the militants behead Sotloff and British aid worker David Haines.
In October, they behead aid worker Alan Henning and raise the black flags over parts of the city of Kobanî in Syria, a city that sits directly on the border with Turkey.
EMMA/DUNYA
Spring 2014, Raqqa, Syria
Dunya kept her eyes closed in the early-morning heat, refusing to be roused by the child screeching from the neighboring bedroom. She and Selim had parted the night before, when he dropped her off at the guest house where arriving women stayed, awaiting husbands who, like Selim, were off doing their military training. The official ISIS employment/identity form listed his religious knowledge as “rudimentary,” so after his weapons training he would do a course of religious instruction. He was not allowed to use a mobile phone during this period, so for nearly two months Dunya neither spoke to nor saw her husband.
The guest house was something between a hostel and a reality TV show, the days bleeding into one another in a tedium of sameness: cooking, eating, repeating the same inconsequential but sometimes tense conversations. There was no television. There were no books to read. There was nowhere to hide from the ever-present children, who shrieked from boredom and shrieked while playing and generally just shrieked. It was, however, international, and this was something Dunya appreciated. There were women from everywhere coming through: Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, France, the United States. Most were very young.
The people who migrated from Germany she divided into various groups. The do-gooders, who wanted to fight Bashar al-Assad and then were eventually indoctrinated, inured to the violence. The convert freshies, who didn’t know a thing about Islam and watched the wrong videos and met the wrong people, and were convinced that the path to heaven led through Syria. The psychopaths, attracted to violence. And the submissive women who followed their husbands, who for whatever reason—codependent personalities, misplaced loyalty, fear of divorce—went along with the plan.
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