Guest House for Young Widows

by Azadeh Moaveni

  The British girls in Manbij flocked to her office, and the waiting room chatter, each time Dunya visited, was dominated by English. At a certain time each day, the doctor finished her clinic and prepared for Arabic lessons, which she offered in the late afternoons. Initially the doctor worked closely with ISIS and didn’t charge for her services. Women just had to show their (pictureless) Islamic State ID cards, which also secured them free medicine from the pharmacy and free baby formula. But after about a year, the gynecologist fell out with the ISIS authorities. She carried on running clinics, but started charging women for visits and made clear she was operating independently. She never talked about what happened.

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  THOUGH SHE WAS CARRYING AN AK-47 herself—she was scared to go outside without one—Dunya was startled to enter the new doctor’s office and see a desk piled high with weapons. There were long rifles, like her own, and small handguns, enough to make the room seem like a small arms depot. At the sound of the door, the local doctor, a long-nosed Syrian woman, stuck her head out of the examination room. “Leave that gun on the table, please,” she ordered Dunya. “I work with the Red Crescent, not ISIS, so next time you come here leave your weapons at home.”

  Dunya refused to put her gun down. Sometimes you had to resolve things mafia-style, she thought. The doctor walked up to her and said that if she wasn’t willing to disarm, she would have to leave. Dunya squared her chest. She paced back and forth in the small space. The waiting room went silent, anticipating a fight. Finally, Dunya pulled the rifle off her shoulder and flung it onto the desk.

  There was a certain romance to guns in the thug-life culture she had grown up around. In her rough neighborhood in Frankfurt, everyone had internalized the codes of The Godfather, used names like Corleone in their Facebook profiles, and shared memes of passionate moments in Italian crime dramas. For young people like Dunya, growing up on the margins of German society in fractured families, building up some bravado through street culture was second nature. The German jihadi scene back home was rife with people like her, tasked with raising and nurturing themselves. They converted to Islam in part to secure some meaning in life, in part for a measure of community and support.

  This was the story, also, of her friend from back home in Germany, Denis Cuspert, the German rapper known as Deso Dogg. Cuspert was raised by a German mother and an African American stepfather who served with the U.S. Army. Their home life was troubled. Cuspert and his soldier stepfather did not get on, sparring over everything from America’s role in the world to the rules of the household. When he was young, his mother and stepfather sent Cuspert to a home for juvenile delinquents. A grudge against authority and American heavy-handedness emerged as themes in his life and music. He wrote songs like “Gangsta Inferno” before converting to Islam in 2010. Then he assumed the name Abu Maleeq, and joined a street gang in Berlin, composed mostly of Turkish and Arab young men who tussled with neo-Nazis.

  In Germany it was mainly second-generation Arab, Turkish, and Kurdish boys who produced rap music, searching for identity between two cultures and coping with racism and discrimination. Later, Cuspert’s German record producer would say that for these kids, hip-hop was an artistic family, a place to vent their grievances peacefully. The hip-hop community took in Cuspert with open arms, hoping he would get out of crime.

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  IN POLICY CIRCLES, THERE IS something called the “al-Qaeda narrative” of contemporary history—the idea that the West invades Muslim countries, cultivates and backs corrupt dictators who subvert the will of their people, and overthrows popular leaders it deems hostile to its interests. In response to this, political violence in places like Palestine and Iraq is an acceptable form of self-defense against occupation.

  To many Muslims the world over, this doesn’t just sound like the “al-Qaeda narrative.” It sounds like a recognition of their lived reality. This perception is chiefly political rather than religious, held by even secular or liberal Muslims (or indeed Middle Easterners of other religious backgrounds) who have lived in the West for decades. It is discomfiting, because it runs at such crosscurrents to acceptable opinion in the West, where political violence of many varieties had long been referred to as “terrorism.” Terrorism, as the word is presently used, is a condition of ideological wickedness, stripped of any rational or legitimate context or motivation, and associated culturally with Islam and racially with Muslims.

  At the U.S. State Department’s terrorism conference in 1974, the American scholar Lisa Stampnitzky notes, terrorism was recognized as “the production of frustrations induced by unresolved grievances” and a tactic that could be used by “established regimes.” But by the late 1970s, terrorism had become a tool confined to nonstate actors, driven by motivations whose political or socioeconomic basis was “doubtful.” Stampnitzky argues that we stopped trying to understand and diagnose political violence when the political violence began to spread.

  The 1970s saw a rise in international hijackings, bombings, and kidnappings. They were the work of the very same armed groups who had been operating militantly the previous decade, who in that period had been called by the word insurgents, and whose goals and aims had been dissected along with the political strategies that might quell them. But when the violence spilled out into the wider world, when it went transnational and hit European capitals, forces began to shift, in Stampnitzky’s words, to invent the problem of terrorism. This new terrorism was an amorphous thing, an evil that required demonologists to decipher it, supplied by the fast-growing industry of terrorism experts.

  These experts sought to promote the idea, which culminated after 9/11 in the War on Terror, that the West was up against enemies of such unfathomable evil that engaging with their causes or motivations was pointless, and that virtually anything the national security state did to combat them, including a dramatic rise in civilian deaths, was justified. To the millions of people whom it impacted—Arabs, Iranians, Afghans, Pakistanis, and Africans of secular background or various faiths—the terrorism paradigm created a painful double existence. Those who believed that, in many instances, violence committed in their countries of origin stemmed from legitimate grievances—that the violence was not legitimate, but the underlying pathologies and grievances were—felt themselves unable to acknowledge this in public life.

  This was not an inheritance that anyone wished for, having to equivocate about what constituted legitimate violence. Better for a child to grow up not having to consider the intricate ethical, legal, even theological dimensions of when violence is justifiable. But this deliberation was the fruit of contemporary history.

  The British psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott’s concept of the “good enough” mother is one who is initially emotionally all-giving, but steadily allows a child to experience enough frustration to develop in harmony with external reality: a world in which all of his or her needs won’t be met. Growing up in a “good enough” Muslim household in the West required this same introduction of frustration. It enabled second-generation Muslim kids to inherit this narrative of grievance while also internalizing that none of it excused killing civilians in the West. In functional or “good enough” Muslim families, children are instilled with an intense, deeply felt concern and responsibility for the plight of Muslims everywhere, but made to understand that they must also bear this reality without resorting to indiscriminate violence. Frustration is inevitable; emotional needs won’t be met. It was the struggle of all such families to explain to their children that they could simultaneously feel revulsion for the violence of September 11 and also a glimmer of schadenfreude; that Osama bin Laden could be valorized for his intentions, but that his means were grotesque, deviant, and impermissible; that Islam did not allow and would never allow the killing of civilians. In a good enough Muslim family, one learned to live with these contradictions.

  It was not so much, th
en, that people like the rapper Denis Cuspert and Dunya were “brainwashed” into an “ideology” of radicalism; they simply lacked the intellectual and psychological coping skills to channel their newly found beliefs into more productive and legal means: activism, charity work, human rights law, citizen journalism. They didn’t have the living room culture, the ethical conditioning passed down through good enough families. They were not raised to understand that the correct response to terrible injustice was not wanton violence. Arguably, they didn’t even have good enough parents to teach them not to hurt themselves, let alone teach them not to hurt others.

  European converts to Islam were more vulnerable to extremist groups because many lacked this lifelong socialization. Many came from deprived social backgrounds and were primed to be drawn to aggressive, militant strains of anything, from local gangs to local extremist ideologues. They were quick to subsume their personal grudges against family and society into transnational political grudges against the West. Cuspert fell readily into the arms of shadowy German jihadist figures who promised that extreme stance.

  In fact, Cuspert didn’t convert to Islam so much as initiate himself straight into a radical Islamist group called the True Religion. It was as though he had pressed a button and changed the aesthetic theme of the WordPress site of his life from gangsta to mujahid; the chaotic structure and violent impulses were all the same, but were now overlaid with Islamist imagery and themes. Suddenly causes like Iraq, Chechnya, and Afghanistan mattered to him deeply, and Germans, Westerners, and a broad swath of humanity became “unbelievers” who were complicit in Muslim suffering.

  His old friends on the Berlin rap scene were devastated, and furious. They were from “good enough” Muslim families and were adept at living and rapping about the painful contradictions. They didn’t turn to violence. They all knew where the lines were. His record producer later complained bitterly about Cuspert’s betrayal: “He disgraced everyone, all of the Muslim MCs. He ruined the community. May Allah forgive him. But we don’t.”

  Cuspert was at home on YouTube, on the stage, on the screen, and rapidly became as high profile on the German jihadist scene as he had previously been in the hip-hop world. In 2012 he traveled to Egypt and Libya for military training, and in 2014 he moved to Syria to join a jihadist rebel group, eventually jumping to ISIS and assuming the Kunya Abu Talha al-Almani. Abu Talha imported his insouciant humor and rapper sensibility to Syria, posing in Raqqa as he nibbled a sprig of grapes aloft in the air, standing before an SUV in a long white thobe, with electric-blue sneakers.

  There was something of the air of Tupac about him—his handsome, soulful face, his songs about a life of pain, his air of embracing violence reluctantly, as though heaven itself had ordained it for him. He even titled one album Alle Augen auf Mich, a German rendering of Tupac’s All Eyez on Me. From Raqqa he started putting out nasheeds and video messages with titles like “Against the Infidel Hypocrites and the Saudi Palace,” with cinematic graphics of him clutching a rifle with desert scenes and Saudi figures in the background, a mash-up of Lawrence of Arabia, Spike Lee’s Malcolm X, and Scarface. In one propaganda video, he held the severed head of a man who had received the “death penalty” for fighting against ISIS.

  Dunya knew Cuspert from Germany. She was reticent about the nature of their relationship, but said he had helped her out when she was going through a rough time back home: he had arranged a place for her to stay and dropped off food. She thought that he was, at core, a good person. Or at least he had been, once. “The world is not black and white,” she said. “He had a good heart before he came to Syria. He met the wrong people, and they changed his life.”

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  ON THE DAY THE TALL, willowy blonde arrived to marry Cuspert, the heat was so oppressive that the women were waiting to see how long it took a raw egg to cook through on the pavement (eight minutes). The midsummer heat, that June 2014, sometimes approached 130 degrees, an intensity that pushed it beyond weather into a searing physical dimension unto itself.

  The blonde was dropped off by the unit that ferried women into Syria from the border, the al-Khansaa unit that Asma worked for. She arrived exhausted, wearing a black dress. Dunya and the other German woman rose to take her inside the house, offering her grapes and cold water. She said she had converted to Islam three years ago, but later, when it was time for evening prayer, she fumbled and said she wasn’t “one hundred percent comfortable” praying yet. Would they forgive her? She was so tired. Once alone, Dunya and the other women rolled their eyes and talked in low voices, agreeing it was just like Abu Talha to get some barely practicing Muslimah who was pretty and slim enough to be a model to come out to a war zone for him. “Abu Talha’s funny. And women like funny men,” Dunya said dryly.

  When they walked back into the living room, where they’d left her dozing on the sofa, the blonde was rather more alertly examining a bookshelf and seemed startled to see them. She didn’t say much over the next few hours. She was friendly and, oddly, said she didn’t mind sharing Abu Talha with another wife.

  “It might be two others,” Dunya warned. “Are you sure you don’t mind?”

  The blonde shook her head, but looked paler.

  “I converted years ago, but if my husband came home with another wife, I would kill him,” Dunya said.

  “But if it’s allowed…,” the blonde said.

  “Allowed! Lots of things are allowed, doesn’t mean you’re supposed to like them. Doesn’t mean it’s good for everybody.”

  Dunya tried to impart some basic Islamic thinking about jealousy to their new arrival, but the blonde half listened with a weary expression and asked if she could go lie down. She stayed in the bedroom till after dinner, when Abu Talha arrived to pick her up in a beat-up old Peugeot, and they drove away into the night.

  Dunya never saw the blonde after that, though she did hear from one of the ex-wives of another fighter that the blonde had been caught eating before iftar during Ramadan. Abu Osama’s wife had said there was something strange about the girl. Dunya defended her. “Don’t you remember when you started fasting, in the early years? When you were so hungry you thought you couldn’t take it anymore and felt like killing anyone who took the wrong tone?” Abu Osama’s wife was unconvinced. More likely, Dunya thought, she was envious of the blonde’s slender figure. Life under the caliphate, sedentary and confined, had made all the women fat, but it did not seem to thicken the blonde at all.

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  THE SUMMER IT TRANSPIRED, A German newspaper reported that an American spy had managed to seduce Cuspert and escape with intelligence about him and his associates. “We are already a long time in the bedrooms of the terrorists,” a German security official boasted. The story did not identify the woman by name.

  Two years later, American news reports revealed her identity and cast the operation very differently, presenting it not as a premeditated infiltration but as a real love story—an agent who fell for her target. The blonde was FBI agent Daniela Greene, who had been assigned to investigate Abu Talha but instead left her husband in Detroit to travel to Syria and marry him. Greene was born to Czech parents in Germany. When she was young, she married a U.S. soldier and moved to the United States. There, she became an agent for the FBI.

  Was it a coup for Cuspert, seducing an American FBI agent into abandoning her country and her soldier husband and joining him in the caliphate? Was it a coup for the FBI, sneaking an agent into the heartland of ISIS and then pulling her out without physical harm? Was she a double agent? A triple agent? And why did her story garner scant attention in the media, when it was far more sensational and dangerous to U.S. security than the breathlessly recounted tales of American and European country bumpkins who were lured or even just thought about being lured to ISIS?

  They reported that Greene was prosecuted upon her return to the United States and served
two years in prison on a reduced sentence, in exchange for cooperation with government officials. Partially unsealed documents from her case include a memo from a prosecutor in the U.S. attorney’s office writing that she had put national security at risk by “exposing herself and her knowledge of sensitive matters to those terrorist organizations,” but that she managed to “escape from the area unscathed, and with apparently much of that knowledge undisclosed,” a “stroke of luck or a measure of the lack of savvy on the part of the terrorists with whom she interacted.”

  If this was truly the case, Greene would be the first and only American who experienced anything approaching “a stroke of luck” at the hands of ISIS, and it would certainly be one of the rare instances when the finely tuned, twenty-first-century militia-cum-state showed a “lack of savvy,” especially given that Greene disclosed to Abu Talha that she worked for the FBI.

  As Dunya said, “I cannot understand this woman.”

  SHARMEENA, KADIZA, AMIRA, AND SHAMIMA

  February 2015, East London

  The families in London discovered, one by one, that their school-age daughters had gone missing. Kadiza had said she was going to the library. Amira and Shamima had said they were going to Kadiza’s cousin’s wedding. It was winter and the sky darkened early, but by around 8 p.m. the girls still weren’t back and their phones were either switched off or not answering. Shamima’s sister finally decided to ring the police.

  The next morning, police officers visited each family and said the girls had flown to Turkey. In the days that followed, the full circumstances leading up to the disappearance of their daughters emerged to the families: that their best friend Sharmeena hadn’t just “disappeared” but had traveled to Syria to join ISIS; that the school and the police had neglected to share this with them, and had tasked the girls themselves with bringing letters home.