Guest House for Young Widows

by Azadeh Moaveni

  “Well, you don’t expect me to just leave them behind, do you? I’m their mother!” She had bothered to put on mascara and blinked at him with her long lashes.

  This European princess act had carried Dunya far in the world of Middle Eastern men, who found it, initially, disarming. They usually snorted with laughter, recognized her demands as absurd, and then humored her. But the act wasn’t working anymore.

  “I’m leaving, suit yourself,” he said with a shrug, turning toward his bike. He suggested Dunya speak to their mutual friend again. Then he started the engine and disappeared into the night.

  * * *

  —

  “YOU DIDN’T TELL ME YOU had so much stuff,” the FSA contact told her, annoyed, when she rang him to complain. Fifteen members of his family had been killed in the past year alone, and the rest were living in displaced-persons camps in Turkey. It was war. What did this woman think he was offering her, some TripAdvisor-reviewed extrication service?

  She cried into the phone about how the cats would starve without her, how nobody here cared about animals. It would be better when she got home. Did he know that in Germany, there were state-mandated rules about the size of a hamster cage?

  “Fine,” he sighed. He would send a car the following night. But she would need to do the crossing without her things. He would arrange for them to follow her later, on a commercial truck.

  She was pleased when he followed through on his word. For a week she stayed at a house near the border with Turkey, along with other women waiting to be smuggled out. The border wasn’t really a border, though; it was more like a hazy line that demarcated territory controlled by ISIS from that controlled by the FSA. The smuggler said nearing the line was safer by night, so it was past midnight when they finally set out walking.

  The moon was round and bright and they could see clearly. But this meant they could also be seen. About five miles into the walk, shots rang out. The only cover was a few trees ahead. They were four in all, Dunya and two other women and the smuggler, and they sprinted to the trees. “Just rest,” the smuggler instructed them. He lay down with his head on a root and closed his eyes. “We’ll walk at first light.”

  The ground was cool at first, but soon a chill seeped into Dunya’s bones. Her stomach was collapsing against itself from fear. She listened to the breathing of the woman next to her and tried to match her inhalations, to calm herself. She slept only a fitful few minutes and was awake to watch the night sky gently lighten to a rose pink. The smuggler soon woke as well, roused the others, and led them all the final mile to the waiting car.

  November 2016, a Village in Northern Syria

  Dunya didn’t sleep the whole of the night. She made her WhatsApp picture a bleeding heart over the word Halab, the Arabic for Aleppo. A German woman she knew was circulating this message:

  Hello, this is an urgent message from besieged Aleppo, buses are stuck since yesterday morning at check points, people’s situation is extremely hard, because of cold and shortage of water and food supplies. Forced evacuation is suspended and people can’t leave buses, we need to speak to as many journalists as possible to inform them and connect them to people, we need to talk to the UN too. Some of them on the bus have mobile phones, and they can speak to them, although all batteries are almost dead, if you can send them to as many journalists as possible, awake them [from] sleep if needed. As the situation can’t hold till morning.

  She felt fury mount inside her, and started texting. “Dumb asses go to kill tourists when the war is here.”

  The State Retreats

  The Russian intervention shifts the war slowly in the Syrian regime’s favor; in the first half of 2016, ISIS territory shrinks by 10 percent. Turkey moves away from its support for the rebel groups and starts staging incursions into northern Syria, creating yet another front of potential conflict with U.S.-backed Kurdish fighters.

  The Islamic State leadership prepares its followers for more losses. As the territorial caliphate shrinks, attacks surge abroad: in November 2015, militants launch six simultaneous attacks in Paris, killing 350 people; in December 2015, Tashfeen Malik and her husband open fire on an office Christmas party in San Bernardino, California, killing 14 people. In January 2016, a suicide attack in Istanbul kills 13 people; in March 2016, three coordinated attacks in Brussels, two at the airport and another on a busy metro station, leave 32 dead.

  In March, as Donald Trump campaigns for the presidency of the United States, he says on national television: “I think Islam hates us.” In November, he wins. And promises to fulfill his campaign pledge of “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”

  It is the first time in contemporary history that an American leader suggests Islam is an enemy of the West and that Muslims are not welcome in the United States, echoing two points often made by ISIS.

  SHARMEENA, KADIZA, AMIRA, AND SHAMIMA

  December 2015, Raqqa, Syria

  Kadiza, to whom the high school world of Bethnal Green now seemed the most elusive, distant memory, spent her days wandering listlessly through a dilapidated mansion in Mosul, trying to figure out who among the widows remained an ISIS zealot, who was disillusioned, and who was the former posing as the latter in order to snitch to the ISIS authorities.

  Kadiza had married a Somali American not long after her arrival in Syria. For a time, they lived together on the edge of Mosul as he looked for work to avoid having to fight. Kadiza spent her days keeping house for her husband, cooking and cleaning. As a foreigner, she could move about with a degree of freedom, and was able to go out to the market and to internet cafés. Though she and her friends from Bethnal Green scattered after arriving in Syria, they kept in close touch.

  By the time her husband eventually went to the front and was killed, Kadiza rued her decision to travel to Syria. The caliphate was not a land of honor and justice where Muslims could hold their heads high, where the call to prayer filled the air and the pavement was littered with roses. Instead it was a vortex of violence and corruption where men hoarded cars and women settled scores against neighbors and foes, as though it were one long mafia war. If she had stayed in Britain, she would have been studying for her A-level exams and thinking about which universities to apply to. In Syria, Kadiza was only sixteen years old, already a widow living among widows.

  Some of the British women had become true believers. There was one girl from London who had brought her toddler son, and made him act in propaganda videos wearing combat clothes and an ISIS headband. The mother was active on social media, crowing over the beheadings of Western hostages and promising to become “da 1st UK woman 2 kill a UK or US terrorist!”

  Kadiza thought these women were fanatics. She was petrified; she wanted to come home. Her family tried to counsel her from afar, helping with escape plans. As a widow, she lived in a women’s guest house that was awash with intrigue, rivalry, and suspicion. She sensed the other women watching her carefully, suspecting that she wanted to escape. Rumors had spread that an Austrian girl caught trying to escape had been beaten to death. Especially frightening was the fate of another girl from East London who had tried to escape: the girl, married to an abusive ex-footballer, had gotten as far as a nearby village with her small daughter. Her husband tracked her down, had her prosecuted and imprisoned by a Sharia court, and took their daughter away, to be looked after by his second wife.

  Kadiza spoke with her family back in East London with some regularity. They hadn’t seen her in almost a year. They missed her, but sometimes their anger at her took over, and they shouted at her on the phone. She wanted to come back anyway. “I don’t have a good feeling. I feel scared,” she told her sister on the phone. “If something goes wrong, like, that’s it.”

  Her sister reassured her that this anxiety was normal. She actually suspected that Amira, who was still loyal to ISIS, was trying to discourage Kadiza from escap
ing. She worried that Kadiza might have confided her plans to Amira and put herself in danger, should her best friend decide to turn her in. Kadiza said she felt a sense of dread. “You know the borders are closed right now. How am I going to get out? I’m not going to go through PKK territory to come out. I’m never gonna do that.”

  This part of the war was simple: the territory she had to pass through, to get out of Syria, was controlled by groups that hated ISIS; she thought they wouldn’t hesitate to kill someone associated with the caliphate. Eventually Kadiza managed to move to Raqqa, still the capital of ISIS-controlled territory, where she hoped she could mount her escape under less watchful eyes. Umm Layth, the teenage blogger from Glasgow, lived in the same building, though she had stopped writing now that tech companies were finally patrolling ISIS content.

  Kadiza’s family, with the help of their lawyer, used cellphone tracking to identify her position within a five-hundred-meter range. The plan was for her to get into a taxi, which would be waiting at an appointed time and place. Back in London, her sister peered at a map of Raqqa, trying to explain the location to Kadiza over the phone. Right near al-Baik restaurant, she said. “How confident do you feel about that?” she asked, hoping Kadiza could store some trust in the plan.

  After a long pause, her voice trembling and barely audible, Kadiza said, “Zero. Where’s Mum? I want to speak to Mum.”

  RAHMA AND GHOUFRAN

  February 2016, Sabratha, Libya

  The American fighter jets flew over Sabratha in the early hours of Friday, well before anyone would be stirring for the dawn prayer inside the training camps on the fringes of the city, or in the houses in the western and southern districts. In one of those houses, Rahma and Ghoufran were sleeping.

  The impact threw their bodies off the bed before their minds registered waking. Part of the ceiling caved in. Plaster started falling. The air filled with smoke. Rahma opened her eyes and struggled to see through the haze of gray dust. Her ears vibrated and she heard high-pitched screaming as though from very far away. Then she realized the sounds were coming from Ghoufran, across the room, pinned to the ground, visible now through the dust, her eyes wild and crazed, calling her baby daughter’s name.

  By dawn, there were men everywhere, surveying the damage done by the American bombs. Large parts of Sabratha resembled a tropical moonscape, all craters and palm trees. Some men came to take Ghoufran to the hospital. Rahma didn’t know where to go. She sat for a while in the rubble, holding Ghoufran’s baby, just a few months old, listlessly. A fighter came to tell her that Noureddine, Ghoufran’s husband, was dead.

  Later, one of the women lent her a phone. When she called Olfa, the sound of her mother’s voice broke through the shock. Rahma began crying and speaking in broken sentences. Olfa couldn’t understand a word Rahma was saying. Her daughter was almost panting, and Olfa just caught snatches about planes and Ghoufran’s husband being dead.

  “If you’re scared, just come. It’s not far. Do you hear me, Rahma? You can come home.”

  “No,” Rahma said, her tone suddenly calmer. “If my time has come, God has willed it.”

  Olfa winced. In the space of a minute, she had careened through her usual carousel of emotions: guilt, self-recrimination, and then intense frustration with her younger daughter, who—even now, even surrounded by death and destruction, with her sister in the hospital—clung to blindness.

  May 2016, Mitiga Airport Prison, Tripoli, Libya

  After the air strike on Sabratha, Rahma and Ghoufran were detained by the militia of the UN-backed government that ruled Tripoli, which had determined they were members of ISIS. They were taken to the airport prison. Rahma insisted that she didn’t want to leave. She told everyone who asked—Olfa on the phone, the prison wardens, journalists—that she would rather stay in the Libyan prison, where she was treated with dignity, than return to Tunisia, to live in poverty at the permanent mercy of the police.

  One afternoon, not long after they arrived at the prison, the guards brought the two sisters a little boy to look after. His hair was closely cropped; he had a round little nose and ears that stuck out. Tameem was two years old, and he was an orphan. His mother, a Tunisian woman called Samah, had died in the Sabratha air strike. She had given birth to Tameem in Turkey and they returned to Tunis when he was a few months old, but after endless middle-of-the-night raids by police looking for information about ISIS sympathizers, she traveled to Libya to join her husband. The baby’s father, an ISIS militant, was nowhere to be found. He was presumed dead, but there was no body to prove it.

  Samah’s father, the baby boy’s grandfather, lived in Tunis. The old man had lost multiple children by this point. His son had gone to fight in Syria a few years prior, and had been killed. Now his elder daughter was dead from an air strike.

  Samah’s father, back at his spare house in a run-down neighborhood of Tunis, was careful not to explicitly support his children’s choice to join the militants. But he said, with something like pride in his voice, that many from the neighborhood had gone. “There are doctors who went, people who left behind millions and said, ‘We shall go fight for God.’ You see? Not just the unemployed, as you and I might say. People who were well off went for the jihad. As for me, I don’t really get anything,” he said, shrugging his shoulders.

  He traveled twice to Tripoli, to try to bring his grandson Tameem home to Tunisia. The Libyan authorities were helpful, but the Tunisians threw up bureaucratic obstacles. “This could be any baby,” one official told him. “How do we know it’s a Tunisian baby? Does it have papers?”

  Samah’s father continued to travel back and forth to visit Tameem, who was growing bigger, and more and more unsettled in the prison. In the pictures he took of Tameem when he visited, the little boy looks impassive and blank. Many of the orphans in prison had been carried out of the rubble of air strikes. They wet themselves and grew withdrawn. At night they couldn’t sleep.

  Nothing in the world at that time seemed to make sense to Samah’s father. What could you say about a world where your baby grandson was kept for months on end in a prison, because bureaucrats wanted to punish families for the path their children had taken? Tunisia’s government, and many of its people, remained in denial about just how many Tunisian citizens had left to join the jihad, because this was an indictment of the state itself. Mohammed Iqbal Ben Rejeb, the man who started an organization to help Tunisians stranded abroad, whose own brother had left for Syria, warned that allowing these children to languish in Libya would just make everything go in circles, the future repeating the past. “What are they going to be when they get older? Doctors? Engineers?” he asked. No, he said, they would just form the next generation of ISIS.

  Samah’s father echoed this. “Even if al-Baghdadi dies tomorrow, someone else will replace him,” he said wearily. “We ask of God peace, and that is all.”

  A Tunisian delegate traveled to Tripoli in April 2017 to visit the Tunisian women and children in Libyan detention, but failed to meet with them. Some of the children were detained alongside their mothers; Tunisian authorities floated a plan to repatriate the children only, which everyone refused.

  In October 2017, after over a year and a half of negotiations, the Tunisian authorities allowed Tameem to come home. His picture appeared in a newspaper with his grandfather, both of them grinning and flashing a thumbs-up, the first photo taken of Tameem that shows him smiling.

  The authorities in Tunis failed to bring home the other forty-four Tunisian children held in Libya.

  BETHNAL GREEN

  August 2015, East London

  In 2015, the National Youth Theatre of London commissioned a play called Homegrown to explore the radicalization of British youth. The play was so abrasive it might have been flecked with shards of glass, but it was also self-contained and composed, in conversation with itself, invoking prejudice and raw youthful pain and then cou
ntering it. It was staged in a school, with student actors strewn across the audience and the theater, to impart a sense of a schoolyard chorus conversation. From scene 1, act 5:

  GIRL: Hey, guys. Today is super exciting because I’ve got three awesome hijab styles for you. Not only are they new looks, but they’re a hundred percent pin free….

  [I saw your dad on TV.]

  [Apparently you like Keeping Up with the Kardashians—I can’t say that I do.]

  [People will either label you as traitors or children.]

  [I’ve seen you on Twitter.]

  [It’s actually getting quite serious now.]

  [I certainly would never be brave enough to run away at sixteen.]

  [I heard you got sold.]

  GIRL: Okay, guys. Key here is to make one side longer than the other. Like there’s not much in it, just a couple of centimeters—it makes all the difference between a horrendous hijab and a hella fleeky one.

  [A cynical, ideological terrorist group.]

  [You’re not a bad person.]

  [I don’t agree with your decisions.]

  [You were looking for something to believe in.]

  [What made you believe you were doing the right thing?]

  The play conveyed what it was like to be young, Muslim, and male, and to be humiliated by “random” police searches. It had young people making beheading jokes; it included a devastating scene about Mohammed Emwazi, who became the executioner Jihadi John, that seethed with condemnation, empathy, and disturbing reality (“I know kids like him”); it aired the indignation of Muslim girls who were told that their religion was misogynistic; it showed that even teenagers knew it didn’t make sense for their government to be at “war with radical Islam” while also “playing kiss-ass with Saudi businessmen.” It leveled painful jokes about liberal Islamophobia: “Who’s more nervous than a Muslim man on the tube? The Guardian reader next to him, pretending to be fine.” It encapsulated life as Sharmeena, Kadiza, Amira, and Shamima had experienced it, as they struggled to make sense of the noise that buzzed around them. It was also the story of their peers who chose to stay behind, who continued to live with that noise every single day.