Guest House for Young Widows

by Azadeh Moaveni

  EPILOGUE

  AMONG THE DISSEMBLERS

  She herself is a haunted house. She does not possess herself; her ancestors sometimes come and peer out of the windows of her eyes and that is very frightening.

  —ANGELA CARTER, “The Lady of the House of Love”

  Cities die just like people.

  —KHALED KHALIFA, No Knives in the Kitchens of This City

  The final time I met Nour was at a café near Avenue Bourguiba, nearby where she works in a shoe shop. The café has multiple televisions, all set to the Rotana music channel; the music network is partly owned by a wealthy Saudi, and reflects the confused ways in which Saudi money reaches around the world, whether funding jihadists in Syria or pop music sleaze on television.

  It is early 2017, and it has been over six months since Nour’s release from jail. She looked radically different from any of the previous times we had met. She wore a lavender wool sweater over dark skinny jeans, her nails were long and French-manicured, and her hair, which I was seeing for the first time, was lustrous and wavy, shot through with flecks of gold. Her makeup was like that of a well-groomed American college student: natural but filled-in eyebrows, subtle mascara, a sweep of bronzer. She was so easy to look at that I found her more appealing and sympathetic than on previous occasions. This reaction may be natural enough—we sympathize more readily with those who look like us—but it made me feel guilty. Nour the almost-model, with eyelashes that swept up and down like butterfly wings, should not seem a more defendable girl because of her new, more liberal, lacquered looks. It was also true that she seemed more open in this guise. She smiled and talked more, but perhaps that was part of the role she was inhabiting.

  Nour told me she had stopped going to the mosque on Fridays, stopped seeing the group of Salafi sisters. Some of her friends had gone to Libya to join their husbands, who were still fighting with an ISIS faction there. I asked her what it felt like to look completely different on the outside than she felt on the inside. Her eyes welled up with tears as she looked out at Avenue Mohammed Cinq, the Tunis thoroughfare modeled after the boulevards of Paris. “It is like living a lie,” she said.

  We sat on the second floor of a bustling art deco café, the tables around us filled with old men in tweed caps smoking, young people eating French pastries, couples with their heads bent low in conversation. At one point, I asked her if she supported what had transpired in Paris in November 2015. I said they were just regular people who were killed, nodding at the tables around us, people just like this, many of them Muslims. She shrugged. Of course she supported the attacks. “They kill our people. They don’t play by the rules. Why should we?”

  July 2017, Ain Issa Refugee Camp, Thirty Miles North of Raqqa

  It was near midnight as they set out from the refugee camp, Ayesha with her three children, the dour Turkess with her two, with Ayesha feigning a broken foot that was, at moments, remarkably easy to walk on. They bribed the driver with cash they had managed to keep when they fled Raqqa, and which they supplemented by selling the diapers the Kurds had given them in the refugee camp. Their fighter husbands were in prison, and who knew what the Kurds planned to do with them. The only thing to do was disappear, to get as far as Manbij and then the Turkish border, to disappear into the cities of southern Turkey as though it had all never happened, as though the caliphate had been a dream, a whisper as corrupted as the Satanic Verses themselves.

  Ayesha had hatched the plan. She had flirted, bribed, and wheedled her way into the graces of enough men at the refugee camp to slip out without anyone raising the alarm. She was a Syrian woman who was slim and attractive in a charismatic rather than pretty way, with a teacher-like manner that had a way of making people do what she said. The Turkess had no such abilities or charms. She was short and stooped, with features that were now permanently pinched, the result of trying to hide how much she despised the people around her. The Turkess had asked to join Ayesha’s plan out of desperation: her ten-month-old daughter’s stomach was as bloated as a basketball, and the Kurds weren’t taking her to a hospital. Not that there was any functional hospital to be taken to. Not that with the final assault against Raqqa unfolding just thirty miles south, an ISIS baby with a swollen belly was anyone’s priority.

  The rest of the ISIS women watched them leave, silently. They were living ten or twelve to a room, the kind of proximity that bred pique and occasional hatred, and the feeling of not being entirely disappointed that God had not seen fit to send clouds across the bright full moon that night.

  As the two women and their children drove away toward the Turkish border, they passed through the first two checkpoints smoothly. At the third checkpoint, their driver assumed a tired look, spoke in Kurdish, and was waved through. The van’s windows were tinted, and no one asked him to open the doors.

  Ayesha was just starting to relax, feeling satisfied with her resourcefulness—she was so unlike the other women, passively content to be corralled up at the refugee camp awaiting their fate—when they arrived at the fourth checkpoint. She couldn’t understand the Kurdish they were speaking, but she knew that the conversation was taking too long. The driver was waving his hands. The soldier at the checkpoint kept repeating one word: maybe open, or hurry, or now, something like that, because the driver got out and pulled the van door open. The checkpoint was nothing more than several enormous concrete slabs arranged irregularly, so that any car would have to slow down and maneuver around them. Ayesha focused on the slabs, cradling her foot.

  The soldier peered in at them. Ayesha wished for a moment she hadn’t brought the Turkess, who could never pass for a Syrian Arab or a Kurd, and whose inclusion had necessitated a van. She might as well have brought the Russian woman who looked like Michelle Pfeiffer, who was so absurdly beautiful her face disrupted whatever space she occupied. Ayesha and her kids could have fit into the back of a regular car and been plausibly asleep, the driver’s family, maybe. But with the Turkess along, there was no mistaking who they were: ISIS women in flight. What else would a parchment-pale Turkish woman be doing in the hinterland of Syria as the caliphate collapsed?

  The soldier gestured at them to pull over and made a call on his cellphone. It was over. Kurdish soldiers escorted them back down the same road, past the same destroyed buildings glinting in the moonlight. Within an hour, they were back at the camp, and Ayesha, the Turkess, and their children filed back into their quarters. Back to the squat toilets and concrete rooms, one starch-laden meal a day, back to the flies and the hate-drenched stares of the awam, the ordinary Syrians, who looked as if they would like to plunge knives into them right there. Back to having to confront the reality that many people didn’t care at all if you were sorry, that most of them didn’t believe you anyway, and that even if they did, they still wanted you to pay.

  * * *

  —

  THE SEA OF WHITE TENTS stretches out across the desert, dotted with giant red cisterns of water. During the day the temperature often reaches 115 degrees; at night the sky is littered with stars and there is a cooling breeze, but mosquitoes prey on bodies that lie unprotected under the tarpaulin. At the center of the camp there is a market, heaps of used clothes and shoes laid out on tarps, refugees combing through them as much for something to do as for need of an extra faded T-shirt. There is a ramshackle row of covered kiosks selling foil-wrapped cookies, french fries, and ice cream.

  American and British special forces and officials stride about, mostly not in uniform. They are setting up outposts across this northeastern stretch of Syria called Rojava, land that is administered by the Syrian Kurds, outside the reach of the regime. The U.S. bases that house the security officials, intelligence officials, diplomats, and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) are so new that they don’t have names yet, just GPS coordinates. No one knows how long these bases will stay—whether the United States is just helping prosecu
te the final phases of the ground war against ISIS and interrogating captured fighters, or whether it intends to stay and permanently occupy this part of Syria. Whatever the plans are, the scale and purpose of the American presence is barely disclosed to the media, rarely discussed by politicians, and, as such, remains largely outside the bounds of public scrutiny. This is not Iraq in 2003, when American officials flaunted their administrative occupation of Baghdad and held court in the Green Zone, wearing crisp khakis, dreaming up anti-smoking campaigns for Iraqis over cocktails and pork hot dogs flown in by Halliburton, only belatedly realizing there were problems when Sunni insurgents began planting roadside bombs under their military convoys. It is said that the Americans, unlike the British, don’t know how to do empire because they lack subtlety and institutional memory. Their discretion in eastern Syria suggests they are learning.

  The camp has only one permanent structure: a low-slung, four-room cement shelter. It buzzes with flies and is covered with dust, but it boasts actual walls and an actual roof and sits in close proximity to the makeshift showers, the pit toilets, the feeding hall, and the kiosks. In the eyes of the camp’s seven thousand tent-housed inhabitants—mostly civilians from the eastern district of Raqqa, streaming up as Kurdish fighters clear ISIS from the city—the shelter is a luxury hotel. It is here where the ISIS women reside with their children, in comfort and privacy, protected from the sun, the mosquitoes, the nightly arguing of neighbors wafting through the tents.

  Everyone in the camp has arrived after enduring weeks and months of bombardment, the eerie permanent tinnitus of hovering drones, which can itself drive you mad. They now spend their hours dazed, lying listlessly in tents or wandering about the camp. The camp is Raqqa transplanted about thirty miles north, but whether it is liberated Raqqa or reoccupied Raqqa, no one quite knows.

  The entrance is strewn with trampled strips of black cloth, the black abayas and niqabs that women fleeing the city have discarded and shredded upon arrival. The refugees believe they have escaped the Islamic State, and women are now dressing as they used to, in long sleeves, long skirts, and headscarves. But then the ISIS women appear in their black niqabs, just as they wore them on the streets of Raqqa, wraiths floating through the camp, stark against the chalk-white earth. Sometimes the refugee children cower when they see them, and clutch at their mothers. But as the days pass, the children absorb the changed circumstances. They hear from the adults that they are safe, that the black-robed women no longer have any power over them. The children then become emboldened. They start throwing stones at the ISIS women as they line up at the cisterns for water, or sidling up to them at kiosks to demand money.

  In the guarded compound where the ISIS women stay, the Kurdish soldiers run what might be called a deradicalization program or an indoctrination program, depending on your perspective. Whether these ISIS women are civilian wives or female jihadists in their own right is a question no one feels ready to answer.

  Commander Salar is a senior member of the Syrian Democratic Force, charged with the security of Ain Issa refugee camp and the ISIS women detained there. He has observed the women since their arrival and does not consider most of them combatants, or even especially dangerous. He sees them as civilians who went down the wrong path. He was well positioned to know the difference between these women and women actively involved in war. In the SDF, he is a commander to women fighters who clip their long hair back and sling rifles over their shoulders and go to the front, just like his men.

  Salar grew up in Syria among Kurdish families who split down political lines as the civil war unfolded: daughters who joined the PKK, sons who went to ISIS out of despair at the Kurds’ “failing national project.” There are many paths to militancy, he has seen, that aren’t about militancy per se. Often the militancy is a reaction to repression and broken aspirations and false hopes, a disavowal of circumstances that feel unbearable. “These women, most of them aren’t even ISIS, really,” he says. “They were tricked and cheated into coming here, out of some belief in true Islam.”

  But at present, he is not concerning himself with these questions. His job is to offer the most humane, international-norm-abiding detention possible in the middle of this desert heat, in order to further the Kurds’ dreams of retaining this patch of Syria as an independent statelet. Kurdish fighters have kept the Assad regime out of this large eastern stretch of Syria for years now—it is a de facto, temporary autonomy that makes genuine autonomy feel tantalizingly within reach. Like all his soldiers, Salar manages a close shave every single morning despite the lack of electricity and running water. The clean shave is ideologically necessary, signifying the militia’s fierce secularism, or at least its fierce commitment to the personality cult of its leader, Abdullah Öcalan, a Turkish Kurdish separatist who is interned in an island prison in the Sea of Marmara.

  Most American press accounts of the battle for Raqqa in 2017 feature convoluted, acronym-heavy descriptions of the SDF. It is usually described as a Kurdish and Arab military force, with links to the YPG, which is the military wing of the PYD, which is in turn linked to the PKK, the Kurdish militant separatist group classified as a terrorist organization by the United States and Turkey. Despite these contortions, which are meant to paper over awkward political realities, everyone here calls the SDF “the Kurds,” and their allegiance to PKK leader Öcalan is everywhere on display. His mustachioed picture hangs from lampposts in towns and in offices in this eastern part of Syria.

  Every morning, Commander Salar plays Arabic pop music for the ISIS children, featuring the throaty, luscious voices of Lebanese and Egyptian divas. The children cluster around the soldiers, their hair hopping with lice and matted to their scalps, shrieking offendedly, “Haram!” “You’re a kafir!” four-year-old Abu Bakr shouts at him. Commander Salar plays an ISIS nasheed next and the children relax. The Kurds play the pop music every morning. After about a week, some of the ISIS women stopped covering their faces and hands, and stopped wincing at having to speak to Commander Salar. “Their husbands told them we’d behead them. It took a little while for the shock of their reception here to wear off,” he says. Eventually the pop music becomes ordinary to the children. But they continue running around in the dirt playing their “Allahu akbar!” shootout games.

  Some of the ISIS women have taken wildly circuitous routes to arrive here, hoping to avoid falling into the hands of the Iraqi forces battling ISIS to the south, inside Iraq. Accounts are already emerging of atrocities committed during the retaking of Mosul, of Iraqi forces executing civilians for simply being Sunnis who stayed behind, settling old scores in the name of exterminating ISIS. The ISIS women who end up in the hands of these forces, the rumors hold, are being forcibly divorced from their husbands, often raped. For now, they are safer in the hands of the Kurds, though the bar for their treatment has been set very, very low.

  Now that al-Baghdadi’s aspirant state is crumbling, it is expedient, indeed a matter of survival, for its fleeing ruler-inhabitants to declare to have never believed in it. The fall of every empire is accompanied by such a rush of candor and soul-searching, and because every empire’s fall necessarily reflects a decayed inner core, it is the hard work of time to tell whose tales of regret are genuine and whose contrived. For now, the truth can be gleaned mainly from the children of Ain Issa. Their parents’ devotion to ISIS, at least at one time, can be read in their style of play, and in their names like Jihad and Abu Bakr—though the mother of four-year-old Abu Bakr is now quick to say, “After Abu Bakr al-Siddiq, of course,” the companion of the Prophet Muhammad, not al-Baghdadi.

  Nearly all of the ISIS women detained in this camp claim to be victims, dissenters at heart who were forced to stay in Islamic State territory because getting out was impossible. They cite happenstance and conniving husbands and bad roads for how they ended up with ISIS. They admit they were originally true believers in the state-building project, but maintain that th
ey quickly lost faith when they saw it was a miserable, vicious lie.

  The civilians in the camp don’t buy it for a second. Neither do some of the officers and staff who are tasked with looking after them. “They are liars and daughters of dogs,” a local Syrian working for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees says. “If it was up to me, I would kill them slowly. I would cut their fingers off and then their arms and then their feet.”

  Some of the ISIS women hold themselves with the arrogant mien of recently deposed rulers. Others are humble, shoulders stooped, aware they must carry the weight of their choice, however disastrously it turned out. If the courtyard of the women is a microcosm of the Islamic State in exile, then the wider camp is the future of Syria, teeming with questions of complicity and regret, everyone competing for a share of victimhood.

  * * *

  —

  AYESHA, THE WOMAN WHO FAILED to escape the camp, glides around with the air of a beleaguered exiled aristocrat—as though she were a White Russian washed up in Paris, a post-Shah Persian in Kensington—keen to establish that her current status doesn’t reflect her proper station in life. “My uncle has a flat near Hyde Park,” she announces, offering a cigarette with a conspiratorial look. “It’s okay, we can smoke in here.”

  She is everywhere at once, batting her eyelashes at the guards (at 10 a.m. she already has impeccable smoky eyes), ingratiating herself with the kiosk vendors. It emerges that she attended Homs University at the same time as Mahmoud, the journalist who has accompanied me here from Iraq, and she trades stories with him about mutual acquaintances (“Do you remember that Palestinian girl, the fat one, who studied English lit?”). The children are sharing a bag of sweets, and she pockets one for later. “I can’t smoke and have anything in my mouth at the same time,” she says daintily.