BY THE TIME Laila had begun her hunger strike and Khulood and her sisters were losing their jobs, Majd Ibrahim had himself found a moment of respite—one that, although brief, had been a long time coming.
In late 2013, the Ibrahim family had returned to Homs from Damascus, only to discover that, with the serial siege steadily grinding ever more of the city’s neighborhoods to dust, even their shelter home was no longer safe. In March 2014, the family had moved once again, this time to New Akrama, a neighborhood near downtown that had been spared the worst of the violence. There, they simply waited along with everyone else for something, anything, to change.
That change finally came in May, when the last of Homs’s rebels accepted a brokered cease-fire and safe passage from the city. The three-year siege of Homs was over. What had once been a vibrant, cosmopolitan city was now known as Syria’s Stalingrad, with vast expanses of its neighborhoods uninhabitable. It was also only then that the full horror of what many of its residents had been subjected to came to light. In the total-war environment, some trapped residents had starved to death, while others had survived by eating leaves and weeds.
But even if a kind of peace had reached the shattered streets of Homs, the war continued elsewhere in Syria, and in a form that boded poorly for all its citizens. Majd Ibrahim heard the names of so many new militias competing with the plethora of already existing ones that it was quite impossible to keep track of them all. For sheer daring and cruelty, however, one group stood out: the Islamic State, or ISIS.
Comprising an even more radical offshoot of Al Qaeda, the newcomers attracted Islamic extremists from around the world. In Syria, the group announced its presence with a series of sudden, brutal attacks in Aleppo and the desert towns to the east, battling not just the Syrian army but any rival militias it deemed “apostate.” What most drew the attention of Majd Ibrahim was the group’s reputation for complete mercilessness, for eliminating by the most horrific means possible any who would resist its will.
Just a month after the Homs siege ended, most of the rest of the world would hear of ISIS, too, when it stormed out of the Syrian desert to utterly transform the Middle Eastern battlefield yet again.