EPILOGUE
AFTER SIXTEEN MONTHS traveling in the Middle East, I find it impossible to predict what might happen next, let alone sum up what it all means. In most every place Paolo Pellegrin and I went, the situation today looks worse than it did when we set out—the repression of the Sisi regime in Egypt has deepened; the war in Syria has taken tens of thousands more lives; to add to its other problems, Libya is now hurtling toward insolvency. If there is one bright spot on the map, it is the slow but seemingly inexorable defeat of ISIS in Iraq. Following the recapture of the cities of Ramadi and Fallujah earlier in 2016, an unlikely coalition of the Iraqi army, Shiite militias, and the Kurdish Peshmerga launched an assault on the ISIS bastion of Mosul in October. When Mosul falls, it will also effectively end the ISIS “caliphate” in Iraq.
That said, I am reminded of something Majd Ibrahim told me: “ISIS isn’t just an organization, it’s an idea.” It is also a kind of tribe, of course, and even if this incarnation is destroyed, the conditions that created ISIS will remain in the form of a generation of disaffected and futureless young men, like Wakaz Hassan, who find purpose and power and belonging by picking up a gun. In sum, nothing gets better anytime soon.
But how much worse it gets might also depend largely on external forces, and specifically on how the new American administration responds to events in the Middle East. If agonizingly slow in coming, one of the crowning achievements of the Obama administration was its methodical building of the international military coalition now confronting ISIS, a coalition that paradoxically includes some of the same nations—Turkey, Saudi Arabia—that once helped the terror group flourish. In looking beyond the crisis of the moment, perhaps the best hope for the wider region is that this international coalition not only extends into the future but takes on a broader political and humanitarian role, one that will enable it to respond more quickly and effectively to the new crises sure to come.
But to achieve that will require both hard work and diplomacy, and the initial signs of this being taken up by the isolationist-minded Trump administration are not at all encouraging. Even more worrisome has been Trump’s vitriolic bombast about “Islamic terrorism.” One of the most striking patterns I found on this journey was that, of the nearly two dozen former ISIS fighters I interviewed, only one professed to have joined for religious reasons. All the rest enlisted for the most banal of reasons: money, prestige, because their buddies had joined. In essence, then, it seems that what primarily drives young Arab men to ISIS is very similar to what might drive a disaffected American youth to an inner-city gang, or a young Mexican to the narcos, and that combating the danger they pose is more of a sociological and economic undertaking than an ideological one. Perversely, with its veiled talk of a war between religions, the Trump administration has adopted the very same rhetoric peddled by ISIS—and if that is a war the administration wants to have, ISIS leaders will surely do all they can to provide it.
Girl running in Tikrit, Iraq, 2016
On a more philosophical level, this journey has served to remind me again of how terribly delicate is the fabric of civilization, of the vigilance required to protect it, and of the slow and painstaking work of mending it once it has been torn. This is hardly an original thought; it is a lesson we were supposed to have learned after Nazi Germany, after Bosnia and Rwanda. Perhaps it is a lesson we need to constantly relearn.
Against this, I found solace in the extraordinary power of the individual to bring change, and no person that I met more exemplified this than Khulood al-Zaidi. Through sheer force of will, Khulood—the youngest daughter of a traditional family in a provincial city in Iraq—became an unlikely yet remarkable leader, and in the process saved what she could of her family. Here, too, though, is a paradox. It is people like Khulood who must see to the mending of these fractured lands, yet it is those very people, the best their nations have to offer, who are leaving in search of a better life elsewhere. Today, Austria’s gain is Iraq’s loss.
AS I WRITE this, the battle for Mosul remains joined. For Dr. Azar Mirkhan, however, the true struggle, of fully separating his Kurdish homeland from the Arab world, will continue in the battle’s aftermath. That aftermath will also mark the end of Wakaz Hassan’s usefulness to his captors; as bluntly explained by the Kurdish security officer, he will then almost surely be handed over to Iraqi authorities for execution, if he has not been already.
In Libya, Majdi el-Mangoush is continuing his engineering studies in his hometown of Misurata. In December 2016, a motley amalgam of militias finally succeeded in driving ISIS from the coastal city of Sirte, but fighting still rages elsewhere. The one consensus about Libya, held by natives and outside observers alike, is that the nation faces a very long and hard road back to some semblance of normality. On that road, Majdi believes he has a role to play.
“I want to help my country return,” he told me. “Libya is a wonderful place. More, it is my home, and I don’t want to leave it for anything. Yes, the future is full of uncertainty, but so was the past. I am ready for a new kind of uncertainty.”
In Dresden, Majd Ibrahim has been granted refugee status, which will enable him to remain in Germany for at least the next three years. Having become proficient in German, he was recently hired on as the night auditor at the Holiday Inn in Dresden.
In Egypt, Laila Soueif’s son, Alaa, is now completing the second year of his five-year prison sentence. Laila’s youngest daughter, Sanaa, was released in September 2015 under a presidential pardon, after having served fifteen months, but that didn’t end her troubles with the Sisi regime. In May 2016, Sanaa was found guilty of “insulting the judiciary” for failing to answer a prosecutor’s request for an interview and given a new six-month prison sentence. While some observers believe that the regime is specifically targeting Laila Soueif’s family for their outspokenness, there is grim evidence that this actually might not be the case; according to a recent study by the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI), today an outright majority of Egypt’s national prison population—estimated at 109,000—are incarcerated for political offenses.
In Austria, Khulood and her sister Teamim continue to live with the Edelsbrunner family and were recently awarded scholarships to study intercultural management at a local university. Not long ago, their mother, Aziza, who had never left Iraq and whom Khulood had seen only once since she fled Iraq twelve years ago, died in Kut. Khulood’s response to the news was typical of this dauntless woman. She redoubled her efforts to rescue her remaining family, the father and sister still stranded in Jordan, and bring them to Austria. “To bring them here, to have a family again,” she said. “That is my greatest dream.”