THE CAMP DIRECTOR WAS an Iraqi named Massoud from Anbar Province. He had lost his left eye fighting the Americans during the troop surge of 2006. The right he fixed suspiciously on Natalie when, after a thoroughly unappetizing supper in the dining hall, she requested permission to walk alone outside the camp.
“There’s no need to deceive us,” he said at length. “If you wish to leave the camp, Dr. Hadawi, you are free to do so.”
“I have no wish to leave.”
“Are you not happy here? Have we not treated you well?”
“Very well.”
The one-eyed Massoud made a show of deliberation. “There’s no phone service in town, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“It isn’t.”
“And no cellular or Internet service, either.”
There was a short silence.
“I’ll send someone with you,” said Massoud.
“It isn’t necessary.”
“It is. You’re far too valuable to go walking alone.”
The escort Massoud selected to accompany Natalie was a handsome university-educated Cairene named Ismail who had joined ISIS in frustration not long after the coup that drove the Muslim Brotherhood from power in Egypt. They left the camp a few minutes after nine o’clock. The moon hung low over the northern Palmyrene mountain belt, a white sun in a black sky, and shone like a spotlight upon the mountains to the south. Natalie pursued her own shadow along a dusty path, Ismail trailing a few paces behind her, his black clothing luminous in the moonlight, a weapon across his chest. On both sides of the path, neat groves of date palms thrived in the rich soil along the Wadi al-Qubur, which was fed by the Efqa spring. It was the spring and the surrounding oasis that had first attracted humans to this place, perhaps as early as the seventh millennium BC. There arose a walled city of two hundred thousand where the inhabitants spoke the Palmyrene dialect of Aramaic and grew wealthy from the caravan traffic along the Silk Road. Empires came and went, and in the first century CE the Romans declared Palmyra a subject of the empire. The ancient city at the edge of an oasis would never be the same.
The date palms along the track moved in a cool desert wind. At last, the palms fell away and the Temple of Bel, the center of religious life in ancient Palmyra, appeared. Natalie slowed to a stop and stared, openmouthed, at the catastrophe that lay scattered across the desert floor. The temple’s ruins, with their monumental gates and columns, were among the best preserved in Palmyra. Now the ruins were in ruins, with a portion of only a single wall remaining intact. Ismail the Egyptian was obviously unmoved by the damage. “Shirk,” he said with a shrug, using the Arabic word for polytheism. “It had to be destroyed.”
“You were here when it happened?”
“I helped to set the charges.”
“Alhamdulillah,” she heard herself whisper. Praise be to God.
The fallen stones glowed in the cold light of the moon. Natalie picked her way slowly through the wreckage, careful not to turn an ankle, and set out down the Great Colonnade, the ceremonial avenue that stretched from the Temple of Bel, to the Triumphal Arch, to the Tetrapylon, to the Funerary Temple. Here, too, ISIS had imposed an Islamic death sentence on the non-Islamic past. The colonnades had been toppled, the arches smashed. Whatever ISIS’s ultimate fate, it had left an indelible mark on the Middle East. Palmyra, thought Natalie, would never be the same.
“You did this, too?”
“I helped,” admitted Ismail, smiling.
“And the Great Pyramids of Giza?” she asked leadingly. “We will destroy them, too?”
“Inshallah,” he whispered.
Natalie set out toward the Temple of Baalshamin, but soon her limbs grew heavy and tears blurred her vision, so she turned around and with Ismail in tow made her way back through the date palms, to the gates of Camp Saladin. In the main recreation room, a few trainees were watching a new ISIS recruiting video promoting the joys of life in the caliphate—a bearded young jihadi playing with a child in a leafy green park, no severed heads visible, of course. In the canteen, Natalie had tea with Selma, her friend from Tunisia, and told her wide-eyed of the wonders just beyond the camp’s walls. Then she returned to her room and collapsed onto her bed. In her dreams she walked through ruins—a great Roman city, an Arab village in the Galilee. Her guide was a blood-drenched woman with eyes of hazel and copper. He is everything you would expect, she said. Inshallah, you’ll get to meet him someday.
In her last dream she was sleeping in her own bed. Not her bed in Jerusalem but her childhood bed in France. There was a hammering at the door and soon her room was filled with mighty men with long hair and beards, their surnames taken from their villages in the east. Natalie sat up with a start and realized she was no longer dreaming. The room was her room at the camp. And the men were real.