FOURTEEN
“YOU, IN RAQQA, WERE LIKE this,” said Abu Qutada, shaking his chaste jihadi ass in front of my desk.
The Tunisian Brother was wrist-bandaged and terrible-looking. His spectacle was inspired by the heated discussion between the Brothers and the commoners—including me—of the capital’s irreligious past. Our failures were proven by our reluctance to join the jihad and by our obsession with money. He had been told that before the arrival of ISIS the villas on the Euphrates outside the city had been dark places for indecent nightlife, which Satan—represented by sexuality, alcoholic drinks, and music—attended, as his newly seduced victims danced, intoxicated, to the vulgar faux-folkloric songs and squandered their harvest money. Abu Qutada had been in town for a few days, enough time to make him confident spitting out such a statement. We wished that his wound would heal so that he’d be sent to the front lines at the earliest opportunity. Our heated discussion could be traced back to his bill; he thought we had overcharged him for his first hundred megabytes, which had been exhausted by the time he found himself a seat. In truth, he was a victim of his own phone’s auto-update setting, but we failed to convince him that his megabytes had been taken by software and not stolen by us. Between the five cups of tea and the two hundred megabytes—for we had refilled his account with another one hundred—we charged him four hundred Syrian pounds, no more than two U.S. dollars, but that was sufficient to trigger his now-sprawling outrage at Raqqa.
Abu Qutada seemed to have heard stories like the one about Abu-l Nour, a fat, neatly dressed, beard-combed, tastily perfumed Brother from Germany, who once told me that he had wasted ten thousand dollars in forty days in East Aleppo simply on shopping. East Aleppo was not a particularly extravagant town for shopping at the time, considering that its regular weather forecast was “hail of barrel bombs,” but he once found himself buying a kilo of bananas for seven dollars when the price elsewhere was less than two. “People in Aleppo are khabeth [foul],” he spat, and I gladly agreed.
That Ramadan, I suffered the torture of having to wake up, stuporous and dry-mouthed, at 11 A.M., after long hours of sleeping and sweating in the hot July night, and, unable to have so much as a sip of water, stagger over to open the café. I was tempted to break my fast, but with ISIS members as customers, I had minimum opportunity. A wake-up cigarette, the enemy of al-Dawlah, smoothed by coffee, tempted me mercilessly. I needed it to equip my brain for the long, delicate hours of handling the Brothers. Not that all of them were fasting; some of them excused themselves, claiming the dubious justification that they were “defenders of Islam, garrisoned at every front.” I resisted my thirst for a time by watching Game of Thrones in the blazing heat, until the hall was vacant of Abu Qutada and all of the Abu Others, at which point I locked the door, snapped open one of the soda cans, and sank into delirium.
When the muezzin called out the Maghrib prayer, the skinny ISIS fighter Abu-l Munther from Egypt—where he had been imprisoned for radical preaching—limped into the café, leaning on a crutch to compensate for his severed left leg. He was housed in Abu Steif’s sanctuary too, and was sent in a plateless van to a nearby village to the south every Friday to lead the day’s sermons. Abu-l Munther was short and mean, mean as the acid in his voice. He called for everyone to gather to follow him in prayer in the little space next to the foyer, making sure that Ammar, our daily free-bandwidth hunters (the shopkeeper across the street and his WhatsApp-addicted brother), and I joined. We often made excuses to disappear, but when one of us went missing Abu-l Munther was sure to investigate at length. To our dismay, Abu-l Munther’s wound would never heal, and he would never be sent to the front line.
THE FIRST TIME BOTH Abu-l Munther and Abu Abdullah al-Jazrawi from Saudi Arabia met at the café, they didn’t seem to know each other. But the second time, Abu-l Munther made himself comfortable in the little chair in front of my cashier’s desk, which sat against the café’s southern wall, next to the entrance, enabling me to look through the windows at the city. He did this on an invitation from Abu Abdullah, who himself was seated next to Abu Adeeb, his father-in-law. Abu Abdullah, a member of al-Hisbah and an utter idiot, had very recently taken a bullet in his waist during the ongoing Battle of Kobane, and he was keen to show the wound to everybody. However, on this day Abu Abdullah was wary, less talkative, and definitely less stupid. Everyone who knew “Abu Abdullah al-Hisbah” knew that he was weird, rude even, and not simply because he followed Torjuman al-Asawerti—the mysterious ISIS Twitter propaganda legend who set a record by having his account suspended five hundred times—and loudly read every single tweet his eyes rested on, swallowing the sought-after, frantic dose. Abu Abdullah continually got himself into embarrassing positions with his thick-minded, utterly unfunny jokes and with the vulgar remarks that provoked Brothers he had just met, until someone saved the situation and everyone, except him, was relieved.
Abu Abdullah was married to Abu Adeeb’s second daughter, and they all lived together in the luxurious, confiscated al-Gos villa, which consisted of two residential blocks separated by a garden, only a few steps from the café. Abu Adeeb had grown daughters, all of whom he married to the mujahedeen, and one underage son, whom he pushed to join the mujahedeen. He was a fragile, fastidious, white-bearded man from Aleppo, who passed by regularly to pay me the weekly five hundred Syrian pounds, the charge for his active night account. Now he was bowing his head in grief as Abu Abdullah spoke.
“We heard your daughter Amina’s husband has passed away, may Allah accept him,” Abu Abdullah began.
“Yes, Allah granted him shahada a few days ago.”
Abu Abdullah bent forward, lowering his voice further, and said, “This is our brother Abu-l Munther, he made Hijra all the way from Egypt, mashallah.”
“Welcome, Akhi Abu-l Munther.”
“May Allah house your son-in-law in Ferdous,” said Abu-l Munther.
I remained silent as no one, luckily, seemed to notice my existence behind the cashier’s desk.
“The Brothers are advancing against the atheist Kurds, Alhamdulillah. Now they are already near Ain al-Islam,” Abu Abdullah said, using the ISIS name for Kobane, a Kurdish city on the Turkish border. He hesitated, bobbing his head up and down. “Abu-l Munther was given a residence in al-Kasra, near his mosque. He wants to talk to you about something.”
“I want to ask for your daughter’s hand.” Abu-l Munther’s words rushed out.
Unsurprisingly, Abu Adeeb’s face reddened, and his eyes widened in shock. Something inside me felt unease, for surely such a conversation was too weird to have in front of me, let alone in this way.
“She’s still in idda, so it’s still early to talk about that.”
Idda is the 125-day period after her husband’s death when a widow is forbidden from seeing strange men, let alone marrying one. Islam forbids even a hint of a proposal during this period.
“Of course. We mean when she finishes idda.”
“We’ll talk about that when she finishes, Abu Abdullah.”
Even with that, Abu Abdullah might have felt that he had overstepped a religious boundary. The two men were saved when a group of Brothers came for the check.
WITH THE CAFÉ’S HALL crowded, we began to make good money from the fighters, both crippled and able, who were interested in watching high-quality video releases and whose Skype video calls (on the most up-to-date smartphones, of course) made them greedy for bytes. Foreign mujahedeen, who came from more modern worlds, were to blame for the swelling smartphone trade—in comparison to civilians with their ancient Nokias, whose Internet use was mostly limited to WhatsApp sessions typing to relatives living in places they could not visit.
Abu Steif bought his own satellite dish eventually, but his building was crowded with over a hundred tenants, so everyone who was still ambulatory came to the café. Within a few days, we had to provide another Wi-Fi signal to keep up with demand. Fighters speaking different tongues from different countries and with skin of different colors, all were unified in their thirst for infidels’ blood and our bandwidth. As I hustled around the café, setting up customers and handling complaints, I overheard their constant chatter: They discussed the front lines, the challenges facing al-Dawlah, the ignorance of the ordinary people and their Jahaliyya habits, and the difficulty of finding brides. People like Abu Adeeb did their own jihad by offering their daughters to the mujahedeen, whose marriages often did not last long—mujahedeen husbands were usually gone too soon, in more ways than one. We seldom saw a fighter at the café for more than a few weeks; large numbers disappeared and then we would hear from their fellow fighters that they had been killed. We sincerely prayed that God might grant them all shahada.
My days were torn between setting up Internet accounts for the jihadis, with the simplest usernames and passwords (to save time), and checking the accounts of jihadis, rebels, activists, analysts, and journalists—Western and Arab—on my Twitter timeline. There, ISIS jihadis were bestowed with a bevy of names, each revealing the viewpoint of its user—ISIS, ISIL, the Islamic State, al-Dawlah, and, when one wanted to show contempt, ISIS’s Arabic acronym, Daesh. Two worlds fused before my eyes: one a virtual world full of theories about the apocalyptic nature of the ’stache-less, long-bearded cultists of the black flags and the baglike black abayas, referred to by Twitter wits as “Daeshbags,” the other world right in front of me, its would-be champions obsessed with fantasies of expansion and fictional triumphs, dreaming aloud about returning home to be welcomed as liberators in Cairo, Tashkent, Baghdad—oh, Baghdad—and Mecca, smashing crosses and butchering pigs. From Raqqan pulpits, preachers preached the Re-Reconquista of Al-Andalus and the battering ram at the gates of Rome, and from Jerusalem, a Twitter stalker assured me that life in Raqqa was utopian and that his al-Dawlah brothers were “ruthless toward the polytheists, humble toward the monotheists,” a phrase he had read in the Quran. I continued my habit of tweeting life in Raqqa, though now, under the present occupiers, I did it in greater secrecy and at far greater risk.
In those days, I and those around me knew that the nightmare of ISIS would come to an end, but not before killing our dreams. We knew that somehow, if the rebels were not able to put down these jihadis, then, when their danger expanded beyond the borders of Iraq and Syria, the world would lash out with wrath. But, alas, the world had no interest in putting an end to ISIS as long as people like us were the only victims. We knew, this time truly, that in the interval before ISIS fell, we would have to survive by every means, smart and dishonest. We also knew that we would eventually be misjudged—presumed to be not ISIS’s victims but, perversely, its base of support. When guilt weighed upon me, I tried to abandon it on the shore of the Euphrates.
At midnight, if by good luck our customers had finally left, we closed the doors and turned off the already dim LED lights. Not to lengthen their battery life so much as to render ourselves invisible to those outside who might want to come in—and thus to maintain our sanity. Our customers were not the sort who abided by the rules of opening and closing times; they believed that they were the rules. Some mornings, when Ammar was sleeping in the kitchen, they pounded on the windows and woke him up, demanding that he open the café for them. Some nights they stayed until 4 A.M., preventing our escape. How could we dare say we needed to close? Some of them made us lend them our own phones or laptops if they wanted to make a call, like that Chechen monster who forced me to let him Skype with his family from the only laptop we had. The second time he asked, we brought him a desktop computer to use, but soon the café’s electricity went out. He left in sullen silence, only to come back exactly a week later, barreling into the café, screaming at us in Chechen. We couldn’t figure out what he was ranting about. When he got violent, when he almost broke my laptop, even in my confusion I knew better than to respond in kind. I was enough in control of myself to know that an angry reaction would mean my certain death. These men were a band of brothers, and a non-fighter’s life for them was worth no more than the surplus share of ammunition it would take to kill him. After twenty minutes of intense Chechen frenzy, as contained as a volcano’s lava, his friend—who spoke a disastrous Arabic, with a jumble of butchered syllables and a considerable quantity of saliva—successfully interpreted his madness, telling us that his brother’s Skype account must have still been signed in when the electricity cut out, and we swore by God’s ninety-nine names that it would have signed out automatically when the computer’s power came back on. We demonstrated it, but he wasn’t totally convinced. This would not be the last we saw of him.
This was not the only conflict for which we had to improvise an urgent response or face uncertain consequences. Like when they thought that the plus signs on the stained glass panels—oh Nael, you painted them!—were crosses, and we had to blot them out with blank paper squares.
Or when two al-Hisbah members, one Saudi and the other Moroccan, both regular customers, began hassling Ammar while he was working. “Akhi, why are you shaving? Don’t you know this is haram?” the Saudi remarked, and the Moroccan said that Ammar looked like a girl in his jeans and his tight shirt. “Brothers years younger than you are sacrificing their lives in jihad,” the Moroccan jeered. “Look at you, in your prime. Akhi, you look soft.” The lecture lasted for over forty minutes, of which maybe thirty were dedicated to the “meaning” of “There’s no God but Allah”! Ammar smirked and said, “Brother, I’m too poor to buy clothes while I am feeding my family. Maybe you should give me some cash.” (Of course, he was a liar; he was saving money to buy an iPhone 5s.)
Or when the door suddenly opened and a belligerent Moroccan’s eyes gazed at the village rug and its intertwined patterns with which my uncle had decorated the walls. He understood the patterns to be Masonic Satanic symbols, so we had to remove the rug immediately, with no time for a debate about the ambiguity of art.
Or when we placed a bell above the front door to chime whenever a new customer walked in, and Abu Abdulrahman and countless others, especially that short, fat Tunisian, asked us to get rid of it because the ringing of bells was a Christian thing. In that case, we elected not to act immediately and instead put him off with the argument that it was necessary to alert us if anyone had entered the café. But then came the day when he, followed as always by the same group of Tunisian Brothers, stormed the door as if it were the gate of Baghdad and the bell fell on his bare, bold skull—oh, that skull! Not a single drop of blood spilled forth!—but we were saved by the peals of laughter that burst from his own friends, which restored the blood to our veins, and by our offers of free drinks and Internet. But we savored the justice.
Or when we fought a long war of attrition against Abu Siraj al-Jazrawi and Muhammad al-Maghrebi over cigarettes. Muhammad al-Maghrebi took the habit of coming over every afternoon that summer. He most often arrived with the Saudi Abu Siraj, who I guessed was about fifty years old. Abu Siraj would park his Toyota HiLux in the garage, and he would always enter after Muhammad. Muhammad was very young, with a tall, taut, athlete’s build, a wide forehead, and a half-beardless chin. He would put his mobile phone and keys on my table and then walk behind the café and leap into the cool water of the Euphrates. The river was known to be tricky around Raqqa. It had swallowed hundreds of lives, not that the young boys who challenged each other to dive from the bridge cared. Neither did Muhammad. Muhammad’s childhood and adolescence were very different from his present, chosen lifestyle. He grew up in the meadows of the Moroccan north, among the cannabis fields cultivated by his family. Muhammad then had worn a foolish smile identical to that worn by the Muhammad of the present. He’d take out his phone for us and scroll through photos from his past in those fields. He had also lived in Agadir and Fes before migrating to Syria. Muhammad was not like the other ISIS fighters. He enjoyed a pleasant mood and had an adventurer’s spirit. He knew that we smoked in the empty kitchen we used as a dump but didn’t mind—in fact, he smiled every time Abu Siraj made his accustomed tour, poking around in search of cigarette packs. Abu Siraj usually dunked the packs in the fish pool when he found them, until he was certain that the tobacco had been fouled; then he threw them at Ammar, grinning at his destructive handiwork. We retaliated, of course, by overcharging him; Abu Siraj unknowingly paid for the damage.
On YouTube, Muhammad followed the news and videos of al-Dawlah’s enemies as a form of entertainment—or possibly as a job. He didn’t, as the others had, shout ridicule or pray to Allah to enable him to cut their throats. Rather, one night he called Ammar and me to watch a YouTube video of Aleppo rebels singing: “You are in a valley, and we’re in another valley. Oh, Baghdadi, we are going to oust you.” The song continued: “You want a state, go convince people to follow you, but be careful not to alienate them through your actions.” He sat on the couch in the corner opposite my desk and examined our faces every time there was a phrase too critical of his group, as if to read our sequestered thoughts, a test of my ability to exhibit apathy even when my interest was excited.
Muhammad was interested in Ammar at first simply because Ammar came from Atareb, a small town in the western Aleppo countryside. There, the rebels had fired their first bullet against ISIS. That night in December 2013 put ISIS at odds with the rest of the insurgent groups, radical and moderate. Enmity and a long war followed. ISIS accused local Atareb rebels of raping its foreign female members, something that, whenever ISIS fighters brought it up in the café—usually Abu Abdullah, who made sure to tell every new member that Ammar was from “Tareb,” mimicking the local pronunciation in his thick Saudi accent—put Ammar in the spotlight.
Since Abu Siraj led the way, paid the checks, and drove the car, we joked that he was Muhammad’s boyfriend. However, their strong bond was of a different sort—and not one that we exactly guessed until later. One day, when the café was empty, Muhammad pulled Ammar to his side and whispered in his ear that he wanted him to be a spy. He asked Ammar to help him bust “underground brothels” and big-fish tobacco dealers in the neighborhood, offering him an irresistible stack of dollars. Ammar told me about the offer and I—lying—warned him that it was a trap; the boy was thankfully scared enough to refuse. It was easy for Muhammad and Abu Siraj to take in the unwary, since they were friendly and didn’t care about minor offenses like cursing or Ammar’s half-shaved, gel-stiffened “un-Islamic” haircut. It was only when Abu Siraj came alone and sat down for a few minutes that we understood something of the nature of their actual profession. We asked him about Muhammad and Abu Siraj replied that he had achieved shahada in a recent bombing by the “Nusayri regime.” This bombing was no doubt the only time the Syrian regime succeeded in hitting ISIS hard, for the building they struck housed Point Eleven, ISIS’s intelligence unit in Raqqa, which was notorious for kidnapping and torture. The Point Eleven building was pummeled by a dozen air raids. ISIS lost more than fifty members that day; one of them was Muhammad. That afternoon was the last time we saw Abu Siraj.
OF ALL THE MANY THINGS ISIS had forbidden, smoking was the hardest to control. Nicotine was in the blood of many locals and one of the very few pleasures that was not traditionally prohibited. Of all the Islamists who ruled Raqqa, only ISIS fought that popular addiction with lashings, imprisonment, and fines.
After ISIS imposed its ban on cigarettes, the café’s dump kitchen became our haven in which to hide and smoke, but during one of the many bombing raids, the glass on the kitchen doors shattered and the patches of plastic sheeting we hung leaked the smell of tobacco. One day, when Ammar and our WhatsApp addict neighbor and I were sharing a smoke, the Dutch fighter Abu Suleiman pulled open the kitchen door and breathed in our foggy climate. Only the day before, Ammar had cooked eggs and tomatoes that Abu Suleiman and his best friend had invited themselves to share with us, and we, for once, dined with the elite European Brothers, much to their satisfaction. But that happy time didn’t help us now. When he smelled the remnants of our smoke, Abu Suleiman’s countenance switched abruptly from white to angry red and he insisted on inspecting the kitchen. He found three packs but couldn’t believe that we were not hiding more until he had rummaged through the spiderwebbed interiors of the drawers. He contained himself after a moment (probably recalling the taste of Ammar’s eggs with tomatoes) and then began lecturing us on the evils of cigarettes, seemingly without sensing the need to clear his throat. He seemed shocked that these criminal things still existed—as if they were a gateway drug to defying the very existence of his al-Dawlah. And they certainly were, in some cases, perhaps even in ours.
“Where did you buy these cigarettes?” Abu Suleiman began.
“They don’t sell them here anymore. I brought some with me from Aleppo yesterday,” the WhatsApp addict lied.
“You are not trying to fool me, are you?” he snapped. “All of you smoke the cigarettes he smuggled from Aleppo!”
“Tell us from whom you bought them and we won’t call al-Hisbah,” interjected Abu Suleiman’s best friend.
To snitch on a dealer meant that you’d be dragged to the Islamic Court as a witness, if the fighter didn’t honor his promise to hide your identity, and they usually didn’t—not to mention the loss of both a rare source of cigarettes and your people’s trust. Usually al-Hisbah monitored a suspected dealer for a long time in order to discover his supplier, one of the big-fish traders of cigarettes. Most of the time, they then sent a collaborator to buy from the dealer and thus catch him in the act. Dealers were always suspicious and sold only to the people they truly trusted.
“Okay,” Ammar said, and I could sense that he was searching for the right lie to end this debacle. “Vendors don’t sell cigarettes in the shops so that they won’t be caught. They walk in the streets like normal people so that you couldn’t guess what they were up to. The only thing that makes them identifiable for us is the suitcases where they put the packs. You’d have to be a smoker to identify them easily. You come close to them and whisper what brand you need. They take you to a corner where no one can see you and sell you just a few packs at a time.”
Abu Suleiman looked at us in turn, half buying it, half not.
“That’s how people in Raqqa buy cigarettes,” Ammar said. We nodded.
“I’ll find out about that,” he said, and he and his friend withdrew.
AT THE BEGINNING OF THE MONTH, when the jihadis first came, the air had felt different. During those first few days of Ramadan, there was electricity twenty hours a day and a caliphate. ISIS shortened its long name to IS—the Islamic State—to further burnish its prestige. Baghdadi declared himself a “Prince of the Believers,” but the majority of “believers” didn’t give a damn. The media crowned Raqqa the de facto capital, and while believers in the capital barely heard the news, they enjoyed cooling themselves by the fans and air conditioners powered by the new electricity. To celebrate, the caliphate organized a parade of force, consisting of tanks, heavy machine guns, and hails of bullets, even a Scud missile shell they displayed on a long truck. A Syrian fighter jet roared above, and hundreds of anti-aircraft machine guns fired at it, uselessly, from our pale, dusty ground. At dusk, I returned to my new home, the rooftop terrace of one of the buildings my uncle owned, to break my fast. I leaned against the fence surrounding its balcony. A soft breeze, moistened by the river, caressed my hair and gently struck my cheeks.
It was a dishonest messenger.