TWENTY-THREE
A PROMISE BROUGHT ME BACK TO Raqqa.
My friend Ali was an agricultural engineer. He had spent the last fifteen years regulating the countryside’s irrigation system, and he had received an apartment from the Land Reclamation Establishment as a perk of the job. After a year under ISIS, he could endure no longer, and his children’s probable futures—mired in war and occupation—loomed as a reproach. He vowed to leave. Knowing that ISIS confiscated all vacant apartments, he asked me to stay in his home and save it from ISIS theft. I promised him that I would. I spent the whole winter and most of the spring there until I took off to Aleppo. I’d been gone for three weeks.
There was also the matter of family obligation. It was Ramadan, in the middle of an unbelievably hot summer—a month of special social rituals and pretentious friendliness, kept up even amid war. Every day at sunset, my sisters and friends would invite me to dine with them and break our fasts.
After eight hours on a minibus from Aleppo, I arrived back in Raqqa and headed to Ali’s former place. When I reached the front door, I stopped in horror.
The door—marked by bootprints three feet up—gaped wide open. Someone had broken the lock. Inside the apartment, every drawer and storage box had been ransacked and left agape. Ali’s children’s toys lay tossed in careless piles, and his papers were scattered on the floor like leaves. The intruder had poked his snout into the kitchen cupboards. He’d disconnected the telephone line. He’d unplugged the desktop computer from its screen. My notes for my journalistic work—I’d stupidly decided to write on paper—had been rifled through and were strewn around the table. At least one, titled Abu Suhaib, had captured a good deal of their attention. Whoever had entered had grabbed the black pen next to my notes and tried to write Abu Suhaib twice on the empty half of the page. The pen failed him on his first attempt, bleeding just enough ink for Abu and the S in Suhaib before going dry. The paper bore the ghosts of the u and the h. Frantically, I looked through my notes, which were written in English. Whoever the intruder was, he had not taken even one sheet.
I sat on the floor. Panicked and exhausted, I began going through the possibilities:
• If it was a thief, he would have stolen something. Not a single object was missing.
• If it was ISIS and I was the target, then I should have been arrested by now. And they would have raided my apartment while I was in town, not away in Aleppo.
• If they wanted some information Ali had, they’d have hauled away his boxes of papers. No way could they have read everything while they were in the apartment.
• If by some impossible chance they found the documents or whatever else they were after, they would have tried to conceal their traces.
• If they were sent by the Islamic State’s Real Estate Diwan—the office that confiscated and doled out housing to ISIS members and their families—then they would have had no need to break in. They would simply have left a note or written “Islamic State’s Property” on the door.
I looked through the piles of papers. Everything was still there: my passport, Ali’s proofs of employment, his apartment lease, authorizations, documents pertaining to the Land Reclamation Establishment. I jammed the door shut with a bit of cardboard, then went to my uncle’s.
The next morning, I returned to the apartment, suspicion pumping in my head as I passed the other people in the complex: One of you fucking neighbors must be involved. With each step I took, the heavier my feet weighed and the faster my heartbeat raced. I could meet my enemy like in the movies, I thought. He’ll wait until I’m unprepared, then strike. No, these fears are exaggerated. I’ve been paranoid since I started with the journalism. Maybe this is all some bad dream, hallucinated on that crappy minibus. I’ll open the door and find the apartment untouched.
What could Ali have done before leaving? Why would his neighbors wish us harm?
Abruptly, I remembered Abu Zuhair.
Abu Zuhair was Ali’s good friend and colleague at the Land Reclamation Establishment. When, twenty years ago, the al-Sahel Construction Company had erected this building, half the apartments had gone to Land Reclamation Establishment employees and half had gone up for sale. Employees battled each other for these apartments in a corrupt contest whose victors triumphed through aggressiveness and wasta. Ali won the fourth-floor apartment in 2000 but with considerable effort and at the cost of making some enemies. Abu Zuhair owned two—one below and one, opposite Ali’s, that he had purchased for his second wife.
I knocked on the door just like I had the night before. No one replied. I went downstairs and rang Abu Zuhair’s bell in the other apartment. He was praying, his ten-year-old son told me. While I was waiting for Abu Zuhair to come I asked the boy if he knew what had happened. The boy didn’t seem surprised. He said that when he went up he found the door open and tried to close it. He said he saw two al-Dawlah guys the day after asking about who was living there. When he’d completed his prayers, Abu Zuhair greeted me warmly and asked me to come in. I told him my story and he looked at me with a surprised expression that I didn’t buy at all. The kid must have told him what he saw—he was too young to hide something like that from his father.
I went up again and repaired the lock and then wrote my telephone number on the door to see if the belligerents wanted to talk. Then I left, to spend the night at a friend’s house. The men never called but apparently, I was told, came back a few days later. I decided to start spending at least my nights in the apartment. My first night at home came and as the hours passed, I gradually grew calmer and convinced myself that I wasn’t the person the intruders had been looking for. They had seen the notes, nonetheless. I burned them all, but they could have simply snapped photos of them. I decided to take my chances and wait for them in the apartment.
MONDAY, THE TWENTY-NINTH of June, 2015. Just when I was convinced that whoever had ransacked Ali’s apartment wasn’t going to come again, and I lay in bed drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, one hour before the sunset call to prayer, the lock began to rattle and so did my heart. I frantically rushed around the house, half-conscious, cleaning up evidence of my sins. No time to prioritize. The cigarettes. The coffee. My pants. The door.
Unthinkingly, I hid my phone in my small backpack. It might as well have been a bomb, so dangerous was that small device, filled with my notes, and my emails with the artist and other journalists, any one of which was enough to get me lovingly tortured to death in an ISIS basement. I pulled on my azure shirt and my pants. Now they were breaking the lock; there was definitely no time to hide all my forbidden things. As I approached the door I could hear mumbling among the assaulters and the noise of a walkie-talkie. I managed to open the door before they broke it.
They were six fighters armed with rifles, long and short. They weren’t masked. Three Syrians, one Saudi, one possibly from a country in the Caucasus, and a sixth whose nationality I couldn’t identify.
“Why are you living here, sheikh?” the Saudi asked me immediately. “You are in a property that belongs to the Islamic State.” Not expecting an answer, obviously, he pushed for another question: “Are there any women here?”
“No, this is my friend’s home. What do you—”
I couldn’t finish my question as the others pushed the door wide open and cautiously spread out into the apartment, each of them headed to a different room. Clearly they were the guys who had broken in some weeks earlier, for everyone knew where to go, even though Ali’s apartment was designed like a small maze. One went to the study where I put my notes, one to the large bathroom, one to the room on its right, one to the small toilet, and one to the kitchen hidden next to the balcony. The Saudi headed to the living room, where I spent most of my time. I followed him.
“What’s all this about?” I asked.
“Where’s engineer Ali? Has he arrived in Sweden yet?” he asked, not bothering to look around the room.
“He’s not going to Sweden. He’s in Turkey.”
“In Turkey, huh?”
“Yes, and we can call him on his Turkish number if you want. Is there any document you have from the Islamic State giving you permission to break in like this?”
The man with the skeptical look didn’t pay attention to what I was saying. He spotted a Mikado Silver cigarette pack, a half-empty cup of coffee, an empty glass for tea, and a big glass of water.
“You are not fasting!” he exclaimed, happy to have found the first evidence to excuse his gangster-style raid. The others excitedly joined in. Now everything was turning against me. This was clearly just what they wanted. I could see that they had not been authorized to come in like this. I could also see that they had been tipped off that Ali had fled with the intention of seeking asylum in Sweden. The informant was probably from his department, or a neighbor who knew the apartment had been left uninhabited for about three weeks.
The snitch might be Ahmad al-Mhawesh, Ali’s fellow employee in the Irrigation Section who provided the neighborhood with electricity from a generator he’d bought a year earlier. Mhawesh had known that I was going to travel outside of the city because I’d paid my electricity bill a whole month in advance. He had knocked on the door the night before I left for Aleppo and, as per his norm, he had taken leave to sit on my floor, catch his breath, ask for a glass of water, smoke a cigarette, and lament about how “life” had separated him from his dear friend Ali. Mhawesh ranted against ISIS, the rebels, and the Syrian regime, all alike. He narrated to me the story of his younger brother, who had been studying law in the fall of 2011 in Damascus when he was arrested and tortured by the mukhabarat. They paid “everything they could” to get him out, Mhawesh told me. After his brother was freed, Mhawesh’s people had to ask friends and relatives for money to pay for medical treatment. “They let him out a skeleton with involuntary movements and muscle contractions,” he said, and furrowed his brow.
Or the snitch could be that crazy, half-deaf old woman, Um al-Heif, whom I had hired to clean up my apartment. She was a poor woman who moved heavily and spoke in a thundering tone of voice but made her living from washing carpets and mattresses. She knew everyone in the neighborhood and told me how ISIS guys were generous with her, paying forty dollars for every carpet she washed. After a stroke, her husband needed drugs to survive, so she had to work at the age of sixty.
Or it could be…the truth was, it didn’t matter who the snitches were. The fighters were already staring at the coffee cups with unbridled glee.
“These are from last night. I was sleeping.”
I was lying, obviously. The remnants of the coffee would have dried by that time. The smell of the tobacco still hung in the air.
“Call al-Hisbah,” the Saudi ordered. “Tell them we have someone who is not fasting.” One of the Syrians took the walkie-talkie and pretended to call, but he wasn’t calling shit.
“Take your personal stuff and leave,” said the pompous Abu Islam, who so far had stayed silent.
“He can’t leave,” interrupted the Saudi. “We are bringing in al-Hisbah.”
Perhaps he wasn’t serious. Perhaps Abu Islam, a Syrian from Tal Abyad, was smarter. The man was clearly in charge—I later found out that he was a member of ISIS’s security services. He, however, only wanted Ali’s apartment, and calling al-Hisbah could bring further investigation and questions about why they had raided a civilian house with no authorization from the Islamic Court.
“We are pardoning him since it’s Ramadan,” he said. “These drinks could be from last night.”
The Saudi fighter with the suicide belt around his belly was slightly insulted. “Not before we inspect his stuff,” he said.
The Saudi squatted down and rummaged in my bag for a minute, then found my iPhone.
“Unlock it,” he demanded.
In shitty situations like this, you just need luck and for the God of Crucial Details to blink; otherwise, you are fucked.
I was standing beside the Saudi and didn’t bend down with him. He handed me the phone and hurried me to insert the passcode while he was still squatting. Because of his position, neither he nor the others could see my screen. I had this one second to save myself from their dark dungeons, a nightmare that had haunted me since they first came to Raqqa. I unlocked my phone’s screen and saw my WhatsApp icon, begging me to delete it. With a press-hold, the icons began to dance, mimicking my churning insides.
The Syrian cried out, “Don’t! Give me the mobile!”
If this was a matter of life and death for me, so be it. Shoot me if you like to, you’ll not get it with WhatsApp installed.
Absurdly, my mind went to the annual Saudi satire show—which aired during the sunset hour when we broke our fasts—that this year had devoted some of its episodes to ISIS. Tuesday’s Maghreb episode had been about a split between jihadists: An actor decided to make a new Islamic State, abandoning his previous Islamic State when his fighters took over a town and he refused his emir’s order to withdraw. This new caliph, Abu Al-Qaqa’a, created his own flag, al-Hisbah, Diwan, and even a Takfir Diwan. When I watched the satire on my friend’s TV, I began to doubt that it was sane to stay in Raqqa. Sweating in front of the Saudi, I asked myself again: How had our lives become as absurd as one of his country’s sitcoms?
I handed the Saudi my cellphone, and he started to search it. With my incriminating WhatsApp gone, the remaining apps were in English: Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, Notes, Skype, and the Wi-Fi connector. English defeated the Saudi, so he gave it to the Caucasian—but not without first questioning my suspicious facility with English.
“I’m an English literature graduate” was my answer. He didn’t follow up.
The Caucasian started his own inspection, and now I was collecting my clothes, my mind focused on the moment when he’d shoot me or arrest me or do whatever else to me when he found something against me, which was basically everything on my phone. But when the God of Deliverance interferes and overrides the God of Crucial Details, languages do matter.
And then there’s that universal celebrity of words: Fuck. Who doesn’t know fuck? Even fortunes fuck each other.
“Do you know what Salafist means?” the Caucasian asked, massacring the Arabic.
“Yes.”
“What does it mean?”
“The one who adheres to the fundamental teachings of Prophet Muhammad and his companions.”
“Then why are you cursing them?”
He was referring to an email in my inbox: Fuck the Israeli government, fuck Hamas and Salafists.
“Oh, that comment was about Gaza’s Salafists, who, just like Egypt’s Salafists, deviate from rightful Salafism.” I replied hesitantly, as my skin cells were springing sweat. It wasn’t a particularly accurate line of reasoning, but it was good enough to expose either my enemies’ ignorance or their inability to argue.
“Wallah a’am, inta murtad,” the Caucasian decreed. God knows best. You are an apostate.
They set me free. The apartment was occupied by Abu Islam’s old parents, who ran from Tal Abyad after it was taken, in fear of retaliation from the YPG.