TWENTY-EIGHT
WHEN THE DRONES FINALLY INCINERATED Jihadi John, ISIS’s video-famous executioner with the ninja mask and the East London accent, they did it next to an Internet café. He burned alive just a few hundred feet from the Raqqa clock tower. He had launched a million Twitter memes, but he died minutes after connecting to the Internet on his phone. It seemed only fair. Jihadi John’s death was all the excuse ISIS needed to do what it had wanted all along. They arrested the Internet café’s owner under accusations that he had informed the coalition about John’s location, and even when they released him forty days later, the interrogation only added to the café owner’s suspicious taint. Internet users were spies. Internet café owners were spies. The routers and satellites dotting the town were the filaments of a web of espionage woven by Raqqan traitors, who eavesdropped on the conversations of the fighters innocently Skyping with families in Brussels, then called down bombs from their Crusader Kafir Rafidhi Nusayri Jewish overlords. ISIS cut off all private Internet, then announced that all Internet cafés would report to the Communications Diwan for private licenses. Within two days, ISIS had shuttered almost all cafés. They never reopened.
On my third day offline, I heard rumors that one Internet café had survived the purge. I didn’t know why, except that the son’s owner had died fighting for ISIS in Mosul, so they must have trusted him. Café was too grand a word for the establishment, as it offered neither water nor food. It was a dark box, ten feet by twenty, its walls raw brick, one corner dominated by two dusty billiard tables, and every other inch filled with ISIS fighters absorbed in their phones.
I came late at night, ten minutes before closing. The man sold me thirty megs of data—just enough for emails, WhatsApp, and a few minutes of image-free Twitter.
The Islamic State had become a cottage industry, and Twitter was the place to hawk one’s wares. Countless articles, even books, were being written by people who didn’t speak Arabic and had never visited an ISIS-held territory but claimed to have inside access to an organization whose own members often didn’t understand its inner workings. Instant experts, global analysts, and TV pundits who had first heard of Syria just a year earlier all flaunted their insights on What Needed to Be Done. Al-Dawlah offered enough perversion and evil for any tabloid, but outlets still outdid themselves in inventing kinky new crimes. Mandatory female genital mutilation. Pictures of chained-up, abaya-swathed women—supposedly sabayah, but actually Shia women in southern Lebanon who were taking part in a play to commemorate the Battle of Kerbela. Whole articles based on single tweets, then backed up by some quote from an analyst in some distant foreign capital.
I was writing my own stories.
I’d landed two commissions, for The New York Times and Foreign Policy, one before and one after I crossed the border. My assignment was to write about daily life in Raqqa, under bombs and ISIS occupation. Every night, I came to the café, bought my megabytes, and connected to the Internet on my phone. I performed the routine feints and dodges meant to confuse whatever Brother might casually decide to search my phone. In my Gmail sat another round of edits. I loaded the files, copied them into Notes—MS Word would have been much too suspicious—then edited them at home until the battery died. These magazines were very nice to me, I later realized. No one works this way. Of course, no one files copy under ISIS either. The café arranged its plastic chairs in six rows, as tightly packed as the cheapest economy seats on the worst airlines, and my shoulders brushed those of the men next to me. I sat with guys to the right and left, front and behind. I needed constantly to be aware not to hold the phone so high that the person behind me could see what I was writing, nor so low that the guys to the right or left could peek. Blessedly, it was winter, and I made a tent out of my coat, my shaking hands concealed within. Once, my Times editor responded to a draft during my last hour of Internet and gave me nine items to fact-check. I searched feverishly through twelve articles, desperate to make my corrections as quickly as possible. At any given moment, I needed to concentrate both on the work and the exact configuration of bodies that would shield the work I was doing from prying eyes. No one needed to read what I wrote to suspect me. Just that I, a civilian, was reading English was suspicious enough.
I listened to the two boys next to me as they traded quips. “Did she message you back?” asked the first—small, dark-skinned, beardless but perhaps too young, miraculously wearing jeans. “That bitch!” The second laughed. He was as careless as I had once been, at my uncle’s café, before the Brothers’ real paranoia had descended.
JANUARY 2016. The last month. The worst month. My Times and Foreign Policy articles are about to be published. The tension stretches painfully between the iPhone screen, the room, and the world. It’s not funny anymore. ISIS is obsessed with “spies.” They released three videos of executions of men they claimed were spies, found guilty of sending pictures of fighters’ headquarters through hidden cameras or receiving money from abroad to open Internet cafés. The videos were all the same. Orange jumpsuits. Torture-induced “confessions.” Bullets through the brains in Rashid Park. I erase every message I send, and the memories vanish with them.
Two Daesh guys walk into the café.
They are laughing about the “dirty pigs” whom their colleagues had shot against Rashid Park’s palm trees. I sign out of everything, then listen without looking. It would be too suspicious to look. One Tunisian fighter chuckles. “We are catching a lot of spies lately in cafés,” he says. “They get what they deserve.”
I sit with my phone shielded by a veil of coat, surrounded by fighters, potential ISIS spies, and potential ISIS victims, who need to watch every word they send and receive for anything that might offend the Brothers; otherwise, this so-called Internet café will be the last place their eyes see in this sunlit world. I am caught, I think. They are talking about me. I am the pig, the spy, the kafir. I am everything they hate. I’ve been lucky for years. More than once, my phone was searched, and it was only the idiocy of the Brothers who detained me that saved me. I survived, didn’t I? I am still alive. I still see sunlight. The blood is still rushing through my veins. I am still sharp enough to imagine, in every ISIS Bro’s dumb eyes, the demon who will catch me. I, who am here for no reason, with no one to blame but myself if I am caught. I thought I could establish myself in Turkey that last time, that I could work, that my money would stretch until I found a job. It went that way in my mind, but plans are different from reality. The money disappeared. I tried to find work in factories, but it’s not life, anyway, sweating your years away for one-third of what a Turk gets paid and maybe you lose your fingers to a machine and end up with nothing. The path between Ankara and Raqqa had been my thread of safety. I knew I could be back in forty-four hours, and at least here, even if this journalism thing didn’t work, I wouldn’t have to ask anyone for anything. I could keep my head up. That’s what I thought. The blood is so loud in my ears. They won’t kill just me; they would kill my family, my friends, anyone who had been in contact with me. These decent people whom I had betrayed by working undercover, milking their stories, pretending I was like them—all dead, because of me. I’m too careless, I think. This is not a joke anymore, nor is Raqqa the city it once was.
Five minutes pass. The Tunisian guys shush, then start browsing their phones. I stand and walk to the counter. Each step thunders. They will hear them. I force my right foot forward, then my left. I will fall, and they will see. The air presses down on me, so harsh my back will snap. I hand the slip of paper to the guy at the counter. It shows my username and password, so he can delete my account and thus prevent me from checking my phone outside the café and away from ISIS eyes.
“Assalamu aleykum,” I say.
“Wa aleykum assalamu,” he answers. He smiles, as if with recognition. This is normal, I tell myself. I am in here every day. No, this is not normal. See how he’s looking at me? He has memorized me. He suspects me.
I have to leave as soon as I can. I have to leave today. I have to leave this fucking hour.
It’s dark outside. I edge past the motorcycles, into the narrow street that leads to my house. The asphalt has eroded, to reveal dirt, made into mud by the winter rains. Two ISIS cars pass. I walk for fifteen minutes, numb with fear. When I open the door to my parents’ apartment, then fall onto the bed, a great luxury fills me—a concerto played through nerves, lymph, tendons, brain. I outwitted them, I tell myself. I did the job and then left safely. They will never catch me.