I am a woman now. Yesterday I was just a girl, with nothing, and now I have a husband, a house and a job. I begin to understand how a caterpillar can turn into a butterfly, but the miracle is to think all this was in me always, waiting to find wings.
My first day on the brigade is training. The Al-Khansaa Brigade – the most fearsome women on the planet. I’ve seen the pictures and now I’m one of them. My breath is actually short with excitement, I have to control it.
Umm Karam is there, Idara, others I’m getting to know. It’s a real team. Umm Karam gives us a short speech about how women are the foundation of the khilafa, and how if they’re allowed to ignore sharia the whole building will come down. I get it. It fills me with pride, and nerves.
For the rest of the day she trains us. What to look for. Who to look for. The appropriate punishments for transgressions. How to record punishments, and how to verify people’s papers.
Tomorrow, she explains, you will be apprentices. Watch. Listen. Smell. You are His senses in the City.
The next night Khalil comes to pick me up and we go for dinner at his favourite place. I’m still pinching myself. I’m tired, more tired than I think I’ve ever been, but I don’t feel it like tiredness, it’s just like every part of me has done what it was supposed to do and now I can take a moment to reflect, and relax. I don’t think I’ve ever known what work was before. Such fulfilment. Such release!
The restaurant is full of our people, hanging out, chatting, taking it easy. We all work hard. We all deserve a bit of time before rejoining the front. Brothers are here with their wives, with their kids, it’s all so . . . natural. So right. No alcohol, no pressure, no one who isn’t on the same path.
One of the things I love about the khilafa is that everyone is here for a different reason and the same one. Everyone has their own story to explain why they don’t fit in the world of lies and killing and greed, and no matter what that story is, somehow they slot into the khilafa like they were always made to be here. And that’s because we share the same faith, in every way. It’s like a universal language we all speak. A safe harbour for true souls.
Khalil orders and he’s patient with the waiter, who seems nervous for some reason and doesn’t hear right the first time. Other fighters might shout at him but not Khalil, he patiently repeats what he said and leaves it at that. He’s so handsome tonight, I swear a light shines from his eyes, it’s like the sun sometimes. He has this way of just looking at me so that his eyes smile but the rest of his face is still serious – it’s hard to explain but it’s like he’s sending his love straight from his soul to mine.
Tonight I have so much to tell him. What a day! My first catch, there’s no way I can keep it from him, but I wait till our food comes.
‘How was your day?’
‘Good. Just chilled. Prayed, watched videos. Building up my strength.’
He grins as he pulls another wing apart with those strong soft hands.
‘You need your strength.’
‘If I’m not careful you’ll use it all up.’
He grins again and I hope he can see that behind my veil I’m doing the same.
‘I made my first catch today.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I went out on patrol. I’m the new girl.’
‘That’s cool.’
‘There are four of us and they use me like a scout, I don’t have a gun so no one knows I’m in the brigade.’
Khalil nods and picks meat off a bone with his teeth. So white!
‘We went to a market and they just told me to get on with it. And at first it was like my eye wasn’t in, you know, it’s difficult to see things when you’re not used to the background yet.’
‘Yeah,’ he nods. ‘I know.’
‘So for a while I just couldn’t see anything, like a good half hour, and I was beginning to think Oh no, what if I don’t find anything? They’ll throw me straight out and how would I explain that to you? Stupid, I know, but I just wanted to impress them.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Umm Sharik – she’s the leader, she’s great, so focused – she has targets for our team each day. She told us that’s what the kafir police do but there’s no reason we shouldn’t learn from them.’
Dear lamb, he’s deep in his food, and I realize I’m not being very interesting. I need to get to the point.
‘Anyway, I couldn’t see anything and every woman looked completely fine and every veil was correct and everyone had a mahram and I was thinking, Oh great, my first day and the whole of Raqqa is suddenly under perfect sharia, and then I smelled it.’
I wait for him to respond, and he looks up at me frowning.
‘What?’
I know he’s going to be proud of me.
‘I smelled her. Perfume. Kind of faint at first and I thought I’d lost it but then I got a real hold on it and I followed my instincts and then it was just me and her walking away from the market with me calling Umm Sharik to come to us. She really stank, some horrible smell, like a kafir smell, you know? Like a London smell.’
‘Some of these women are so fucking stupid.’
‘I know.’
We eat for a bit, letting each other’s words sink in.
‘So I caught up with her and questioned her and then Umm Sharik came with the others and gave her forty lashes.’
‘You didn’t do that yourself?’
‘She said maybe when I’ve settled in.’
Khalil nods sympathetically and smiles. He tells me to eat, he wants to get home quickly to be alone with me. I love that about him, he’s so direct, and there’s more than one kind of hunger in his eyes right now. I want to talk to him about all sorts of things like his family and his poor mother who died at the hands of Assad and when he came to the khilafa and if he has brothers and sisters and on and on and on, but there’s time for that when he wants it. It will come.