BEHIND THE LINES
In the Ruins
of Raqqa
“what’s up with the camera?” asks the
wild-looking American special forces opera-
tive standing outside my car window. He has
a sculpted beard, angry eyes, huge tattooed
arms, and an M16 slung across his chest. I’ve
just entered Raqqa, and his large white suv has
pulled me and my driver over.
“I’m a journalist,” I tell him.
“Oh are you, now? You took a picture of my
motorcade?”
“No, I didn’t,” I reply. When I saw the suvs
full of special forces zoom past, I had pulled out
my camera, but I was too late to get anything.
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah, but I’m a journalist.”
“Okay, I don’t care if you are a journalist. You don’t take
pictures of my motorcade. Period.”
“I’m an American,” I say. “I am free to take pictures of
American forces.”
“Okay, buddy.” He marches back to his vehicle and gets
in, and the three suvs drive away into a warren of bombed-
out buildings and mounds of rubble.
Raqqa is an apocalyptic landscape of dust and debris.
I visited Baghdad and Fallujah during the Iraq War, and
they looked nothing like this. Even Syrian cities that have
seen heavy fighting, like Deir Ezzor and Aleppo, are less
damaged. By early 2018, as much as 80 percent of the city’s
buildings had been destroyed or damaged, according to the
United Nations. Amnesty International has called Raqqa
“the most destroyed city in modern times.” Light posts lean
over roads flanked by giant knots of metal and concrete.
Blankets, clothing, and neatly piled unexploded mortars
are visible inside buildings that no longer have walls. In the
dark skeleton of an apartment complex, two men strug-
gle to adjust rebar with their bare hands. Much of Raqqa’s
population fled during the fighting; more than 150,000
people have returned since isis was driven out, according
to the United Nations.
At a desolate roundabout, an old man sells lighters and
water bottles full of gasoline. “isis used to hang human
heads here,” he tells me. “They would crucify people, shoot
them in the head, and leave them for 24 hours. There used
to be restaurants all around the square, and people would
eat sandwiches and drink fruit cocktails. When they fin-
ished they would go spit on the heads.” Then the coalition
jets came. “They didn’t just try to get rid of isis. They tried
to destroy everything so [isis] had nowhere left to stay.”
When the revolt against Assad began in 2011, the protests
in Raqqa were small. The government was so confident of its
hold on the city that the president visited in November 2011