Mother Jones – July-August 2019

50 MOTHER JONES |^ JULY / AUGUST 2019

BEHIND THE LINES

isis’s leadership was mostly made up

of foreigners who were concerned less

with replacing the Syrian government

than establishing an ever-expanding

Islamic state. Wael met many of them

at the hospital where he worked as an

mri technician. He remembers a Kazakh

with needle tracks on his arms who said

he had been in the mafia back home.

“Ninety percent of these people had no

value where they were from,” Wael says.

Then they came here and suddenly they

had weapons, money, and power.

We drive to Wael’s neighborhood, a

network of dirt roads and modest

houses surrounded by cement walls.

Wael waves to a neighbor sitting on a

parked motorcycle. “He used to be in

isis,” he tells me. “This neighborhood

used to be full of them.”

Toward the end of the battle of Raqqa,

many residents evacuated the neighbor-

hood. Before isis withdrew, it left some

deadly surprises for the “apostates” who

had abandoned it. When some of Wael’s

neighbors came home, they were blown

to pieces after opening booby-trapped

closets, windows, and refrigerators, or

as they stepped on a mined floor tile or

lifted a rigged tea kettle. Some of the

bombs were triggered by lasers. Some

mines even had mines under them so

they’d kill anyone trying to defuse them.

Men taught themselves how to disable

the explosives and made a living clearing

houses for returning residents.

When we pull up to Wael’s place, I try

to slip into his walled-in yard without

anyone noticing. Inside, chunks of con-

crete are scattered under pomegranate

and orange trees. Last year, the coalition

bombed his neighbor’s house; isis had

turned it into a weapons depot. Under

a grape arbor, there is a rectangular hole

the size of a body. “That was my neigh-

bor,” Wael says. Someone buried him

there during the battle. Afterward, his

family returned to dig him up.

Wael makes tea and we sit in the only

surviving bedroom. I am supposed to leave

soon; the sdf requires all journalists to stay

in Kobanî, a Kurdish city two hours away.

But Wael says I should just stay with him.

“Why aren’t you afraid of having a for-

eigner in your house?” I ask him.

“If you aren’t afraid, should I be?” he

replies.

“I’m a little afraid, to be honest.” It’s hard

to believe there are no remnants of isis

here. Just the other day, an ied exploded

on a nearby street. It doesn’t help that

there is still no cell reception in the city.

I have a satellite phone, but I’m hesitant

to turn it on. Journalist Marie Colvin was

assassinated by the Syrian government

after they tracked her satphone. Thanks

to Wael, I’m not completely cut off. He

has a small solar panel that charges a car

battery, which powers a rig that inter cepts

the wifi signal from a nearby internet café.

With this, we can connect to the outside

world for a few hours a day.

He tells me not to worry about isis.

Any former members who are still

around were low-level fighters who

joined more out of a need for a job than

ideological conviction. isis paid com-

petitive salaries and offered extra sup-

port for dependents. The members who

stayed behind turned themselves in a

while ago, Wael says, and the sdf took

their guns away. “But if it makes you feel

better, we can get guns,” he says.

I chuckle nervously. “If you can get

guns, so can they.”

“Look, protection comes from God,”

he says. “Don’t think you are in more

danger than me.”

He leaves and goes to Friday prayer

at a nearby mosque. I ask him not to

tell anyone that an American is staying

with him.

While he is away, someone knocks on

the gate of his compound. I reflexively

look for an escape route. I could climb

onto the caved-in roof of one of the rooms

collapsed by an airstrike. From there,

I could hop over the wall, but I am not

wearing shoes. There is more knocking. I

go into the tiny bathroom until it stops.

a friend of Wael’s takes us to an empty

school whose hallways are packed to

the ceiling with dirt. A couple of boys

take us out to the back of the build-

ing, where there’s a hole in the ground.

They’ve been inside it, they tell us, and

we follow them in.

isis fighters had dug tunnels through-

out the neighborhood so they could hide

from planes. They dug at night and hid

the dirt in large buildings like this to

avoid drawing the attention of American

drones. The work looks professional, done

with power tools and reinforced by metal

supports. “They could walk comfortably

in here!” Wael’s friend says as we walk

through the corridor. “The devils.”

Other tunnels break off to the side.

One ends in the living room of a house.

There is still a subterranean network

beneath Raqqa. When I ask residents

about the tunnels, some repeat rumors

about hearing voices underground or

seeing bearded men emerge from the

tunnels. It’s hard for some people to

believe that something that had ruled

their lives so thoroughly could just be

gone, that it won’t reemerge one day.

Wael says he thought he was going to

be living with isis for the rest of his life.

As we drive through the city, we pass

a monument painted with the words

“No Border, No Nation.” There is an

anarcho- syndicalist flag painted next

to it, the mark of foreign ypg fighters.

Wael asks what it means, and I try to

explain what anarchism is. He looks be-

wildered. “If they were looking for some-

where without government, they came

to the right place,” he says.

Wael pulls over and asks a man if he

knows whether anyone has been in the

tunnel in the Black Stadium. The man

says he’s not sure, but he says he spent

48 days imprisoned there in 2015. It’s the

same place where Samantha Elhassani

told me she was held and tortured. The

man, whom I’ll call Zayn, joins us. He says

isis accused him of killing one of its men.

He was released two and a half years ago,

but “even when you got out, you still felt

like you were in prison. There was no

way to escape them. You couldn’t trust

anyone, not even your own brother.”

The stadium gates are open and no

one is guarding them, so we drive inside.

sdf flags hanging from the floodlights

flutter in the breeze. Under the stands, a

short flight of stairs leads to a long hall-

way. Bullet casings are strewn across the

Someone knocks on the

gate of the compound.

I reflexively look

for an escape route.