Authors: Joby Warrick
The city’s new rules began with mandatory religious observances—all shopkeepers were required to close for daily prayers, for instance—and expanded to include personal dress and behavior. ISIS banned not only smoking and drinking but also Western music and displays of Western clothing in shop windows. Women could leave their houses only if fully covered, and even then, any outing risked a humiliating inspection by police to ensure that the woman’s
abaya
was sufficiently opaque and loose fitting, to avoid revealing any hint of the wearer’s physical form.
Punishment for violating ISIS’s rules could range from a public scolding or fine to floggings and worse. One unmarried couple was beaten for sitting together on a park bench. Another man was publicly flogged because he married a divorced woman before the mandatory three-month waiting period had ended. Any infraction carried an implicit threat of summary execution, which at times seemed to be carried out almost on a whim, Abu Ibrahim said.
“Sometimes a week or two will go by with no executions, and then suddenly there will be five at once,” he said. “For ordinary people, there are fines and fees for everything: for running a business, for parking your car, for picking up your trash. They take your money and they use it to pay the salaries of the foreign fighters. And people are afraid to do anything because of the risk of execution.”
But most troubling to Abu Ibrahim was how Raqqa’s occupiers treated the city’s children. Schools were kept shuttered for months after ISIS seized power, and when they finally reopened, everything had changed. The old textbooks and curricula—the “books of the infidels,” ISIS called them—had been tossed out, replaced by religious training. Meanwhile, the city’s hundreds of orphaned children and teens were moved to military camps to learn to shoot rifles and drive suicide trucks. Abu Ibrahim would sometimes see the young ISIS recruits in military convoys, carrying guns and wearing oversized uniforms.
“
Some are boys younger than sixteen,” he said. “When the schools were closed there was nothing for them to do. They see these tough guys with their Kalashnikovs and it affects them. They want to be part of it.”
Indeed, ISIS would frequently boast about its youth camps, offering virtual tours on social media of facilities with names such as “al-Zarqawi Camp.” Photographs and videos posted to Twitter showed prepubescent boys in military garb, firing weapons and practicing maneuvers. Other images depicted young trainees being directed to execute prisoners with gunshots to the head.
To Abu Ibrahim, the camps were ISIS’s attempt at ensuring the movement’s survival and hedging against the possibility of future military setbacks. The organization was investing in the creation of cadres of fanatical young followers willing to kill others or sacrifice their own lives if ordered to do so. “They are being brainwashed,” Abu Ibrahim said of the ISIS youths, “to create an army of loyal followers for the future.”
Meanwhile, ISIS was doing fine with the army it already had. A few months after announcing its entry into Syria, the Islamic State’s ranks had swollen to nearly ten thousand fighters, including the bulk of the foreign volunteers streaming into Syria from fifty countries
around the world. Rival rebel groups, from the al-Nusra Front to the secular Free Syrian Army, complained that ISIS was winning the competition for recruits—not just because it could afford to pay bigger salaries, but also because it claimed to be fighting for something bigger than Syria.
The group’s Twitter and Facebook pages featured daily testimonials from volunteers from Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East touting the many rewards of jihad, both heavenly and temporal. An August 2013 Twitter posting by a Syrian jihadist who called himself Nasruddin al-Shami said he felt he had joined a “global gathering” when he signed up for ISIS. “I chose to be a soldier under this banner, because I found it to be Arab and non-Arab,” he wrote. “I found people from the Peninsula, the Islamic Maghreb, the Egyptians, and the Iraqis. I met people from the Levant and Turkey. I met French, British, and Pakistanis. The list is long. They were all beloved brothers whose concern is to support the religion.”
A British ISIS recruit told a British broadcaster, “It’s actually quite fun.
“
What’s that [video] game called—‘Call of Duty’?—It’s like that,” he said, “but really, you know, 3-D. You can see everything’s happening in front of you. It’s real. You know what I mean?”
In Raqqa’s downtown markets, bearded, rifle-toting foreigners seemed at times to outnumber locals as the ISIS occupation took on a look of permanence. The group’s coffers were fattening quickly, between the fees and bribes assessed to businesses and the sale of more than forty thousand barrels of crude oil per day from oil wells captured by ISIS in its march across the Syrian desert. The jihadists who had been so anxious to capture Raqqa a few months earlier seemed in no hurry now to push on to further conquests, Abu Ibrahim noted. The Islamic State’s men would turn aggressive whenever there were punishments to mete out, but between executions and floggings, Abu Ibrahim would see them relaxing in restaurants, gawking at Western Web sites in Internet cafés, or buying knockoff Viagra from the drugstores.
For the occupiers, the Islamic State had finally arrived, at least in miniature. The men with the guns seemed happy with the state of affairs, because they were running the place. For everyone else
in Raqqa, Abu Ibrahim wrote, all that was left was the “culture of backwardness and terror, after extinguishing the light of the mind.”
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In April 2013, as Baghdadi was preparing to announce his restructuring, Mouaz Moustafa slipped into the country, as he had done many times, through a hole in the chain-link border fence of Hatay Province in southern Turkey. He moved easily—this corner of far-northern Syria had been liberated from Assad for nearly a year—and made his way by foot to Khirbet al-Joz, a farming village that had become a kind of in-country base for his Syrian Emergency Task Force. The former congressional aide and his team had made a project of restoring basic services in the town, still scarred by months of fighting and looting. After helping reestablish the police department, he had returned to meet with locals interested in setting up a magistrate’s office to settle minor disputes. He never dreamed who else would show up.
At the meeting was a well-dressed lawyer who introduced himself as Muhammad. The man explained that he was representing a client with an interest in the administration of justice in post-Assad Syria. Pressed, he identified the group that had hired him.
“
I’m here to represent the Islamic State,” he said.
Everyone in the room was floored, from the American visitors to the Christian and Muslim clerics who had unofficially presided over the town since the government forces pulled out.
“It was shocking,” Moustafa said. “He was clean-shaven, maybe fifty, wearing a suit. We stopped in our tracks, because we didn’t even know how to carry on.”
ISIS’s man at the meeting had little else to say, and appeared to be mostly listening and taking notes. At one point he interjected that his client tended to prefer Sharia law over secular legal codes.
“We didn’t get into a discussion,” Moustafa said, “because we didn’t want him there.”
The man eventually left, but his presence cast a pall. Here was evidence not only of ISIS’s presence in Syria, but also of the group’s intention to insinuate itself into governance at a microscopic level.
For Moustafa, now two years into his job and more deeply engaged
in Syria’s struggle than he could ever have imagined, it was another ominous turn. By early 2013, Moustafa had all but despaired of the possibility of a major U.S. intervention in the conflict. Now he spent most of his time looking for practical ways to improve the lives of Syrians in areas of the country outside Assad’s control. But for every forward step, there were steps back: infighting among rebel groups; widespread corruption, sometimes fueled by suitcases of cash from Arab governments; a growing sectarian divide that hampered cooperation and sometimes led to reprisal killings. Soon the ISIS problem—the presence of heavily armed extremists at war with everyone else, their replacement of existing courts and police departments with their own system of justice—would eclipse all others, further complicating the efforts by moderate rebels to win Western support for the opposition.
Moustafa’s perspective on Syria’s unraveling now came at close range. He traveled to Syria constantly, often venturing within a few miles of the ever-changing front lines. He spoke and met regularly with rebel commanders, part of a growing personal network that also included journalists, international relief workers, foreign diplomats, and wealthy donors. After the U.S. Embassy in Damascus closed, Moustafa’s reports from Syria became a useful window into parts of the country the Americans could no longer monitor directly. When allegations surfaced that spring about a small-scale use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime, Moustafa was asked if members of his network could help obtain blood and tissue samples for testing. They could, and did.
In May 2013, Moustafa stood next to Senator John McCain when the Arizona Republican made a surprise visit to Syria to meet rebel commanders there. McCain was escorted through a rebel-controlled border crossing and then to a small building that served as a command center for the Free Syrian Army. There, he sat grim-faced as a dozen rebel commanders took turns complaining about Washington’s refusal to supply them with weapons, particularly antiaircraft missiles needed to stop Assad’s bombing of civilian enclaves. In lieu of the guns and bombs they needed, the militias were receiving surplus army rations—the ubiquitous MREs, or meals ready to eat, in their bland plastic packaging.
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Am I supposed to throw pizzas at those airplanes?” one of the officers asked. Later, McCain would learn that all but two of the twelve officers he met had died in combat.
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We need to have a game-changing action,” McCain told a TV interviewer after returning home. “No American boots on the ground, [but] establish a safe zone, and protect it and supply weapons to the right people in Syria who are fighting for obviously the things we believe in.”
But at the White House, the president stood firm, insisting that shoveling more weapons into Syria would only make matters worse. “I don’t think anybody in the region…would think that U.S. unilateral actions, in and of themselves, would bring about a better outcome,” Obama told a news conference. The only trigger for a U.S. military response, he said, would be if Assad used chemical weapons, “
something that the civilized world has recognized should be out of bounds.”
There would be no help from Washington, Moustafa told his exasperated friends. The conflict, now in its second year, would continue as before, with the armies deadlocked while the suffering of civilians grew steadily worse. The biggest change was that risk of violent death now came from multiple sides at once. Two Syrians employed in the relief effort were captured by Assad’s forces and later killed. Then two other workers, both of them young men whom Moustafa knew well, disappeared after being stopped at an ISIS checkpoint. Task-force members later learned that the militants had found the workers’ laptops, confirming their employment with a Western relief organization. The two were executed, their bodies dumped into a pit.
In late summer, the Assad regime’s chemical-weapons attack on civilians in Ghouta, a Damascus suburb, briefly raised expectations of a Western military response. After U.S. intelligence agencies released evidence showing that Assad’s army had fired canisters of sarin gas into residential neighborhoods on August 21, Obama signaled his intention to punish Assad for crossing America’s one clear “red line.” Yet, despite widespread outrage over the deaths, the White House could not muster the political support for a military strike. Congress blocked a vote on a resolution authorizing air strikes against Assad, and the Parliament in Britain—a country presumed
to be a key ally in any military campaign—rejected a similar proposal by Prime Minister David Cameron’s Tory government. President Obama managed to secure a deal, with Russia’s help, to remove all chemical weapons from Syrian territory, and the prospect of military intervention was again pushed aside.
Among Syria’s opposition leaders, the collapse, in their view, of Western resolve after the Ghouta attack was a tougher psychological blow than the chemical attacks themselves, Moustafa said. Some rebel groups that had previously aligned themselves with the moderate Free Syrian Army simply gave up and joined the Islamists, who at least paid better salaries.
“People had been ecstatic when they believed the U.S. was finally going to act,” Moustafa said. “It was one of those moments when everyone remembers exactly where they were. The regime was scared. We were hearing reports of people fleeing Damascus. Even the idea of bombs falling didn’t cause concern. It was, like, ‘Thank God. Even if we die in the bombings, at least now things will change.’
“And then, when nothing happened—that was the end,” he said. “There was no more hope after that.”
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Washington’s disarray over the chemical strikes looked even worse from the inside. Syria’s “wicked problem,” as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton famously called it, had split the National Security Council and was now creating casualties among the president’s senior advisers.
Frederic C. Hof, the senior diplomat who helped coordinate the administration’s response to Syria, resigned in frustration in late 2012. Now Robert S. Ford, the exiled ambassador to Damascus, was beginning to consider quitting.
Ford had been waging a fruitless battle inside the administration, pushing for concrete measures to strengthen the moderate opposition as a counterweight to the Islamists, who were controlling about a quarter of Syria’s territory, including border crossings into Iraq and Turkey. He had supported air strikes after Assad’s chemical attack on Ghouta in August 2013, and when those failed to materialize, he pushed for direct support to well-known and carefully vetted moderate militias.