In the Ruins of Raqqa
"WHAT'S UP WITH THE CAMERA?" asks the wild-looking American special forces operative standing outside my car window. He had 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 struggle 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 finished 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 to attend a large public prayer. In March 2013, jihadist groups including Jabhat al-Nusra joined forces with Free Syrian Army factions and pushed government officials and security forces out of Raqqa, making it the first provincial capital to be “liberated.” Anti-Assad activists flocked to the city and used it as a base. “Life was coming back to the city,” Mezar Matar, a secular opposition activist, tells me. “Unlike other areas, there was electricity and water. There were restaurants and cafés.”
The secular activists and the jihadists left each other alone at first, but eventually Nusra tried to take control. The activists protested Nusra’s public executions of suspected “Alawite officers” and the kidnapping of opposition members. It was the first time secular activists found themselves living under Islamist rule, but it was nothing like what would come under ISIS. “Nusra didn’t try to repress the protests,” Matar says. “They let us
