* * *
Leila called to wish the family a happy Eid al-Fitr in September. She complained about her leg hurting and being in pain when walking. Getting to the internet café to call was a trial, she told Sara. The foot she had been shot in had never healed properly. Otherwise everything was good.
Sara had accepted that the girls did not want to return home. She was not interested in digging any more into it or finding out who was to blame. She believed her daughters had misunderstood something or other in Islam. That was all.
In Sadiq’s mind, there was no room for acceptance. Anxiety had taken root in him body and soul. He had dreamed of getting his old boring life back—of the boys returning, of Sara returning—but now that they were back, he thought his life was just that, boring.
Osman and he continued their nightly conversations and indulgence in daydreams. “They’re getting out, whether they want to or not,” he told his Syrian helper.
“It’s out of my hands,” Osman admitted.
Sadiq could no longer rely on his assistance. Smuggling had become harder. Everything had become difficult. Turkey had partially closed its borders. Where there had been barbed-wire fencing with holes in it there was now in places a seven-foot-high concrete wall. The border station of Bab al-Hawa where Osman used to cross had been damaged by a missile. At the other frontier posts, he did not have a permit to cross, or else they were under Kurdish control. Osman was stranded in Syria.
They went back and forth analyzing who and when and how and what would happen in Raqqa. How long would Raqqa hold out? Who would take the city? How long would IS survive? And if IS was driven out, who would take its place?
Many of the local groups that were cooperating in the fight against IS had little in common; they were enemies who had entered a tactical alliance. When IS was defeated, new wars would break out. There were so many competing interests on the ground that any solution seemed far off. Turkey, the United States, Russia, Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia; Hezbollah, Kurdish guerrillas, Iranian Shia Muslims, and a multitude of Salafists, Wahabists, Islamists, and jihadists were all fighting for their own interests on an ever more bloody battlefield. And then there was Assad.
Five years of international impotence had passed. There had been negotiations and condemnations, diplomats and politicians were hamstrung. There was only one thing that never let up: death from the skies.
Assad was left in peace to massacre his own people. The images were shared on social media: people who were alive yesterday but not today.
* * *
It was primarily the rebel-controlled areas that Assad bombed. In autumn 2016, the inhabitants of the caliphate still lived in relative security. Attitudes became reinforced. Only one truth existed and it was never opposed. The jihadist wives shared a mentality and influenced one another. Girls from modest backgrounds could brag of their slaves on Twitter: “My house help (slave) showed me how to bake Syrian bread. Today I finally made my own,” Muslimah4Life wrote.
Access to open sources about daily life in Raqqa had diminished. Twitter had put an effective monitoring system in place to quickly close IS accounts. In addition, the caliphate placed its own restrictions on use of the internet.
The good times were long gone. The standard of living sank, even for the foreign fighters. From late summer 2016, IS no longer shared a border with Turkey. At the start of the year, the Islamic State had announced a 50 percent cut in soldiers’ salaries. The reason was “extraordinary circumstances.” Local fighters now received $200 a month while their foreign counterparts could expect $400. The foreigners had constituted an overclass of sorts in Raqqa. They had moved into the best neighborhoods. Some of them, like Ayan, had brought money along with them from home and could live better than the local population as long as the funds lasted.
Over the course of the autumn, several of the supply lines into Raqqa were shut. Prices soared. People lined up for hours for a pail of soup or a sack of rice, in queues IS wanted to hide but that Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently continued to report on.
Even though a woman was to remain in the home, there was a lot of work that could be imposed on her. For the girls in Raqqa, this meant making food from early in the morning until late at night. Ayan and the sisters prepared meals for the fighters in large cooking pots. Rice, meat, and vegetables. Potatoes in deep fryers. Chicken casseroles. Fried fish from the Euphrates.
The food was made at home or in large communal kitchens. At dinnertime the freshly prepared food was trucked out to soldiers defending the state at the front or at checkpoints.
The sisters had completely embraced Islamic State ideology concerning obedience to one’s husband. Ayan, who back in Norway had been such an advocate of gender equality, told a friend from home she chatted with that she was open to Hisham taking another wife.
“Wouldn’t you be jealous?” her friend asked.
“No, we need to make more babies,” Ayan replied. “If the war is a long one we’ll need new soldiers.”
Personally, she was hoping God would bless her with sons.
* * *
Both Aisha and Emira had remarried after Bastian was killed. Aisha had given birth to a son after Salahuddin’s death.
“What more could you want than to be able to raise the next generation of lions the in Islamic State who will go on to spread Islam?” Umm Muthanna wrote on Twitter. According to the counterterrorism research foundation Quilliam, there were now just over thirty thousand pregnant women in the caliphate.
From a young age children were taught to revere the state and hate nonbelievers. Intensive study of the Koran was required from early on. School, which started at age six, was an instrument to teach them to obey.
