ISIS Women and Enforcers in Syria Recount Collaboration, Anguish and Escape

[Valin]

NY Times:

AZADEH MOAVENI

NOV. 21, 2015

 

SOUTHERN TURKEY — Dua had only been working for two months with the Khansaa Brigade, the all-female morality police of the Islamic State, when her friends were brought to the station to be whipped.

 

The police had hauled in two women she had known since childhood, a mother and her teenage daughter, both distraught. Their abayas, flowing black robes, had been deemed too form-fitting. When the mother saw Dua, she rushed over and begged her to intercede. The room felt stuffy as Dua weighed what to do. “Their abayas really were very tight. I told her it was their own fault; they had come out wearing the wrong thing,” she said. “They were unhappy with that.”

 

Dua sat back down and watched as the other officers took the women into a back room to be whipped. When they removed their face-concealing niqabs, her friends were also found to be wearing makeup. It was 20 lashes for the abaya offense, five for the makeup, and another five for not being meek enough when detained.

 

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None of them subscribed to its extreme ideology, and even after fleeing their homes and going into hiding, they still struggle to explain how they changed from modern young women into Islamic State morality enforcers. In the moment, each choice seemed like the right one, a way to keep life tolerable: marrying fighters to assuage the Organization and keep their families in favor; joining the Khansaa Brigade to win some freedom of movement and an income in a city where women had been stripped of self-determination.

 

But every concession turned to horror before long, and the women came to deplore how they were pitted against their neighbors, part of a force tearing apart the community they loved. Only months in, widowed and abandoned and forced to marry strangers again, would they see how they were being used as temporary salves to foreign fighters whose only dedication was to violence and an unrecognizable God.

 

Each of them was driven to the conviction that escape was a last chance at life. And each joined the flow of Syrians abandoning their country, leaving a void to be filled by the foreigners who held nothing of Syria in their hearts.

 

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[Valin]

The New Yorker: Telling the Truth About ISIS and Raqqa
David Remnick
Nov. 22 2015

On Saturday night, five young Syrians slouched into a dive bar in New York and ordered drinks. When the bartender asked if off-brand vodka was O.K., they had to smile. They were all exiles from Raqqa, the provincial city in northern Syria that ISIS has made its operational center and the de-facto capital of the Islamic State. No one needed the good stuff. Just a drink would do.

 

Everyone in the group works for Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently (R.B.S.S.), a kind of underground journalistic-activist enterprise that, under the threat of grisly execution, smuggles images and reports on ISIS from Raqqa to its allies abroad. The group’s comrades, in turn, post them on social media and its Web site. ISIS has controlled Raqqa for nearly two years and much of the foreign press looks to R.B.S.S. for first-hand reports about the daily life—and depredations—in Raqqa. And because they have dared to post reports of crucifixions, beheadings, sexual abuse, and other crimes, members of R.B.S.S., both inside the city and abroad, have been murdered by ISIS for their work.

 

Abdel Aziz al-Hamza, a slender man of twenty-four, acts as spokesperson. As recently as a few years ago, he was a biology student at Raqqa University who dreamed of studying pharmacology in Jordan or Turkey and returning home to start his career and a family.

 

“I was a normal guy,” he said, after taking a first sip of his vodka-and-Sprite. “I hung out with friends at cafés and bars. None of us were political. In Syria, before the revolution, it was a crime to be political in any way.” Raqqa was a relatively prosperous city with energy resources and an agricultural base. Major dams in the area are an important source of power in Syria.

 

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