The simplest of desires can lead to the most terrible of fates. That’s what Zahida al-Ahmad found out one night when, exhausted after work, she desired a cigarette. She worked as a cleaner in a hospital in Raqqa, Syria, and she’d just finished a long night shift. Standing alone in the street outside the hospital, she lit up, and filled her lungs. As she smoked, she could hear a vehicle approaching. This, she thought, would be the bus to carry her home.
Next she knew, she was grabbed and forced into the vehicle. It wasn’t public transport, she now realised, but a van carrying a patrol of the ISIS Hisba Diwan. Zahida was handcuffed, driven across the city to the working-class Rumaila neighborhood, then pushed from the van into an impromptu prison, where the torments began in earnest. Bearded, masked men in black, Afghan-style clothes harangued and insulted her. They beat her. At one point they beat her hard on her abdomen with a glass cola bottle. Shortly afterwards, she began bleeding. When the bleeding increased, her tormentors sent her back to hospital. There she learned that the beating had caused her to miscarry the baby in her womb. She hadn’t even known she was pregnant. In fact she had been praying, and failing, to become pregnant for the previous decade. Her greatest desire had been to have a child. Well, God had finally answered her prayer – and ISIS had murdered the answer.
The year was 2014, and ISIS had seized control of Raqqa and most of the surrounding areas from the coalition of Free Syrian Army and jihadi militias that had freed the city from Assad regime control a year earlier, in March 2013. Raqqa had been the first provincial capital to free itself from the regime. Though it was a questionable liberation – the fighters that chased away Assad’s forces were in general not locals, and many were either Iraqis or Syrian jihadists seasoned on Iraqi battlefields – people had high hopes for the future. Civil society had been very active in the preceding months, and had big plans now. But the ISIS takeover stymied all forward movement. Following its victories in Iraq later in 2014, the organisation swept across huge swathes of eastern Syria, capturing hard-won liberated territory upon which to establish a new dictatorship. This served Assad and his foreign backers very well. The Syrian Revolution was defeated by ISIS before it was crushed by Iran and Russia.
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