Meet the woman Rep. Barbara Lee literally passed the congressional baton to
Lateefah
Simon, who was born legally blind, said she has weathered challenges
that have fostered in her a sense of empathy and an urge to help others.
By Donna M. Owens
March 19, 2024
When Lateefah Simon, a congressional candidate for California’s 12th
District, stopped by outgoing Rep. Barbara Lee’s election headquarters
in Oakland on Super Tuesday, she intended to bring well wishes to the
veteran congresswoman in her run for the U.S. Senate.
“I’d been
told she was catching a flight back to Washington, D.C.,” said Simon,
whose campaign shared the same office building downtown. “I wanted to
say hello and show my support.”
But it was the congresswoman who
surprised Simon with a gift. She took the candidate by the hand during a
news conference and, as supporters and media looked on, she passed her
the baton — literally.
“Barbara gave me an actual baton,”
said Simon, 47, of the shiny blue cylinder that she accepted to cheers
and applause. “I was humbled. It is an honor and great responsibility,
one that I feel I must live up to.”
Earlier this month, Simon emerged as the top vote-getter in a field of nine, officially
garnering 55% of the vote in the primary for the seat Lee represented
for 26 years. Simon will face her closest contender, fellow Democrat
Jennifer Tran, in November’s general election.
Simon is currently
the president of Meadow Fund, which provides grants and funding to
organizations focused on race, gender, justice reform and voting rights.
She also serves as a member of the Bay Area Rapid Transit Board of
Directors, an elected post she said stemmed from her “reliance” on
public transportation.
Her prior roles as a civil rights advocate and nonprofit leader in
the last two decades have largely focused on equity initiatives.
“I
have spent my career fighting for people who traditionally have not had
a voice in places of power,” the San Francisco native said.
Simon
said she gleans inspiration from women leaders such as Lee and Vice
President Kamala Harris, who she says recognized and nurtured her
potential early on.
Simon and Lee first met years ago at Mills
College, a then-all-women’s campus that merged with Northeastern
University in 2022. “She was teaching a course, and I was one of her
students,” Simon recalled. “We’ve been connected ever since. I just love
her.”
Though they were born decades apart, their lives have had
some parallels. Both became single mothers while young, sometimes
bringing their children to class due to lack of child care. Both
awakened to the power of politics, advocacy and community organizing to
effect change.
Now, Simon wants to represent the district where
Lee, the highest-ranking Black woman appointed to Democratic leadership
in the House, has held a seat since 1998.
According to U.S. Census data,
California’s 12th District is one of the most multiracial, politically
progressive areas in the country — home to cities like Berkeley, where
the free speech movement percolated, to Oakland and its liberation
politics.
Lee decided to forgo re-election in the House to run
for the Senate, seeking the seat formerly held by the late Dianne
Feinstein and now by her appointed successor, Sen. Laphonza Butler, who
has opted against running for election. Lee lost the primary to
a Democratic colleague, Rep. Adam Schiff, who, in November, will face
the primary’s second-place finisher, Republican Steve Garvey.
Meanwhile,
Lee plans to serve out her House term until a new member is sworn in
next January. She has formally endorsed Simon, calling her a “true
fighter for peace and justice.”
“Lateefah is from the community,
and for the community,” said Lee in a statement. “From her teenage years
working to support young women and trans youth, to fighting to make
public transit more affordable and accessible, she is a fierce advocate
and proven leader.”
Simon, who was born legally blind, said she
has experienced discrimination and weathered challenges that have
fostered in her a sense of empathy and a lifetime of fighting for those
in need.
At 16, she began working as an outreach coordinator for
the Young Women’s Freedom Center in San Francisco, helping marginalized
young women empower themselves.
At 18, she became pregnant and
raised her eldest daughter as a single mother. “It was a struggle,” she
said, “and I learned firsthand how important it was that government
really work for people in need.”
She persevered, rising through
the ranks to eventually become the center’s executive director. She
earned national acclaim for her efforts, and, at age 26, she became the
youngest woman to receive a prestigious MacArthur “genius” fellowship in
2003.
Some time later she met Kamala Harris, then San Francisco’s
district attorney, who would prove to be a pivotal influence for Simon,
as she was tapped to help develop and lead Back on Track, an
anti-recidivism initiative for young adults charged with low-level
offenses.
“She told me I needed to be excellent and encouraged me
to pursue my education,” said Simon, who holds a bachelor’s degree in
public policy and a master of public administration degree from the
University of San Francisco. “And she introduced me to my future
husband,” Kevin Weston, a journalist. The pair were married until he
died of cancer in 2014.
Simon is raising the couple’s 12-year-old
daughter with support from her oldest daughter — now an attorney — as
well as the proverbial “village.”
Even with health insurance,
Simon said, her late husband’s hospital bills left her nearly $1 million
in debt. She was fortunate that her East Bay network rallied around,
she said, assisting with everything from rent to groceries. “I
understand what working families are going through,” she said.
It’s
this type of “lived experience” that female candidates can bring to
Congress, said Deborah Walsh, director of the Center for American Women
in Politics at Rutgers University.
Besides the nod from Lee,
Simon has also racked up key endorsements, such as those of Gov. Gavin
Newsom and the labor groups SEIU, EMILY’s List and Higher Heights for
America PAC.
The Collective PAC, which works to increase Black
political engagement and representation, helping more than 400
candidates win races nationwide, has also endorsed Simon.
Co-founder
and President Quentin James told NBC News that it’s “much harder” for
Black female candidates to raise the massive funding necessary to buy
ads and pay for the numerous elements of a federal campaign. Still, he
believes Simon — whose team said she has raised more
than $1.2 million to date — is well-positioned. Her “résumé and bio
speak for themselves,” James said. “She has gone above and beyond in
supporting her community. She’s done the work.”
Simon hopes she
can follow the path of trailblazing Black members of Congress such as
the late Shirley Chisholm of New York and Rep. Ron Dellums of
California, co-founders of the Congressional Black Caucus, who both
passed the mantle of service to Lee.
“The baton Mr. Dellums gave her was real, too,” she said.
Overall,
Simon wants to be a champion for the people. “I want to take their
stories with me to Washington so their voices are heard by the most
powerful leaders in the nation,” she said.
The Biden administration finalized the United States’ toughest limits on
planet-warming emissions from passenger cars and light trucks
Wednesday, in a controversial bid to accelerate the nation’s halting
transition to electric vehicles.
The
Environmental Protection Agency rule — President Biden’s most
far-reaching climate regulation yet — would require automakers to ramp
up sales of electric vehicles while slashing carbon emissions from
gasoline-powered models, which account for about one-fifth of America’s
contribution to global warming.
But unlike last year’s proposed rule, automakers would not need to dramatically boost electric vehicle (EV) sales until after 2030. The delayed timeline reflects an election-year concession to labor unions, a key Democratic constituency that has raised concerns about a rapid shift to EVs.
In
another change from the proposal, automakers could comply by boosting
sales of plug-in hybrid vehicles in addition to all-electric vehicles.
Plug-in hybrids have recently proved more popular with U.S. consumers,
in part because of concerns about a lack of public charging
infrastructure.
The
final rule will still prevent 7.2 billion metric tons of carbon
emissions from entering the atmosphere through 2055, according to the
EPA. It will also reduce fine particulate matter and nitrogen oxides, preventing up to 2,500 premature deaths from air pollution annually starting in 2055, the agency said.
“Our
final rule delivers the same — if not more — pollution reduction than
we set out at proposal,” EPA Administrator Michael Regan said on a call
with reporters Tuesday previewing the announcement. “These final
standards will also reduce some of the most serious pollutants that
impact public health.”
Republican-led states and fossil fuel companies are likely to challenge the rule in court.But
the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, a trade group whose members
include Ford, General Motors, Stellantis and Toyota, praised the EPA’s
decision to delay the stricter EV requirements until after 2030.
“Moderating
the pace of EV adoption in 2027, 2028, 2029 and 2030 was the right
call,” John Bozzella, president and CEO of the alliance, said in a
statement. “… These adjusted EV targets — still a stretch goal — should
give the market and supply chains a chance to catch up.”
U.S. EV sales have cooled in recent months. According to estimates
from Kelley Blue Book, U.S. EV sales increased year-over-year by 40
percent in the fourth quarter of 2023, down from a 49 percent jump in
the third quarter and a 52 percent spike in the second quarter.
Yet
Albert Gore, the executive director of the Zero Emission Transportation
Association and the son of former vice president Al Gore, said other
figures paint a more encouraging picture. He noted that a record 1.2
million EVs were sold in the United States last year, bringing EVs’
market share to 7.6 percent in 2023 compared with 5.9 percent in 2022.
“Whether
or not we’re talking about a real slowdown, the trend line for EVs has
been one of phenomenal growth over the last couple of years,” Gore said.
The price of EVs is also plunging so fast
that they’re now almost as cheap as gas-powered cars. The average price
difference last month was $5,000, according to data from Cox
Automotive.
Still, the recent sales slowdown has prompted some automakers to scale back their EV plans, with Ford slashing production of the much-touted F-150 Lightning electric pickup truck. Many automakers are now pivoting
to better-selling plug-in hybrids — a compromise between the internal
combustion engines of the past and the batteries of the future.
Wednesday’s
rule comes after a contentious back-and-forth between the United Auto
Workers and the Biden administration over whether — and how — the shift
to EVs will benefit workers.
In September, the UAW launched a historic strike against Detroit’s three biggest automakers — Ford, General Motors and Stellantis. The workers warned
that the rise of EVs could erase well-paying jobs in the auto industry,
since many EV plants are being built in Southern states less friendly
to union labor.
Despite these warnings, the EPA issued an ambitious proposed rule last Aprilthat
called for EVs to account for 67 percent of all new passenger car and
light-duty truck sales by 2032. Weeks later, UAW President Shawn Fain wrote
that the union was withholding its endorsement of Biden’s reelection
campaign over “concerns with the electric vehicle transition.”
Yet
the union reversed course and coalesced around Biden after the EPA
signaled it would relax the timeline in the final rule. The UAW endorsed the president at its annual legislative conference in January, and Fain attended Biden’s State of the Union address this month.
Automakers
could still comply with the final rule by making EVs account for 67
percent of new car sales in 2032, according to the EPA. But they could
also meet the requirements by making all-electric vehicles account for
56 percent and making plug-in hybrids represent 13 percent, the agency
said.
Former president Donald Trump,
the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has called Fain a
“dope” and has repeatedly bashed Biden’s EV goals. He has falsely
claimed that EVs cannot travel far on a single charge, and he has
pledged to scrap the EPA rule on day two of a second term.
On Monday, Trump sought to defend his declaration over the weekend
that there would be a “bloodbath” if he lost in November, claiming he
was merely describing a bloodbath for the auto sector. He wrote on his
social media platform that he was “simply referring to [EV] imports”
allowed by Biden, which he said“are killing the automobile industry.”
Manish
Bapna, president and CEO of NRDC Action Fund, the political arm of the
Natural Resources Defense Council, criticized Trump’s anti-EV rhetoric.
“The
industry is betting its future on electric cars, drivers are buying
them in record numbers and last fall’s UAW agreement makes sure workers
benefit,” Bapna said in an email. “Biden’s got a strategy to support
that shift. Trump wants to slam it into reverse.”
The
fossil fuel industry has sought to drum up opposition to the EPA rule,
which could eat into demand for its petroleum products. The American
Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM), an industry trade group,
has launched a seven-figure campaign
against what it calls a de facto “gas car ban.” The campaign includes
ads in battleground states warning that the rule will restrict consumer
choice.
“To
be sure, the administration refers to these regulations as ‘standards,’
not ‘bans’ or ‘mandates,’” AFPM President and CEO Chet Thompson said on
a call with reporters this month. “But they do that because they know
how unpopular bans are with Americans.”
The AFPM’smembers
include fossil fuel giants such as ExxonMobil, Chevron, Marathon
Petroleum and Valero Energy. Marathon Petroleum, the nation’s largest
refiner, waged a covert campaign in 2018 to roll back the car emissions standards set by President Barack Obama.
Mike
Sommers, chief executive of the American Petroleum Institute, said the
oil industry lobby group plans to challenge the new standards in court.
“We’ll do everything we can to stop the rule,” he said in an interview
Wednesday at an energy conference in Houston.
California regulators are going further than the EPA, seeking to end statewide sales of new gas cars by 2035. In the past, more than a dozen other states have opted to follow California’s tougher tailpipe pollution rules.
The California Air Resources Board announced Tuesday a deal with Stellantis,
the owner of the Jeep and Ram brands. Under the deal, Stellantis agreed
to comply with California’s EV sales requirements even if they are
blocked by a court or a potential second Trump administration.
The
automaker had previously blasted those requirements for handing rivals
an unfair advantage. But on Tuesday, Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares
called the agreement a “win-win solution” that will avoid 10 million to
12 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions through 2030.
“The
biggest and most influential companies in the world understand that
this is how we can fight climate change together,” California Gov. Gavin
Newsom (D) said in a statement.
WASHINGTON (AP) — As
Salvatore LoGrande fought cancer and all the pain that came with it, his
daughters promised to keep him in the white, pitched roof house he
worked so hard to buy all those decades ago.
So, Sandy LoGrande
thought it was a mistake when, a year after her father’s death,
Massachusetts billed her $177,000 for her father’s Medicaid expenses and
threatened to sue for his home if she didn’t pay up quickly.
“The home was everything,” to her father said LoGrande, 57.
But the bill and accompanying threat weren’t a mistake.
Rather,
it was part of a routine process the federal government requires of
every state: to recover money from the assets of dead people who, in
their final years, relied on Medicaid, the taxpayer-funded health
insurance for the poorest Americans.
A person’s home is typically
exempt from qualifying for Medicaid. But it is subject to the estate
recovery process for those who were over 55 and used Medicaid to pay for
long-term care such as nursing home stays or in-home health care.
This month, a Democratic lawmaker proposed scuttling the “cruel” program altogether. Critics argue the program collects too little — roughly 1% — of the more than $150 billion Medicaid spends
yearly on long-term care. They also say many states fail to warn people
who sign up for Medicaid that big bills and claims to their property
might await their families once they die.
LoGrande says that’s how she ended up in a two-year legal battle with
Massachusetts after her father died. Several years before he died in
2016, she had turned to a local nonprofit for advice on caring for her
elderly father. The group suggested she sign him up for Medicaid. She
even remembers asking about the house, but was assured the state would
only seek the house if it sent her father to a nursing home.
“He never would have signed on with anything that would put his home in jeopardy,” she said.
For years, her father got an annual renewal notice from the state’s
Medicaid office. She says it wasn’t until after his death, when the
state’s demand for $177,000 arrived, that she saw the first bill for his
care, which included a brief stint in the hospital for pain from
cancer, medications and hospice.
“That’s what ripped my guts out,” LoGrande said. “It was dishonest.”
The state settled with the LoGrandes in 2019 and released its claim on the house.
Some
states will put a lien — a legal right — on a home while others don’t.
Meanwhile, some Medicaid offices try to recoup all medical costs from
patients, like doctor visits or prescriptions, while others just pursue
the costs for long-term care. Alaska and Arizona pursued just dozens of
properties in recent years while other states go after thousands of
homes, totaling hundreds of millions of dollars.
New York and Ohio topped the country for such collections, recovering more than $100 million combined in a single year, a Dayton Daily News investigation found.
An investigation
into the Kansas program, released Tuesday by the Health and Human
Services inspector general, found that program was cost effective —
yielding $37 million while only spending $5 million to recover the
money, But the state didn’t always collect the money from estates that
were eligible.
Last month, a foundation for one of the industry’s
biggest health insurance giants called on Massachusetts to overhaul its
process, which includes collecting reimbursement for most Medicaid
costs, beyond the federal government’s minimum requirement to recover
long-term care expenses. The Blue Cross Blue Shield Foundation of
Massachusetts recommended the state Legislature pass a law that would
prohibit those additional collections.
Estate recovery “has the
potential to perpetuate wealth disparities and intergenerational
poverty,” said Katherine Howitt, a Medicaid policy director with the
foundation.
In Tennessee, which recovered more than $38.2 million from more than
8,100 estates last year, Imani Mfalme found herself in a similar
predicament after her mother’s death in 2021.
As her mother’s
early-onset Alzheimer’s worsened, Mfalme continued to care for her. But
in 2015, when Mfalme was diagnosed with breast cancer and needed a
double mastectomy, she started looking at other options. She hosted a
meeting in her mother’s home with the local Medicaid office. The
representative told her to drain her mother’s bank accounts – money
Mfalme poured into assisted living facility payments for her mom – so
her mother would qualify for the program.
She recalls being somewhat offended during the meeting after the
representative asked her three times: “This is your mother’s home?” The
representative, Mfalme said, made no mention that she could be forced to
sell the house to settle her mother’s bill with Medicaid once she died.
Now, Tennessee’s Medicaid office says she owes $225,000 and the state
is seeking a court order that would require Mfalme to sell the house to
pay up.
Mfalme, now 42, said she wants to pay what she can, but
the house is a particular pain point. Her mother, a Black woman,
purchased her dream home in Knoxville after she won a landmark discrimination lawsuit against her former employer, Boeing, for paying her less than her male coworkers.
“She
fought hard for equal pay and equal rights. Just to see that ripped
away just because she was sick and I was sick, it’s just absolutely
devastating,” Mfalme said of her mother.
TennCare, Tennessee’s Medicaid office, said in an email to The Associated Press that it would not comment on specific cases.
The
Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission’s report recommended
that Congress reverse the 1993 law that required states to recover money
from estates, instead making it optional.
Earlier this month, Democratic Rep. Jan Schakowsky of Illinois reintroduced legislation that would end the federal government’s mandate.
Schakowsky believes the rule is a losing proposition for families, who
give up their homes, and taxpayers, who don’t see big returns from the
recovery efforts.
“It is one of the most cruel, ineffective programs that we see,”
Schakowsky told the AP. “This is a program that doesn’t work for
anybody.”
In a gridlocked Congress, where some Republicans are
clamoring to trim Medicaid entitlements, the bill is unlikely to garner
the bipartisan support needed to become law.
There’s at least one person who acknowledges the rule isn’t working: the man who engineered it.
Many
people don’t know about the decades-old mandate, which was intended to
encourage people to save for long-term care — or risk losing the equity
from their home, explained Stephen Moses, who now works for the
conservative Paragon Health Institute.
“The plan here was to
ensure that people who need long-term care can get it but that you plan
ahead to be able to pay privately so you don’t end up on the public
health care program,” Moses said.
On March 10, a big controversy erupted when a small magazine pulled down a story from its website with the cryptic note, “Guernica regrets
having published this piece and has retracted it. A more fulsome
explanation will follow.” The retraction followed staff resignations in
protest of the piece by Joanna Chen, a British-Israeli author and
translator. One wrote that Chen’s article “attempts to soften the
violence of colonialism and genocide.”
We emphatically disagreed with the critique and the decision to
retract the piece. Like many others who read Chen’s essay—it was
available in an internet archive, a kind of samizdat for our time—we
found it to be moving and empathetic in the extreme to Gazans and
Israelis alike. This is in keeping with Chen’s history not only as a
translator who uses language to bridge cultural divides but also as
someone who volunteers with Road to Recovery, picking up Palestinian
children who live in the occupied territories from the Israeli side of
checkpoints and driving them to Israeli hospitals. The ferrying of these
children is one of many wrenching accounts in the piece.
We contacted Chen when the controversy erupted and asked if we
could post the piece. We’re grateful that she agreed. Here it is with
the most minor editorial changes for style and clarity. –-The Editors
The tree lost its mythical powers, horses huddled at the edge of the earth. The sniping light turned cold, winter came, we continued, faces sealed. Only at night did we sit down with our own names.
It was my Auntie Sheila who taught me the importance of reaching out
to others, of lending a hand when needed. Widowed early, she was a
feisty lady who helped out in hospitals and hospices in the coastal town
of Blackpool, where she lived. Auntie Sheila volunteered for years in
the Citizens’ Advice Bureau, holding a warm and comforting hand out to
people of all denominations without question. She understood the
intrinsic importance of person-to-person contact; she believed it was a
two-way street and that she also benefited from it. But my aunt also
taught me that you cannot care for others if you do not care for
yourself first. This is why she went swimming a couple of times a week
and enjoyed quiz shows; this is why she allowed herself jellybeans and
chocolate-coated figs, a stock of which she kept in her sideboard.
As a child growing up in the North of England, I often stayed over at
Auntie Sheila’s house, which overlooked the local park. At night, when
she tucked me up in bed, she would lean over and whisper in my ear: You’re my favorite, but don’t go telling anyone. She whispered the same words to my brother, Andrew, and I’m sure we weren’t the only ones convinced we were her favorites.
When I was 16, my parents moved us to Israel following the death of
my brother in a traffic accident. They wanted a fresh start, but the
move was wrenching for me: everything was strange and unfamiliar, even
the language. Severed from my family back in the U.K., I felt no
connection to this land or the people around me. I struggled, and I
learned to get by on my own. I immersed myself in grieving for my
brother and for the life left behind.
How can I mourn the distance of years, of waste, of your silence seeping into the earth.
When I turned 18, my mother, who thought that enlistment in the Israeli military would help me assimilate, said: We have the world’s greatest army here. And I fired back immediately: Who’s we? Speak for yourself. I never served in the army.
No one came to visit us except Auntie Sheila, who arrived twice a
year carrying a suitcase stuffed with Lancashire cheese, frozen legs of
lamb, and shortbread wrapped in rustling cellophane from the local
market. She never failed to call me on my birthday and on the
anniversary of my brother’s death. Her visits continued until she was in
her nineties and no longer able to make the journey.
You hand me a clean handkerchief, Ripe figs. I have been moving away For years
I struggled along, went to university, and eventually began working for Newsweek,
which was when I started to take a real interest in my
neighbors—Palestinians and Israelis. But journalism lulled me into the
role of spectator. I kept my distance, hid behind headlines. I was
translating poems on the side, from Hebrew and, as a co-translator, from
Arabic; in that work, I found a different relationship to language.
Translation shook me out of the apathy that had set in after countless
failed peace processes. Literary translation not only demands that the
words themselves be transformed from the original source to the target
language; it requires deep reading, attention to voice, and the nuances
of language. At this level of attention, the surface of a voice is never
smooth but rather textured. It consolidates intonation; it fine-tunes
inflection. If you look up voice in a dictionary, you will find
it defined as a sound arising in the larynx and exiting through the
mouth — and also as an opinion or attitude. In working with voice, at
its many levels of meaning and texture, literary translation allows me
to glimpse other worlds; it is a creaking door held open to the reader
for the length of a poem, the width of a piece of prose. It enables me
to transcend borders and build literary bridges from source to target
language, from one people to another. And it was a wake-up call for me.
By the time the knock at the door came, I was dead. Who’s there? asked the photo in the frame. It is me, I said. I came back to wipe the dust off you.
A few years ago, inspired by my aunt, I began volunteering with Road
to Recovery, a nongovernmental organization founded by Yuval Roth, whose
brother was kidnapped and killed by Hamas in 1993. The organization
transports Palestinian children in need of lifesaving medical procedures
to and from Israeli hospitals. Volunteers pick up the children,
accompanied by parents or grandparents, from checkpoints around the West
Bank and, until October 7, from the Erez checkpoint that leads to Gaza.
I usually drive to the Tarkumia checkpoint, close to Hebron in the West
Bank, a 15-minute journey from my house in the Ella Valley.
Before this present war, I would pick up my passengers around 5:30
a.m., everything still shrouded in shadow when I left the house. As I
approached the checkpoint on any weekday, I would see hundreds of men on
foot clutching plastic bags of food and walking along to the spot where
minibuses awaited them. Headed for work, they would cross from the West
Bank to Israel. Traffic was typically thick at that time of day; it
would sometimes take me half an hour to crawl the last half mile to the
actual checkpoint, where I would drive through to a parking lot
monitored by Israeli soldiers.
Your morning is the morning of others. Your evening is the evening of others And we frequently set traps for birds.
Sometimes, it took a while for my passengers to get through the
checkpoint, so I would watch the sunrise stretch in a blaze of pink
across the sky. Occasionally, flocks of birds flew over the checkpoint
with ease and grace, offering a moment of pause for me. A few months
ago, a muster of storks flew right above my car, their necks stretched
out, wings flapping. But the last time I went there, which was before
October 7, it was early evening, and the sun had already set. I picked
up a mother and her toddler, whom she carried in her arms. It was an
emergency. We smiled briefly. I opened the car door for her, and
together, we strapped her frail son into the back seat. I handed him a
bag of candy, and he held it in his fist, his tiny fingers curling
around it. The mother sat with me in the front, occasionally turning
around to check on her child, her face raw with fear. On many journeys
like this, we spoke in broken Arabic, broken Hebrew, and English. These
were simple sentences: How many children do you have? Where do you live? Would you like water? Sometimes,
we did not speak at all until the end of the journey, when we arrived
at the entrance to the pediatric ER of Sheba Medical Center on the
outskirts of Tel Aviv. During the COVID epidemic, I drove with the
windows open, and we all wore masks. I was careful.
No flag flutters for me, No bird alights upon the window. I am a clock on the wall.
At 6:32 on the morning of October 7, sirens filled the air, and
rockets began falling close to my village. The walls of the house
reverberated again and again. I stood in the garden, surveying the
spinach and lettuce in the vegetable plot, the lemon tree heavy with
pale fruit. The thuds were sickening. I went inside, locking the door
behind me. Muddled reports from the border with Gaza were streaming
through social media. As the day wore on, my dread increased. There were
many dead and injured; hospitals were running short of blood.
The next day, my husband, Raz, and I donated blood at a hospital in
Jerusalem, waiting in line for six hours along with hundreds of other
people. As we stood there, we recalled giving blood at an East Jerusalem
hospital back in 2014 during an Israeli military operation in Gaza. On
that occasion, the blood was being sent to the people of Gaza. Back
then, an Israeli friend of mine shook her head when I told her what we
had done: You should be giving blood to the Israeli soldiers, not the Palestinians, she admonished me.
For two weeks after October 7, I was unable to focus on my
translation work. It felt disembodied, as if the poems I was working on
were floating somewhere above my head, out of reach. They made no sense
to me. I spent my time volunteering with an Israeli family from Kfar
Aza, bordering the Gaza Strip. Their daughter, son-in-law, and nephew
had been murdered. Their house had been torched, and they were evacuated
to my village, where they were temporarily living at the end of my
street. Neighbors. I mopped their floor, did their dishes, and washed
their clothes. I heated up plates of food when they were hungry and
hugged them when they looked like they needed it. What does a person
look like when they need a hug? Like they are lost. It was the least I
could do.
Everything is burnt by the roadside. We do not look at each other.
My volunteer work with Road to Recovery came to a full stop. How
could I continue after Hamas had massacred and kidnapped so many
civilians, including Road to Recovery members, such as Vivian Silver, a
longtime Canadian peace activist? And I admit I was afraid for my own
life.
I want to be your foliage, Dense and cool against the heat, But I am dry thorns on a hilltop
I phoned friends to find out how they were doing. Some had sons
serving in the army in the South; others were struggling to keep going.
One friend told me she was trying to calm her children, who were
frightened by the sound of warplanes flying over the house day and
night. I tell them these are good booms. She grimaced, and I understood the subtext that the Israeli army was bombing Gaza.
An old friend from the U.K. called me while I was running an errand. Hello, my love, she
bubbled in her broad West Yorkshire accent, and those last two words
seared through me, stirring a pang of longing for the rough, gray
landscape of my childhood, the openness of it all. I’m okay, I answered after a pause, my voice cracking, and I wished I were not there among people who used pronouns like us and them and ours and theirs.
I texted Nuha, a Palestinian fixer who had worked alongside me at Newsweek for
years. I’d been a guest at her home in Ramallah. We’d broken bread
together; we’d traveled together through the occupied territories and
had drunk peppermint tea at the American Colony Hotel in East Jerusalem.
Nuha, how are you, my friend? I wrote, half-expecting her not to respond. But she did immediately. Sad, sad, she texted back. We are all devastated in this unjust world. I felt encouraged that we could still talk, but a few minutes later, she wrote me this:
Ministry of Health The water well and oxygen station in Al-Shifa Medical Complex were targeted Dogs. eat corpses dumped in a Shifa compound The complex is subjected to continuous targeting
I didn’t know how to respond. Beyond terrible, I finally
wrote, knowing our conversation was over. I felt inexplicably ashamed,
as if she were pointing a finger at me. I also felt stupid—this was war,
and whether I liked it or not, Nuha and I were standing at opposite
ends of the very bridge I hoped to cross. I had been naive; this
conflict was bigger than the both of us. Beyond terrible was inadequate; I was inadequate. A door had been slammed in my face, politely but firmly.
I wrote to the two poets I know in Gaza, eventually hearing from one.
The other? Was he dead? Had he been detained by Hamas for his ties to
an Israeli or arrested by the Israeli military for his ties to Hamas? I
had no idea. I’ve never met either in person—the conflict has seen to
that—but I’ve co-translated and edited their work. Their voices are
important, and I want the English-speaking world to listen to them as
much as I want the world to listen to the voices I translate from
Hebrew. Now, however, I’m afraid to get them in trouble. A text message
or an email from Israel might be incriminating. Hamas might intercept
it. Who knows?
I want to be innocent of every line I ever wrote, I want to cry on every hand that ever hovered over the cover of a book. A flock of vocabulary jostles at my window, hammers at my heart.
My own heart was in turmoil. It is not easy to tread the line of
empathy, to feel passion for both sides. But as the days went by, the
shock turned into a dull pain in my heart and a heaviness in my legs. At
night, I lay in bed on my back in the dark, listening to rain against
the window. I wondered if the Israeli hostages underground, the children
and women, had any way of knowing the weather had turned cold, and I
thought of the people of Gaza, the children and women, huddled inside
tents supplied by the United Nations or looking for shelter. I stared up
at the ceiling and imagined it moving closer and closer toward me, not
falling or collapsing but moving like an elevator descending into the
ground.
The horrors perpetrated rose to the surface of my consciousness at
these times. I listened to interviews with survivors; I watched videos
of atrocities committed by Hamas in southern Israel and reports about
the rising number of innocent civilians killed in a devastated Gaza.
There is a limit to which the human soul can stomach atrocities and
keep going. On the other hand, turning away from distressing footage
taken by Hamas terrorists, by surveillance cameras, and by people
running for their lives or sheltering from missiles meant turning away
from their pain.
I limited my intake of the news and joined a number of solidarity
groups, Zoom meetings in which the people shared their dismay and shock.
But they were mostly Israelis and much of the talk centered on their
own side. One woman expressed anger that Palestinians she knew through
her volunteer work had not reached out on October 7 to ask how she was
and whether her family was safe. I shrugged inwardly at this sentiment.
The Palestinians in the West Bank were struggling with their own
problems: closure, the inability to work, the threat of widescale
arrests being made by the Israeli army, and harassment by settlers. No
one was safe.
A few years earlier, I had joined a course coordinated by the Parents
Circle – Families Forum in which Israelis and Palestinians met for
three months to learn each other’s narratives. The course entailed not
only conversing with each other but also making field trips to learn the
history of the Palestinians and the Jews. We went on a tour of Yad
Vashem, the Holocaust memorial and museum in Jerusalem; we also went to
Lifta, a Palestinian village whose residents were forced to leave their
homes in 1948. We had time to talk together during two intensive
weekends at the Everest Hotel in Beit Jala. We learned the importance of
acknowledging both the Israeli and Palestinian narratives and the
importance of understanding the pain of each side. But still, after
three months, I left with a feeling of pessimism. It felt like a small
drop in a very large ocean of mistrust. We kept talking in the online
group that followed, but there was always an undercurrent of suspicion.
The Israelis returned to the Holocaust, about how the Jewish state was
the only place they had; the Palestinians insisted that the Jewish state
existed at their expense. There was goodwill, but not enough to
straddle the chasm that divided us.
The hand still moves across the page and on the balcony plants lean forward, long-necked, into the sun.
Two weeks after the war began, I took the plunge and again began
driving children to hospitals. My own grown-up children were against
this, but I was determined to go. The night before my first drive since
the war started, my husband and I decided he would accompany me, just in
case. My son scoffed at this: Go on your own if you must, he said wryly. If anything happens, we don’t want to lose both our parents. We
woke up at 5:00 a.m., made coffee, and waited for the program’s
coordinator to give me the go-ahead. The rules had changed: instead of
waiting in the parking lot of Tarkumia, I was instructed to leave the
house only when my passengers had gotten through security. At 6:30, I
got the call, and we drove in silence to Tarkumia. The road leading to
the once-crowded checkpoint was deserted; since October 7, Palestinians
had been forbidden to leave the West Bank for work in Israel.
We arrived at the parking lot, and I got out of the car. A small boy
with a shock of black hair and his father were waiting at the other side
of the parking lot. I hesitated as a soldier approached me, and I
fumbled for my driver’s license, and the details of my passengers sent
to me earlier: Jad, age three, accompanied by his father. Suddenly, the
little boy waved to me from across the way, and I waved back as they
walked over to my car. The father spoke a little Hebrew. We introduced
ourselves, quickly strapped Jad into the booster, and drove away. Ten
minutes later, I dropped my husband near my house. I felt safe. I was
doing the right thing. This boy deserves medical treatment; he is not a part of the war, I thought.
On this first journey, I focused on only the job at hand: to get Jad
to the hospital. An hour later, I said goodbye to them outside the
pediatric unit of Sheba Medical Center. While the father busied himself
removing an overnight case from the trunk of my car, I unbuckled Jad
from the booster, and he held out his arms and smiled up at me. Shukran, shukran, thank you, the father said as I cradled Jad in my arms for a moment. And I wanted to say, No,
thank you for trusting me with your child. Thank you for reminding me
that we can still find empathy and love in this broken world. I followed them with my eyes as they disappeared behind the glass doors of the hospital, and then I switched the radio on.
Since then, I have made several more journeys to and from Tarkumia. I
spent one night editing a website created by a family whose daughter
was murdered. I’m working on a translation of short stories for an
anthology in English, Arabic, and Hebrew that will be published later
this year. I translate each word, each phrase, carefully; I listen for
the voices.
I finally called Nuha, and she answered the phone right away. We
spoke for a few minutes about our kids, work, and the whole situation.
Hearing her warm, gravelly tones gave me hope. I’m going through a process, she said. We both are.
I think of my auntie Sheila a lot, how she taught me to reach out to
neighbors near and far, how there is more to life than my own backyard.
There is a very long way to go, but of one thing, I am sure: recovery
begins now, at home.
The stanzas quoted throughout this piece are translated by the
author from Hebrew and from Arabic and included here with the permission
of the poets; the original poems are, in order of appearance in this
essay: “The End of Naivete” by Yonatan Berg in Frayed Light; “Remembrance” by Yonatan Berg in Frayed Light; “To My Mother” by Yonatan Berg in Frayed Light; untitled, by Nasser Rabah, in Arrowsmith(translated with Julie Yelle); “The Evening of Others” in Arrowsmith (translated with Julie Yelle); untitled, by Nasser Rabah, published inthe Los Angeles Review of Books (translated with Julie Yelle); “Hebron” in Frayed Light; “To My Children” by Yonatan Berg, forthcoming in Consequence; untitled, by Nasser Rabah, Los Angeles Review of Books; “Report from a Free City” by Yonatan Berg in Frayed Light.
The
number of civilian casualties in Gaza has been at the center of
international attention since the start of the war. The main source for
the data has been the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry, which now
claims more than 30,000 dead, the majority of which it says are children
and women. Recently, the Biden administration lent legitimacy to Hamas’
figure. When asked at a House Armed Services Committee hearing last
week how many Palestinian women and children have been killed since Oct.
7, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said the number was “over 25,000.”
The Pentagon quickly clarified that the secretary “was citing an
estimate from the Hamas-controlled Health Ministry.” President Biden
himself had earlier cited this figure, asserting that “too many, too
many of the over 27,000 Palestinians killed in this conflict have been
innocent civilians and children, including thousands of children.” The
White House also explained that the president “was referring to publicly
available data about the total number of casualties.”
Here’s
the problem with this data: The numbers are not real. That much is
obvious to anyone who understands how naturally occurring numbers work.
The casualties are not overwhelmingly women and children, and the
majority may be Hamas fighters.
If Hamas’ numbers are faked or fraudulent in some way, there may be evidence in the numbers themselves
that can demonstrate it. While there is not much data available, there
is a little, and it is enough: From Oct. 26 until Nov. 10, 2023, the
Gaza Health Ministry released daily casualty figures that include both a
total number and a specific number of women and children.
The
first place to look is the reported “total” number of deaths. The graph
of total deaths by date is increasing with almost metronomical
linearity, as the graph in Figure 1 reveals.b v
The
graph reveals an extremely regular increase in casualties over the
period. Data aggregated by the author and provided by the United Nations
Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), based on
Gaza MoH figures.
This
regularity is almost surely not real. One would expect quite a bit of
variation day to day. In fact, the daily reported casualty count over
this period averages 270 plus or minus about 15%. This is strikingly
little variation. There should be days with twice the average or more
and others with half or less. Perhaps what is happening is the Gaza
ministry is releasing fake daily numbers that vary too little because
they do not have a clear understanding of the behavior of naturally
occurring numbers. Unfortunately, verified control data is not available
to formally test this conclusion, but the details of the daily counts
render the numbers suspicious.
Similarly,
we should see variation in the number of child casualties that tracks
the variation in the number of women. This is because the daily
variation in death counts is caused by the variation in the number of
strikes on residential buildings and tunnels which should result in
considerable variability in the totals but less variation in the
percentage of deaths across groups. This is a basic statistical fact
about chance variability. Consequently, on the days with many women
casualties there should be large numbers of children casualties, and on
the days when just a few women are reported to have been killed, just a
few children should be reported. This relationship can be measured and
quantified by the R-square (R2 ) statistic that measures how correlated
the daily casualty count for women is with the daily casualty count for
children. If the numbers were real, we would expect R2 to be
substantively larger than 0, tending closer to 1.0. But R2 is .017 which
is statistically and substantively not different from 0.
The
daily number of children reported to have been killed is totally
unrelated to the number of women reported. The R2 is .017 and the
relationship is statistically and substantively insignificant.
This
lack of correlation is the second circumstantial piece of evidence
suggesting the numbers are not real. But there is more. The daily number
of women casualties should be highly correlated with the number of
non-women and non-children (i.e., men) reported. Again, this is expected
because of the nature of battle. The ebbs and flows of the bombings and
attacks by Israel should cause the daily count to move together. But
that is not what the data show. Not only is there not a positive
correlation, there is a strong negative correlation, which makes no
sense at all and establishes the third piece of evidence that the
numbers are not real.
The correlation between the daily men and daily women death count is absurdly strong and negative (p-value < .0001).
Consider
some further anomalies in the data: First, the death count reported on
Oct. 29 contradicts the numbers reported on the 28th, insofar as they
imply that 26 men came back to life. This can happen because of
misattribution or just reporting error. There are a few other days where
the numbers of men are reported to be near 0. If these were just
reporting errors, then on those days where the death count for men
appears to be in error, the women’s count should be typical, at least on
average. But it turns out that on the three days when the men’s count
is near zero, suggesting an error, the women’s count is high. In fact,
the three highest daily women casualty count occurs on those three days.
There
are three days where the male casualty count is close to 0. These three
days correspond to the three highest daily women’s casualty count.
Taken
together, what does this all imply? While the evidence is not
dispositive, it is highly suggestive that a process unconnected or
loosely connected to reality was used to report the numbers. Most
likely, the Hamas ministry settled on a daily total arbitrarily. We know
this because the daily totals increase too consistently to be real.
Then they assigned about 70% of the total to be women and children,
splitting that amount randomly from day to day. Then they in-filled the
number of men as set by the predetermined total. This explains all the
data observed.
There
are other obvious red flags. The Gaza Health Ministry has consistently
claimed that about 70% of the casualties are women or children. This
total is far higher than the numbers reported in earlier conflicts with
Israel. Another red flag, raised by Salo Aizenberg and written
about extensively, is that if 70% of the casualties are women and
children and 25% of the population is adult male, then either Israel is
not successfully eliminating Hamas fighters or adult male casualty
counts are extremely low. This by itself strongly suggests that the
numbers are at a minimum grossly inaccurate and quite probably outright
faked. Finally, on Feb. 15, Hamas admitted to losing 6,000 of its
fighters, which represents more than 20% of the total number of
casualties reported.
Taken
together, Hamas is reporting not only that 70% of casualties are women
and children but also that 20% are fighters. This is not possible unless
Israel is somehow not killing noncombatant men, or else Hamas is
claiming that almost all the men in Gaza are Hamas fighters.
Are
there better numbers? Some objective commentators have acknowledged
Hamas’ numbers in previous battles with Israel to be roughly accurate.
Nevertheless, this war is wholly unlike its predecessors in scale or
scope; international observers who were able to monitor previous wars
are now completely absent, so the past can’t be assumed to be a reliable
guide. The fog of war is especially thick in Gaza, making it impossible
to quickly determine civilian death totals with any accuracy. Not only
do official Palestinian death counts fail to differentiate soldiers from
children, but Hamas also blames all deaths on Israel even if caused by
Hamas’ own misfired rockets,
accidental explosions, deliberate killings, or internal battles. One
group of researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public
Health compared Hamas reports to data on UNRWA workers. They argued
that because the death rates were approximately similar, Hamas’ numbers
must not be inflated. But their argument relied on a crucial and
unverified assumption: that UNRWA workers are not disproportionately
more likely to be killed than the general population. That premise
exploded when it was uncovered that a sizable fraction of UNRWA workers are affiliated with Hamas. Some were even exposed as having participated in the Oct. 7 massacre itself.
The
truth can’t yet be known and probably never will be. The total civilian
casualty count is likely to be extremely overstated. Israel estimates
that at least 12,000 fighters have been killed. If that number proves to
be even reasonably accurate, then the ratio of noncombatant casualties
to combatants is remarkably low: at most 1.4 to 1 and perhaps as low as 1
to 1. By historical standards
of urban warfare, where combatants are embedded above and below into
civilian population centers, this is a remarkable and successful effort
to prevent unnecessary loss of life while fighting an implacable enemy
that protects itself with civilians.
The data used in the article can be foundhere, with thanks to Salo Aizenberg who helped check and correct these numbers.
Abraham Wyner is Professor of Statistics and Data Science at The Wharton
School of the University of Pennsylvania and Faculty Co-Director of the
Wharton Sports Analytics and Business Initiative.
The Open-Air Prison for ISIS Supporters—and Victims
Since
the Islamic State fell, tens of thousands of people—many of them
children—have been herded into Al-Hol, a giant fenced-in camp in Syria,
and effectively given life sentences.
The
dead turned up everywhere. Two decapitated corpses in a cesspit. The
remains of a woman with a pierced skull. A child with a bullet hole in
his temple. Men clustering around a ditch suggested the worst, as did
women running at full speed through the dirt. With each grim discovery,
Jihan Omar renewed a promise to herself: she had to find a way out.
Jihan
lived in Al-Hol, a detention camp in eastern Syria which could more
properly be called a concentration camp. Al-Hol was created decades ago,
in a stretch of scrubland about ten miles west of the Iraqi border, as a
haven for refugees. But in 2019, when the U.S.-led coalition vanquished
isis—the armed group that had briefly
established a breakaway caliphate within Syria and Iraq, imposing an
extremist interpretation of Islamic law—tens of thousands of people
who’d been living under its rule were herded to the camp. Guard towers
and armored vehicles and concertina-crowned walls appeared, and
residents could no longer walk out the gate.
About
fifty thousand people are currently imprisoned in Al-Hol, which is
named for a dilapidated nearby town. The detainees hail from more than
fifty countries: Chinese and Trinidadians and Russians and Swedes and
Brits live alongside Syrians and Iraqis. Many of the adults had either
joined isis or been married to someone who’d
joined. But many others have no links to the Islamic State and fled to
the camp to escape the punishing U.S.-led bombing campaign. Some were
thrown into isis’s orbit by force: Yazidis
enslaved by commanders, teen-age girls married off by their families.
More than half the population are children, the majority of whom are
younger than twelve. Dozens of babies are born each month. All the
residents are under indefinite detention, as no plans have apparently
been made to prosecute any of them—imagine if Guantánamo were the size
of a city, and its inmates were mostly women and children. The United
Nations has called Al-Hol a “blight on the conscience of humanity.”
The
camp, which is in a region of Syria still protected by several hundred
U.S. troops, is under the aegis of a beleaguered force of mostly Kurdish
fighters—soldiers who had previously aligned with the Americans to
defeat isis. They are largely backed by the
United States, but the Pentagon declines to specify how much it spends
annually on Al-Hol. The Kurdish fighters guard the camp’s perimeter in swat
vehicles, and a primarily Kurdish civilian administration manages the
camp bureaucracy, coördinating with aid organizations to distribute
rations and deliver such basic services as sewage treatment and water.
But the camp itself—block after block of dirt lanes and tents—is
effectively under the control of its isis
inmates. All-female squads of religious police pressure women to cover
head to toe in the black niqab; violators have been dragged to makeshift
Sharia courts, where judges order floggings and executions.
Assassination cells gun down inmates accused of passing information to
camp authorities.
For years, I have been visiting
Al-Hol with a health-related humanitarian organization. To stand in one
of the camp’s alleys is to feel a type of vertigo: in every direction,
rows of tents—U.N.-issued blue nylon and polyester patched together with
white and beige scraps of fabric—stretch to the horizon. Above this
canvas metropolis loom red water towers whose tanks are known to teem
with worms. Some days, simoom winds blast open tent flaps, covering
residents with dust. The smell of sand and raw sewage is overwhelming.
Jihan,
who arrived in the camp in 2018, spent years plotting escape. Some
guards were corrupt, and she occasionally heard of prisoners bribing
their way out. This carried great risk, though, and required huge sums
of cash. The safest approach was to wait for the camp’s security
officials to decide, through a secretive process that no prisoner quite
understood, that you didn’t pose a threat, or to confirm that you’d
never belonged to isis in the first place. Such
beneficence could take years, though, or might never come. Identifying
an intermediary who had the ear of the jailers was crucial, and after
much searching Jihan believed that she’d found just the person: a
fifty-four-year-old inmate named Hamid al-Shummari, who promised that he
would raise her case with the authorities.
“There isn’t a problem on this earth I cannot solve,” Hamid told me.
One
afternoon in January, 2021, I visited Hamid’s tent, which he’d
outfitted with floor cushions and hanging bulbs, in an homage to the
bungalow that he’d had on the outside. Hamid, who possessed the regal
bearing of a man accustomed to addressing tribal gatherings, had a
well-grooved Bedouin face and wore a checkered shemagh scarf
swirled around his gray hair. He and his family had arrived in Al-Hol
after fleeing the war—an outcome that might have reduced someone less
resourceful to despair. But Hamid threw himself into camp life,
befriending neighbors and smoothing over daily calamities. He roved from
tent to tent, insuring that detainees received their allotments of the
camp’s two official provisions: bread and cooking gas, both of which are
supplied by non-governmental organizations. Before long, he was serving
as an advocate for the camp’s tens of thousands of Syrians to the
authorities. The role filled him with pride—his great fear wasn’t penury
or dispossession but to be thought of as not useful.
On
the afternoon we met, a dozen women, all clad in black, were awaiting
his audience. Hamid told me that he’d recently succeeded in obtaining
official approval to open a sewing workshop for the women. He wished
that he could give me a tour of the facility, but he wasn’t keen to be
seen with a foreigner. Not everyone was grateful for his efforts; some
inmates, who were linked to isis, denounced him
as a collaborator. And conditions in the camp were deteriorating; the
previous evening, five detainees had been murdered. “The people here are
forgotten by the world,” he told me.
Some
days later, Hamid and a few of his sons were walking home from a tent
used as a mosque. They had finished Friday prayers. Teen-agers were
loitering on a lot that served as a soccer field, though it lacked
goalposts. As Hamid paused in front of his tent, to suggest to his
family that they erect a wall to protect themselves, a man approached.
He was wearing Adidas sneakers and track pants, as if he had just come
from the soccer field, and he’d covered his face in a shemagh.
As Hamid turned to greet him, the man fired a pistol. The bullet tore
through Hamid’s neck. One of his sons ran at the attacker and was shot
in the face.
Jihan Omar, who lived a few tents
down, heard the shots and rushed into the street. When she saw that the
father and son had been murdered, she collapsed. She’d believed that
Hamid was an angel sent by God to deliver her from imprisonment. In the
days that followed, she despaired. Jihan had pictured herself walking
freely through the boisterous souks and open fields of her youth. Now
she was trapped, maybe forever.
Among
the hundreds of women I crossed paths with in Al-Hol, Jihan was one of
the few who appeared before me without a face covering; it was her way
of repudiating the memory of living under isis. Her eyes were the color of honey, and her smile said, I know what I’m doing.
When she came to a decision, no exhortation or inducement could move
her. In a different time and place, this quality could have been seen as
ordinary stubbornness, but in the camp it signalled unusual resolve.
I
first met with Jihan in her tent on a spring day, in the hope of better
understanding how so many women and their children had ended up in
Al-Hol. A curtain separated the areas that passed for the living room
and the kitchen. There was a single mattress on the floor. Nearby, goats
bleated.
Like many detainees, Jihan supplemented
her rations using money earned from occasional jobs around the camp. She
had recently started working as a janitor at a kindergarten, where she
made about eight dollars a day. A few aid organizations had established
schools in Al-Hol, although isis occasionally
burned them down, because they dared to teach secular subjects. She was
usually home by the early afternoon, but the work didn’t cease: she
swept the tent clean of sand, patched rips in the nylon, and prepared
dinner, often with provisions handed out by charities.
Jihan
told me that she was born in the early eighties, in a neighborhood in
the Old City of Homs, in western Syria. It was a world of narrow
streets, ancient buildings of black basalt with ogive windows, and inner
courtyards with lemon and loquat trees. Marwa al-Sabouni, an architect
from Homs, has written that “it was common to hear the bells of
Christian churches and the Muslim call to prayer echoing through the
streets at the same time.” Jihan recalled Friday picnics in which her
family would prepare lime-shaped kibbe in yogurt sauce. “We
used to sit in the yard of our house, next to the jasmine and the
fountain, drinking yerba maté, listening to my mother singing in her
sweet voice,” she said.
Jihan
excelled in school, but, at the age of thirteen, after watching her
older siblings’ university degrees come to nothing, she dropped out to
become a seamstress. She apprenticed at a workshop, learning to handle
bodices and chiffons; within a few years, she could sew a bridal
ensemble. Soon, she was talking about designing her own wedding
gown—lots of lace, flared like a bell—and her parents took note. In
traditional quarters of Homs, most marriages were arranged, so one day
they introduced her to a tall boy with rich brown skin named Ahmed.
Jihan knew of him from the neighborhood; he had a reputation for chasing
away men who catcalled women. The families gathered in the Omars’
living room and encouraged the pair to speak privately in a
corner—Jihan’s father insisted that the decision be hers. She sat before
Ahmed, staring into her lap. He was soft-spoken, with a kindness to his
voice. She summoned the courage to look at him. “He had nice eyes, the
color of honey,” she recalled. “We had the same eyes, so I believed it
was fate.”
Jihan and Ahmed became engaged; they
selected invitation cards and playlists for the wedding, and picked out
wallpaper and kitchen appliances for their future home. He wasn’t like
other neighborhood men, who saw married life as a kingdom ruled by fiat.
“He did not impose anything,” she recalled. “He told me, ‘You are my
life partner, we have to share everything.’ ” Ahmed promised that his
family would have no say over their affairs; their secrets would remain
their own. As they planned this shared existence, Jihan realized that
she was in love.
She remembered every detail of
her wedding: the procession through the winding streets, the
metallic-sounding voices on the cassette tapes, the friends dancing the dabke, the date-filled maamoul
cookies. The family couldn’t afford soft drinks, so they provided
water. Afterward, Jihan spent her first night in her new home—a room at
her in-laws’. Exhausted, nervous, and flush with optimism, she was
sixteen.
Jihan had noticed that the act of
matrimony transformed many of her friends’ charming suitors into petty
tyrants. Some husbands even forbade their wives to work. But Ahmed kept
his word about sharing decisions. “Our years passed like a dream,” Jihan
told me. Her husband worked with great industry, earning a decent wage
as a laborer. When he returned home in the evening, they smoked Lucky
Strikes and talked of vacations. Like her, he had little interest in
Islam; instead, his faith was in the idea of progress, and he
assiduously saved money. Once, he surprised her with a washing machine;
later, she was astonished to learn that he’d managed to buy a plot of
land out in the suburbs, on which he hoped to build a new home.
Jihan
prepared to quit tailoring. She hoped for two boys and a girl; her
daughter would be named Sarah, after a dear friend. But they had trouble
conceiving. Men in the neighborhood often used this difficulty as a
pretext to take a second wife, but Ahmed promised Jihan that she was the
only one for him. They planned their future home: life became the
measurement of curtains, the weighing of shades of blue. In 2011, when
the television began showing scenes of protests in Egypt, Ahmed and
Jihan hardly paid attention.
Then protests against
Syria’s dictator, Bashar al-Assad, erupted in their neighborhood. Jihan
wasn’t sure what to think, but Ahmed believed that demonstrations would
bring only chaos. He moved their Friday picnics indoors and stayed home
from work. The authorities were responding with force, gunning down
unarmed protesters and detaining activists. In response, angry residents
launched a sit-in at a clock tower; regime soldiers massacred them,
leaving the asphalt streaked with blood. Not long afterward, troops
opened fire on Jihan’s street while a friend, Aisha, was making coffee
at home. A bullet shattered the window, killing Aisha. Jihan stopped
going outdoors, and was afraid even to pass by her own windows.
One
day, Ahmed came home in a panic: he’d witnessed a regime soldier
fatally shoot an elderly neighbor, whose body was thrown from his
wheelchair. Jihan and Ahmed soon abandoned their possessions and fled to
the countryside with their relatives, taking shelter in an empty house
offered by a local family.
Meanwhile, Homs became a
kill zone. Protesters took up weapons, forming rebel groups. The regime
shelled the city, reducing neighborhoods to rubble. Pro-government
militias dismembered children and set bodies ablaze. Jihan noticed a
change in Ahmed. Like everyone else who’d fled, he’d lost his job, but
he would stay out all day without telling her where he was going. He’d
return in a dark mood, relating news of fresh massacres. In a nearby
town, regime fighters executed nearly a hundred people, half of them
children. Ahmed began lashing out at friends, relatives, and even Jihan.
He abandoned the Friday picnics, saying that he felt guilty breathing
fresh country air while, just miles away, his friends were being buried.
He joined the Free Syrian Army, an assemblage of pro-democracy rebel
groups. But a shortage of funds forced some units into brigandage, which
deepened Ahmed’s cynicism: the government was murderous and the rebels
were corrupt. He could no longer even visit his plot of land because the
road there was crisscrossed by checkpoints. And what was the use of
owning land when the world was collapsing?
Ahmed
received daily updates about the carnage in Homs from his best friend,
Ali, who’d stayed behind. One day in 2013, Ahmed got a phone call: Ali
had been bringing home a breakfast of eggs and yogurt when he was shot
in the forehead by a regime sniper. Ahmed smashed his phone to pieces,
sobbing, and locked himself in his room. Jihan had never seen him like
this; she worried he would harm himself. He left home. Days later, his
mother brought him back, but he had a new, distant look. “I’m sick and
tired of this life,” he told Jihan. “I’m going to join the Islamic
State.”
About
fifty thousand people are currently imprisoned in Al-Hol. The detainees
hail from more than fifty countries: Chinese and Trinidadians and
Russians and Swedes and Brits live alongside Syrians and Iraqis. The
United Nations has called Al-Hol a “blight on the conscience of
humanity.”Photograph by Alice Martins
When
night falls in Al-Hol, the floodlights cast a fluorescent glow on the
tents, and the camp feels like some extraterrestrial colony, severed
from civilization. Jihan didn’t have a phone—guards confiscate them
during raids—and her tent lacked electricity. At night, she would lie on
her mattress, the desert wind whipping the nylon. Occasionally, she
permitted herself to think about Ahmed. Something had been churning
within him, she told me, but his decision to join isis
remained inscrutable to her. Back in 2013, there had been nearly a
thousand rebel groups, an alphabet soup of acronyms. She had no clue
that one of them—the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria—was different.
Nonetheless, she was convinced that Ahmed’s enlistment would bring ruin
on them. She begged him to reconsider. For the first time, they had
vicious fights: slammed doors, shattered dishware. But nothing could
move Ahmed; there was a fury in him that frightened her. Sometimes he
didn’t come home, and Jihan spent the night crying into her pillow.
Ahmed’s decision alarmed both their families. His relatives knew nothing about isis
but believed that the only way to survive was to keep the armed
factions at a distance. Jihan’s father—who had never raised his voice at
her—screamed that she must divorce Ahmed.
“How can I leave my husband?” she asked.
“If you don’t, I will never forgive you,” he said.
For
a month, Jihan stayed indoors, mired in disbelief and depression; she
rehearsed telling Ahmed that she wanted a divorce, imagining his shock,
his grief. Both sets of parents vowed to disown the couple if he
wouldn’t renounce isis. To prove it, they acted
as if they didn’t know Jihan when they passed her on the street. But
Ahmed had stood by her when they couldn’t conceive. Jihan couldn’t
abandon him, even if he was making a terrible mistake; indeed, she would
stay with him precisely because he was making a mistake, since
it was such moments, she told herself, that made love meaningful. She
hoped to keep reminding him that there was a realm beyond air strikes
and mutilated bodies, somewhere.
“We’re going to lose our families,” she told him one day. “Please don’t do this.”
He took her hand. “Maybe we’ll lose our families,” he said. “But we will be doing the right thing, and that’s what matters.”
A few months later, Jihan and Ahmed moved to Raqqa, the capital of the Islamic State’s self-declared caliphate.
The
Islamic State at its height controlled nearly a third of Syrian
territory and forty per cent of Iraq, and ruled over some ten million
people. In addition to the front-line fighters who battled rival Syrian
and Iraqi factions, thousands of functionaries engaged in such mundane
bureaucratic tasks as collecting taxes and conducting restaurant
food-safety inspections. The caliphate’s system of laws, which was as
intricate as that of any established state, included the provision that
women cover fully in public. Jihan loathed wearing the niqab so much
that she rarely left the house. Ahmed asked her to bear it, as if they
were immigrants in a foreign culture. He was often away at the front
lines, returning only once or twice a month, usually without warning.
Jihan had grown up surrounded by siblings and in-laws; she’d never slept
in an empty house a day in her life. Though she had acquired a
smattering of friends by working as a seamstress, each evening she sank
back into a terrible loneliness. She grew obsessed with having children,
but she and Ahmed still couldn’t conceive. They visited several
doctors, who declared them medically sound. One said that their
condition was God’s will.
Whenever Ahmed came home, he was withdrawn. “He hated life in general,” Jihan recalled. When she prepared his favorite meal—mahshi,
stuffed vegetables—he ate without pleasure. He stared blankly into his
phone, then slept for twelve hours straight. He hardly even looked at
her anymore. She saw him smile only when he heard news of regime losses.
When Jihan asked about his work, he refused to discuss it—and she felt
relieved, because she didn’t really want to know. She tried to imagine
they were living a normal life, that he was going off to do construction
or farming, that a child was on the way. Within her four walls, it was
easy to forget that a war raged in other cities. But she couldn’t forget
her former life in Homs. One call from her father would have been
enough. None came.
Ahmed
must have noticed her despondency, because he began taking her out:
hiking along the Euphrates, shopping in the souks. The couple were seen
together so often that when Ahmed’s comrades spotted him out alone they
teased, “You forgot your weapon at home.” Still, he was rarely on leave,
and Jihan wouldn’t go out by herself. In this shrunken universe, she
lost track of time. Two, three years passed.
Then, in 2017, the war came to Raqqa. Though the city was an isis
bastion, there were many residents, especially poor ones, who opposed
the group but lacked the resources to escape. American jets pounded the
city; isis forces shot back from rooftops. Jihan huddled at home while Ahmed was off fighting. The American barrage struck isis
locations and civilian homes alike. A coalition bomb slammed into a
residential building in Jihan’s neighborhood, nearly wiping out four
families living there; twenty children died. A week later, a strike hit
another nearby building, killing twenty-seven civilians. Explosions
rocked the city day and night, and Jihan hardly slept.
Finally,
Ahmed returned home. He frantically loaded their possessions into a
car, and drove with Jihan through a vista of extraordinary devastation:
some eleven thousand buildings—mosques, schools, water towers—were in
ruins. Amnesty International, which tracked civilian deaths resulting
from the battle, later called Raqqa the “most destroyed city in modern
times.” Ahmed and Jihan headed south. She recalled, “A bomb hit a
building on a street we were passing, and I saw with my own eyes a crib
thrown onto the street. Ahmed stopped the car and went to check on it.
There was a baby inside, and it was still alive. Ahmed told me, ‘Do you
see who we are fighting?’ He was very upset, and he was pointing to the
sky: ‘What did this baby do?’ He was shaking.”
After
leaving the infant with neighbors, they drove to Deir ez-Zor, a
province deep in the heart of the caliphate and far from the bombing. It
was the poorest corner of Syria; malaria and polio were rampant. The
accents were rustic and guttural. Ahmed returned to the front and Jihan
resumed tailoring. He was gone for longer and longer stretches. She
tried desperately to imagine a better future, but these thoughts were
impossibly imbricated with her past. In her mind, she was having a
Friday picnic in Homs, and she was chasing after Sarah and her boys,
scolding them, feeding them kibbe.
One
morning, there was a knock on the door. Jihan opened it to find a group
of Islamic State fighters. “Are you Ahmed Ali Saleh’s wife?” one asked.
She nodded. “May God have mercy on him and bless him. He was martyred.”
Jihan wasn’t sure what to say. “Where is his body?” she asked.
“We buried it,” one said, and then they left.
The
moments after this were a haze. At some point, Jihan fainted. Neighbors
must have noticed her in distress. They took turns spending the night
with her. Sometimes she talked about waiting for Ahmed to come home, as
if she’d only imagined his death. When the truth bore down, she fainted
again. In the depths of her mourning, she considered reaching out to her
parents, but the dread of rejection stopped her. “If I called my father
and heard his voice and he told me I wasn’t his daughter, it would
break my heart into pieces,” she said. Occasionally, she imagined she’d
given birth to a child who had Ahmed’s scent. She lost all desire to
leave the house. Her neighbors tried to persuade her to move in with
them, or at least come for meals, but she refused.
One
day in 2018, a woman who lived next door to Jihan was stoking a clay
oven on her roof. As the woman called to her four children down below to
help their father load the car, an air strike rocked the house. Jihan
raced over. The woman had been thrown from the roof. “Don’t check on
me!” she screamed. “Check my children!” But her entire family was dead.
Jihan stared at the children’s little bodies and was suddenly gripped by
a rage she’d never felt before. She realized, for the first time, that
she hated Ahmed—for his stubbornness, his zealotry, his bloodlust, his
willingness to destroy her life. She hated her parents, who, she told
me, had “tossed us out like garbage.” She hated her government for
plunging her country into horror. She hated the Americans, the U.N., and
the entire world, and she swore that she’d never cry for anyone, or
anything, again.
Jihan
began leaving the house, and she resumed tailoring with a furious
intensity, though she couldn’t say what for. The sound of warplanes grew
closer, but she no longer cared. She befriended one of her customers,
who introduced her to her brother, a divorced tuk-tuk mechanic named
Mahmoud. He not only detested isis—he repudiated
every side of the conflict. At first, Jihan resisted any thought of
romance. But after weeks of contemplation she decided that there was
only one way to bury the memory of Ahmed. She married Mahmoud in a small
ceremony. There had been no courtship—indeed, hardly any discussion
between them—but she couldn’t remain alone.
Soon
afterward, the war reached Deir ez-Zor. Pro-regime forces sent jets
thundering overhead, and ordnance crashed down at random. Jihan and
Mahmoud decided to take refuge in the countryside, where Mahmoud had
relatives. As they were leaving, a staggering explosion nearly
overturned their vehicle. Jihan looked back to see their house ablaze.
The
next day, they stole back to the house. It was in ashes. Their
possessions, including their identification papers, had been
incinerated.
The couple moved from village to
village, fleeing the advancing front line and venturing deeper into the
caliphate. Tens of thousands of families were doing the same—isis
was barring civilians from leaving its territory. But nowhere was truly
safe; one day, coalition warplanes struck the hamlet where Jihan and
Mahmoud were sheltering, turning the village into an inferno. As they
gathered their belongings to flee again, an air strike hit a nearby
building; the blast threw Jihan to the ground, and shrapnel just missed
her, cleaving a nearby tree. Mahmoud carried her to the car, and they
raced off.
There was no choice but to try to
escape the caliphate. They joined hundreds of other families trekking
through the desert; many had paid their life savings to smugglers, who
guided them around isis checkpoints. The caravan
proceeded northwest, toward Raqqa, and finally arrived at a checkpoint
of the U.S.-backed Kurdish forces. The travellers—who included the sick,
the wounded, the pregnant, the dying—begged the soldiers to take them
in. The soldiers demanded identification documents, which Jihan and
Mahmoud no longer had. In any event, almost none of the people in the
caravan were admitted. Most of them were arrested and loaded into cargo
trucks. Jihan, who hadn’t eaten in days, was barely conscious. After
many hours, the trucks were unloaded. Jihan and her husband stood
shivering under floodlights, and were informed that the name of their
new home was Al-Hol.
In
2006, the Syrian government settled a few hundred Palestinian refugee
families on a dusty, scorpion-infested stretch of brushland near the
Iraqi border, south of the town of Al-Hol, which means, among other
things, “the horror.” The Palestinians had been living in Iraq but fled
the violence unleashed by the U.S. occupation; they had already been
expelled from their ancestral lands by Israel in 1948. The U.N. built
cinder-block houses for the refugees. During the Syrian civil war, the
camp filled with more displaced families. In March, 2019, when the
caliphate fell, thousands of its residents were corralled into Al-Hol,
and the camp was abruptly converted into one of the world’s largest
prisons. Today, Al-Hol’s fifty thousand residents are grouped into
sectors divided by barbed wire; to walk from one to the next can take
half an hour. Most sectors hold Syrians and Iraqis, but the so-called
Annex is home to about six thousand Europeans, Asians, and Africans,
some of whom have been denied repatriation by their home governments.
Horticulture is evident here and there around the camp, with squash and
bean plants peeking over tents. A few non-governmental organizations
operate health clinics, but detainees complain that malnutrition and
water-borne disease are pervasive. Crowds jostle around bathrooms whose
pipes are often clogged. Many inmates receive money from relatives—hawala
networks, informal cash-transfer systems, are sometimes allowed to
relay funds to prisoners. Detainees can use their remittances to buy
smuggled goods, including drugs. The chief diversion is the souk, which
was built by inmates, and in which you’ll find small grocers next to
carts selling makeup next to smoothie stands. A few lucky prisoners own
shops, but most stalls are run by outsiders with permits to enter the
camp. A mass of black-clad women drifts among the stalls, examining
bras, haggling over cigarettes. You can guess who the true believers
are: the women who cover not only their faces but also their eyes tend
to be loyal to isis.
When
Jihan and Mahmoud moved to their assigned tent, Jihan was surprised to
find many detainees with stories like hers. The common denominator
appeared to be guilt by association. There was a woman from central
Syria named Fatima; her husband had joined the democracy protests and
then, through the twists and turns of the war, had ended up in isis.
Her family insisted that she divorce him, but they had a child, and,
according to local custom, custody goes to the man, so she refused—and
was disowned. Eventually, Fatima’s husband died in battle, and she was
transferred against her will to a “guest house” for isis widows. There she rebuffed isis
suitors, wanting only to be reunited with her family. During America’s
bombing campaign, she was moved from village to village by isis,
and she ended up living in a ditch as ordnance exploded around her. Now
she and her child were in Al-Hol, surviving on camp rations, as she
waited for a sign from her family. She hadn’t spoken to them in four
years.
Jihan met Da’ad, who was also from Homs. Her family, which was not linked to isis,
had fled regime air strikes for Raqqa, then kept moving east to escape
U.S. bombs. One day, she and her children travelled to visit her
parents; they returned home to find that a coalition air strike had
blown up their house. Seventeen people were killed, among them her
husband and her in-laws. Now she lives in a tent with her daughters,
including a nine-year-old who has a blood disorder and requires
transfusions to stay alive. Transfusions are performed at a hospital
outside the camp, but an emergency furlough from the authorities is
maddeningly difficult to obtain, and Da’ad, who works at a grocery in
the souk, can’t always afford the treatments. She has appealed to
neighbors and to aid organizations in the camp, without success. “I
can’t watch my child withering away in front of me day after day,” she
said. “This is a prison, not a camp. I don’t know what crime my daughter
committed.”
Local authorities did not comment on
conditions in the camp. The U.S. State Department said in a statement
that the “humanitarian needs at Al-Hol camp are vast and the
international response is underfunded,” and noted that the U.S. is
“committed to helping the international community address this shared
security and humanitarian challenge.”
I
tracked down eyewitnesses and collected corroborating evidence for the
strikes that Da’ad and other prisoners described. (The Pentagon declined
to comment.) Under U.S. law, civilians harmed in American military
actions can be eligible for condolence payments. But most inmates don’t
believe that they will ever see a dollar—and they hardly even think
about the remote and seemingly toothless world of foreign laws.
Afflicted by images they cannot unsee, they must take comfort in the
knowledge that the haunting is shared.
Asma was from a stretch of Iraq that was overtaken by isis.
When U.S.-backed forces closed in on her village, she and her husband, a
taxi-driver, fled with their two daughters; her two brothers had joined
isis, and she and her husband feared being
branded sympathizers. They took refuge in Syria. Not long afterward,
Asma’s husband was in a traffic accident. “I went running to the
hospital crying,” she recalled. He died from his injuries. “I saw his
body and hugged him and kept screaming.” Five months later, she went to
visit a friend. When she returned home, she saw people gathered in front
of her house. It was in smoldering ruins, from an air strike by
pro-government forces. Both her daughters were dead. “I buried them in
the dirt with my own hands,” Asma said. “They were little girls, the age
of flowers.” Because a woman cannot live alone, Asma moved in with her
brothers Mustafa and Saleh, the isis members,
who, with their families, had taken up residence in Syria. She tried to
suppress her grief, playing with her nieces and nephews and helping out
around the house. One evening, she went to bed around midnight, and woke
up in the hospital; Saleh was by her side, crying. He told her, “We are
the only survivors.” Asma recalled, “I did not even feel the fractures
in my hands and feet. I was screaming, ‘Where is Mustafa? Where are the
boys and girls!’ ” Another air strike had wiped out the rest of her
family, killing twelve people, nine of them children. She and Saleh fled
to a different village, but two months later he was killed in a
coalition air strike. In Al-Hol, Asma lived in a tent alone.
I
met a young man named Hassan, who was a child when the civil war
started; he hailed from western Syria but, through a series of
displacements, wound up in the eastern part of the country. isis
fighters commandeered the ground floor of the apartment building where
he lived with his parents and siblings. Residents begged the militants
to leave, but they refused. The residents had nowhere to go, so they
remained in their homes. One day, Hassan was talking with his brothers
when he heard warplanes. “I woke up to find myself under rubble, trapped
between stones and iron,” he recalled. “I started calling for my
parents, but nobody answered. My brother was next to me. And I then saw
that he was not even a complete body. It was half a body, only the upper
half, from his chest to his head.” Three days later, at the hospital,
he was told that a coalition bomb had killed ten members of his family,
including his parents: “I started howling, and the nurse tried to calm
me and remind me of God.”
Deyaa was an Iraqi from
Heet, a city that became part of the caliphate. He worked in livestock.
One day, he and his wife drove beyond the city limits to collect fodder,
and they took their children along. At dusk, as they were returning
home, they noticed jets flying low. A terrific blast hit the roadside.
Deyaa could no longer hear or see anything. He screamed his wife’s name
but got no answer. Her head had been split open. Shrapnel had ripped
apart his children’s bodies.
After several
surgeries, Deyaa survived. “When they took me home, I couldn’t bring
myself to enter—I just stood outside crying,” he said. “I stood like
this for a long time, long enough for people to worry that I was losing
my mind.” He made multiple attempts to escape the caliphate, but was
eventually detained by Kurdish forces and shipped to Al-Hol. He said of
his family, “They were the most valuable things I had, and the Americans
took them away from me.”
Inmates
who had never committed a crime still tended to blame themselves for
their predicament—they’d fallen in love with the wrong man, sought
refuge in the wrong town. Jihan was overtaken by bitterness and
self-reproach. Should she have listened to her parents? Should she have
forced Ahmed to quit isis? But how? Using a
friend’s phone, she tried to contact her family, but they had changed
their numbers. She had convinced herself that if she could only
comprehend Ahmed’s path into isis, she could somehow rid herself of his stain. But nobody in Al-Hol had known him, and the authorities had no record of him.
To
better understand Ahmed’s story myself, one afternoon I visited a tent
not far from Jihan’s, where Abu Hassan, an Islamic State commander,
lived. He was a heavyset man with a stern, watchful expression, and I
found it easy to imagine him in a grainy jihadi video. His tent was
larger than most, provisioned with embroidered floor cushions and velvet
drapes. I’d heard that he came from an impoverished family in central
Syria, and he confirmed this, describing a childhood spent on the
streets with local toughs. “We drank, we smoked,” he told me. “We never
talked about Islamic ideas.” They labored for pennies as pushcart
venders and construction workers. He got a job painting the sides of
buildings, and enjoyed “hanging between land and sky.”
When
the revolution erupted, Abu Hassan and his friends joined the protests.
“None of us had any idea about the Islamic State,” he recalled. “We
were very poor, so we just wanted better jobs, a better economic
situation, and freedom of expression.” After several people were
detained and then brutalized in regime dungeons, he concluded that
peaceful resistance was futile. He and his friends collected donations
door to door, bought a few old hunting rifles, and declared themselves a
unit of the Free Syrian Army.
As
the uprising mutated into war, Abu Hassan found himself on the front
lines, sleeping in bombed-out buildings and dodging mortars. At first,
Free Syrian Army units received a hero’s welcome wherever they went. But
in time the exigencies of fund-raising pushed rebel units—most of which
lacked foreign backing—into thievery. He considered quitting. But then a
right-wing battalion, Ahrar al-Sham, appeared on the scene; the group,
which had a flush arsenal donated by Gulf states, didn’t have to resort
to looting. Abu Hassan’s unit joined en masse. For the first time, Abu
Hassan was surrounded by young men who spoke of order and
responsibility. It was here that he initially heard Islamic ideas; he
was amazed to see comrades act as if they were accountable to something
greater than themselves.
Before long, isis
emerged, announcing its intention to build a state that would promote
justice and care for the poor. Abu Hassan and his crew signed up. He was
unacquainted with the group’s global ambitions, hadn’t read a word of
jihadi literature and knew none of its catechisms—such as “death to the
rejectionists,” the Shia. But the terrible bloodshed of the previous
years had unsettled all precepts of right and wrong, and it was isis’s message of order, in a world seemingly turned upside down, that resonated with Abu Hassan.
The most commonly told story of isis
recruitment starts with a lone teen-ager in a Western country, watching
YouTube clips in his bedroom and succumbing to indoctrination, then
rushing off to wage jihad. There are those who fit this narrative, but
the vast majority of isis recruits were Iraqis
and Syrians, most of whom hadn’t had the slightest inclination toward
religious extremism before they joined. As I met Abu Hassan and dozens
like him in Al-Hol, various archetypes revealed themselves: the rebel
who, closing his eyes and seeing the ghosts of dead relatives, is bent
on revenge; the poor worker suffering the humiliations of a profoundly
unequal society, then suddenly commanding fear and respect; the
teen-ager looking for excitement who calculates that, by growing a
rugged beard and sporting a bandolier, he might impress the neighborhood
girls.
When religious radicalization occurred, it usually happened after a person joined isis.
Membership in a militant organization can be a powerful socializing
experience, rewiring one’s ideas about reality. That seemed to be the
case with Abu Hassan. He was assigned to the isis
secret police—the caliphate’s gestapo—and tasked with arresting his
former pro-democracy allies. By all accounts, Abu Hassan morphed into a
feared enforcer, his unit snatching citizens off the streets. According
to some sources, at one point he was responsible for half the arrests in
a city in the Aleppo governorate. Those people judged guilty were often
marched to a field or an alley, sometimes in groups, and executed by
firing squad. Their bodies were dumped in unmarked mass graves.
Many
of the people arrested weren’t involved in the war. I located a falafel
seller who’d been detained by Abu Hassan. He’d been accused of taking
up arms against isis—a charge he’d found so absurd he almost wanted to laugh. Then isis
investigators “hung me by a rope and started beating me,” he recalled.
“They broke two of my bones, and I could breathe only with difficulty.”
He was placed in a windowless box so tiny that he couldn’t sit down, and
every so often he was taken out to be tortured again. He was released
after nine months.
The falafel seller was fortunate; many people seized by isis
never made it out. I collected the names of dozens of individuals
arrested by Abu Hassan who weren’t heard from again. Their families are
still searching for them. When I mentioned the names to Abu Hassan, he
said that he hadn’t killed them personally, but they were all dead.
In
the ideologically sundry society of Al-Hol, Abu Hassan had moderated
his persona. He’d acted as a mediator between the community and the
religious police, defending an aid organization’s construction of a
school. The caliphate had become a distant memory. Abu Hassan had lost
his worldly possessions and was living in a squalid camp. What did he
now make of his grisly career? “I will never say I regret arresting
those people, because our duty was to rule in the name of God,” he said.
It was a matter of following the law. “If I’m in Las Vegas, and I
commit a crime, and the punishment for this crime is death, what law
will I be judged under? Las Vegas law, not Islamic law, of course.” In
the same way, he explained, he’d merely been obeying orders. But
sometimes in my conversations with Abu Hassan I detected flashes of
brio, even pride: he had been an unremarkable, even disreputable, youth
before the war, and in his view he and his comrades had done the
extraordinary by burning conventional morality to the ground. When I
asked about isis’s treatment of such minorities
as the Shia, he said, “They are like a disease, and the only cure is to
kill them. The cure of the disease is the sword of justice.”
Not long after arriving in Al-Hol, isis
true believers easily cowed the other inmates, who were shell-shocked,
heartbroken, and in mourning. The Islamic State’s men and women—more
women, because the men were mostly dead or in other prisons—sought to
resurrect the caliphate within the camp itself. Supporters on the
outside took up collections for their imprisoned “sisters.” Female
detainees formed the religious police, Al-Hisba, which targeted
prostitution and other alleged misdeeds, often dragging women away on
real or imagined charges. isis judges meted out
sentences, including execution; before long, four to five people were
being killed a month, most by unknown assailants. isis
agents burned down N.G.O.-run schools and clinics. They murdered aid
workers and assassinated suspected collaborators, like Hamid
al-Shummari. The aim was to sever links to the outside world, rendering
the camp population dependent on isis members and making it easier to cajole inmates, especially children, into joining the group.
isis
cells are active in every sector of Al-Hol, but the heart of this
mini-caliphate is the Annex, where non-Iraqi foreign nationals tend to
reside. Many of the women there, unlike those in the rest of the camp,
chose to join the Islamic State; they are among the most extreme of the
true believers. One afternoon I toured the Annex, which is set apart
from the other sectors. Tents were clustered together and encircled by
alleys, forming little neighborhoods. Graffiti covered the walls in an
array of languages. There was hardly a woman about. As I walked down the
main street, I noticed eyes watching me through openings in the tents.
Here and there, I saw children: sitting in a sewage ditch, gathered
around a well. I approached a pair of boys, one blond and the other with
East Asian features. They couldn’t have been more than four or five
years old. I asked them where they were from, and the blond boy replied,
in stilted, formal Arabic, “We don’t speak to infidels.” As I was
leaving, I felt a sharp pain in my shoulder blade and turned to see
rocks flying toward me. More boys appeared, eager to take part in the
stoning. I ran.
I ended up deeper in the Annex, near a school that had been built by an aid group. It was now abandoned, after warnings from isis
cells. A woman appeared. Speaking with a Lebanese accent, she told me
she’d moved her tent by the school because other women in the Annex had
threatened to kill her for not wearing a niqab. And she was just as
afraid of the children, some of whom had been in the camp long enough to
grow into teen-agers and terrorize residents.
The
Kurdish authorities, who lack the manpower to enforce security, manage
the camp’s nine sectors through occasional raids. Sometimes these
operations net isis commanders accused of
plotting attacks beyond the camp’s fences; occasionally, they have
liberated enslaved Yazidi women. But the authorities are so
under-resourced that they tend to treat the entire population as
hostile. Detainees live in fear of raids; soldiers have beaten people in
front of their tents. In Sector 5, I met a woman whose seven-year-old
boy had been playing near the perimeter fence, then had crawled under it
to pick wildflowers on the other side. Guards had shot him dead. “He
was waiting to celebrate Eid,” she wept. “I had bought Eid clothes for
him.”
When Jihan heard about this killing, which
occurred not far from her tent, it brought back memories of the air
strike near her house—the small bodies of children tossed about. Her
desire to squeeze a child in her arms, to hear the word “mother,” was
overpowering. She and Mahmoud were unable to conceive—an affliction all
the more cutting in the camp, where it’s impossible to step out of a
tent without running into children. Most do not attend school, and there
are few diversions. You might see teen-age boys aimlessly hurling rocks
into the distance. Younger children splash around in ditches or play
with mud.
I met Tahir, a shy and polite four-year-old with large eyes. He was born in the camp; his father, who had belonged to isis, vanished in the bowels of the prison system. In Al-Hol, meanwhile, his mother was accused by isis
members of collaborating with authorities. One evening, she was marched
to a sewage ditch and shot. Tahir is now in the care of an ailing
grandmother. I asked him if he knew what isis was, and he shook his head. I asked if he wanted to leave the camp, and he again shook his head.
For
many children, the realm beyond the camp fence is mysterious, and
possibly dangerous. I spoke to dozens of children, and they knew next to
nothing about life outside Al-Hol. Many had not heard of Syria, Iraq,
America, or even television. (When Abu Hassan, the isis
commander, smuggled in a flat-screen television, his daughter
exclaimed, “Look how big that phone is!”) I met Aisha, a seven-year-old,
who explained that she was from Aleppo, but when I asked her what
Aleppo was she drew a blank. She didn’t know why she was in the camp,
and her days consisted of getting in line early to use the bathroom and
of avoiding security guards, whom she believed would shoot if she got
close. Naser, six years old, wasn’t sure what distinguished a camp from
other living arrangements. Another child boasted that she’d once seen
“moving drawings,” which I guessed was a cartoon, and she queried where
she might see more. I asked a group of children if they’d ever seen a
clown; one child said yes, but I realized that he was talking about a
smuggler—in Arabic, the words sound similar. I explained what a clown
looks like—white face paint, red nose—which inspired much discussion. A
child announced that she had indeed seen such a being, but she called it
a “snow bear,” and described a creature made of ice, with a carrot for a
nose. Internet connections at Al-Hol are sporadic, hitting the camp
like gusts of wind, and she must have seen a video on a phone. I asked
the children what they thought lay beyond the fence. Among the answers I
received: “nothing,” “hungry people,” “dogs,” “soldiers,” “stairs,”
“houses,” “gardens,” “infidels,” “my father.”
Last
spring, I arranged to bring clowns to perform for the children of
Al-Hol. But, just as we were loading our car to head for the camp, two
of the clowns dropped out, offering vague excuses. That left only Ali
Batran, a portly man with a mischievous grin who hails from central
Syria. During the caliphate’s rule, Ali was arrested five times for
hawking cigarettes; once, he received forty-five lashings and was
enrolled in a Sharia reëducation course. Still, unlike his compadres, he
had no qualms about visiting a camp filled with his former tormentors.
“Children are children,” Ali said. Besides, he could use the work; like
everything else in Syria, the clowning industry had been degraded by
years of war.
Ali felt that it was unnatural to
perform solo. “Clowning is all about the collective,” he explained. I
suggested that he recruit our driver, Abu Reem. Ali agreed, but he was
particular about his art and insisted that Abu Reem undertake a few
quick rehearsals. He was also keen that I not confuse Abu Reem with a
professional clown, though he admitted that he, too, was something of a
novice in the field. Ali had grown up poor, and as a child, looking for
“an escape from the intense psychological pressure,” he discovered the
theatre. He’d been landing roles in a variety of productions until the
war put an end to all that. He’d hardly clowned in recent years, and now
mainly worked polishing tiles.
In Al-Hol, several prisoners volunteered to gather children and prepare a tent. I also needed someone who could keep isis
cells at bay, so I approached Abu Hassan. He’d expressed no remorse in
our conversations, but I nonetheless suspected that he harbored doubts.
The smuggled TV in his tent played wildlife videos on loop—lions
stalking gazelles, snakes swallowing mice—and one day I asked about it.
He told me they were for his daughters, aged six and eight. “I don’t
want them to make the mistakes we made,” he said. “I want them to know
about the world.” He wouldn’t say what these mistakes were. But he
allowed that the suppression of clowns, which were haram in the
caliphate, was overreach. “Clowns are good,” he said.
On
the day of the show, the sun was brilliant and children crowded outside
a U.N.-issued tent serving as a big top. Abu Hassan arranged the boys
and girls into lines. No performance had ever been given in the camp,
and the children discussed what they might see. One girl suggested that
there was no such thing as a clown, that it was a ruse to get them to
school. A boy said that he’d heard clowns came bearing gifts. I asked
what he wished for most in the world, and he said a soccer ball. A boy
standing nearby, who looked to be six or seven, raised his index
finger—a gesture of the Islamic State.
Some thirty
kids crammed inside: young boys in tracksuits, little girls in head
scarves or niqabs. Balloons were littered about. Behind a partition, Ali
and Abu Reem were assembling their costumes. More children were trying
to force their way into the tent, which was at capacity, but Abu Hassan
and his friends held them back. The commander looked pleased with
himself about the crowd control.
Suddenly,
a whistle pierced the air, and Ali appeared among the children. There
were shouts of confusion. A girl in a leopard-print scarf burst into
tears and fled in terror. Ali wore a neon wig, and a red nose that kept
popping off. In the heat, his makeup ran, making him look like something
that might poke its head out of a sewer. I asked him to sneak off for a
touch-up, and he returned in better form, goose-stepping with Abu Reem.
The clowns distributed candies, sang songs, cracked jokes; slowly, the
children were won over. They began singing along. The boy who’d raised
his index finger danced. The leopard-print girl reappeared, laughing and
clapping.
Ali and Abu Reem retreated behind the
partition for the second act: a puppet show. They engaged sock puppets
in a complex drama about belonging and tolerance, following a script
that Ali had apparently written. I asked Ali why he needed to be in full
clown regalia while hiding behind a curtain; he told me that that was
just the way things were. I left the tent and saw Abu Hassan, who hailed
the event as a success: for a few moments, the children had been
transported. “They forgot where they are,” he said. “This is a great
gift.”
Suddenly, there was a shout. A woman in a
black niqab was cracking a whip in the air, trying to force her way into
the tent. Al-Hisba—the religious police. Her eyes screwed up in fury,
she declared, “This is devil worship!” Abu Hassan tried to reason with
her, arguing that the children had no other source of entertainment, but
she unleashed a torrent of abuse. I cancelled the remainder of the
show. Ali and Abu Reem gathered their accoutrements, and, as the woman
threatened Abu Hassan with death, we fled.
One
day, back when Hamid al-Shummari was still alive, Jihan received
visitors. It was the pit of winter; freezing rain pounded the polyester
and the muddy lanes, turning the camp into a squelching bog. A young
woman entered the tent. She looked to be about eighteen years old. Her
name was Rachel, and she told Jihan that she’d been enslaved by isis.
Jihan had been living in the camp for nearly a year, but she couldn’t
shake the memory of Ahmed, and in her grief and anger sought expiation.
She had offered her tent as temporary shelter for isis victims, where they could talk through their trauma before moving into a tent of their own.
Rachel
was accompanied by a girl named Raba, around three years old, whom she
introduced as a friend’s orphaned daughter. Raba said to Jihan, “How are
you, Auntie?,” and kissed her on the cheek. The child was dripping wet
and shivering. Jihan found some dry clothes and swaddled Raba, who
thanked her profusely. Jihan had never met a young child so stolid and
polite; Mahmoud was also charmed by what he called her “sweet tongue,”
and wondered where she could possibly have learned such graceful
manners. Raba fell asleep in Jihan’s lap. Jihan carried her to the
mattress on the floor, and, as she wrapped the child tight in a blanket,
she felt her heart surge.
During her stay with
Jihan and Mahmoud, Rachel gave contradictory stories of Raba’s origin.
What was clear, though, was that the child was attached to Rachel,
cuddling up next to her to sleep. After a few weeks, Rachel won her
release from Al-Hol, through the intervention of a church. But she
wasn’t permitted to take Raba, so she asked to leave her in Jihan’s
care, promising to fetch her later. Jihan and Mahmoud agreed.
At
first, Raba was inconsolable; once a week, Jihan arranged for her to
speak with Rachel on a friend’s cell phone. But as the months passed the
calls became less frequent, and finally Rachel ceased communicating
altogether. When Jihan showed Rachel’s picture to Raba and asked if she
missed her, Raba shook her head. “She stopped talking to me,” the girl
said.
Raba was keenly perceptive, and she was
eager to help Jihan and Mahmoud around the tent. Yet there was something
forlorn about her: she didn’t play in the ditches like the other kids;
in fact, she hardly even stepped outside. Jihan sensed that Raba needed
shielding, though she wasn’t sure from what. She now dreaded the thought
of getting a phone call from Rachel—or, worse, of someone showing up to
claim Raba.
One day, Raba asked, “Why don’t we make tannour bread anymore?” The wood-fired flatbread is a specialty of country homes with clay ovens. Jihan had never baked tannour,
and had no idea how it was made. “How do you not know? We used to make
this bread,” Raba said, and proceeded to give step-by-step instructions.
Once,
Jihan was in the tent when the earth shook. She emerged into the
daylight to see the belly of a jet swooping directly above her.
Suddenly, she heard Raba shouting, “Mama! Come back, Mama!” The word
must have jolted through Jihan; no one had ever called her that.
Inside
the tent, Raba was trembling. “The plane is here!” she shouted. Jihan
held her and told her not to be afraid. Raba, eyes pooling, said, “Don’t
you remember how the plane came?”
“It’s nothing,” Jihan said. “Come, let’s say hello to the pilot.”
Raba refused to budge. “Don’t you remember how the plane bombed us!” she demanded.
In
the course of many months, Jihan pieced together the story of Raba’s
past, which I subsequently confirmed and expanded on. Raba had lived in
the countryside in eastern Syria, and her father may have been
affiliated with isis. One day at dawn, Raba’s
mother went outside to perform ablutions and took her along. Her mother
must have heard coalition jets, because she hugged Raba protectively.
Bombs struck the house. When rescuers arrived, Raba was found
unconscious in her mother’s arms. Her mother was dead—an iron pipe in
her back—and so were Raba’s father and her siblings. Raba was rushed to
the hospital, and then, along with other orphaned children, shipped to
Al-Hol. In the camp, she was discovered by Rachel, who had known her
parents.
Jihan noticed the trace of a scar above
Raba’s forehead, and her jumpiness at sudden sounds. She took Raba to a
Ukrainian pediatrician—a woman who’d happened to be living in eastern
Syria when the caliphate emerged, and was then banished to Al-Hol when isis’s
empire collapsed. The doctor advised Jihan to tell Raba that her
memories were all a dream, or a nightmare, and that she was safe now. In
her tent, Jihan watched Raba exploring behind the curtain, fiddling
with the crockery, and sleeping in a tight ball on the floor cushion,
and knew that she was watching her own daughter.
Adoption,
however, was almost impossible. Jihan had no papers. Raba had no
papers. In fact, as far as the camp’s books were concerned, Raba likely
didn’t even exist. For a while, Jihan had placed hope in Hamid
al-Shummari, who worked his official contacts to try to register Raba as
Jihan’s daughter. But, with Hamid’s murder, that door had violently
slammed shut. Now Jihan began to realize that if she were somehow
released she would be forced to leave Raba behind. Jihan had lost a
husband, her parents, her brothers and sisters, her friends, her home,
even her freedom—she couldn’t lose this little girl. She could no longer
think of Al-Hol as a prison or a way station: it had to be her home.
Here, she would raise her daughter, teaching her to read and write. She
would watch Raba get married, and she would welcome grandchildren. Her
bones would grow old, and she would be buried somewhere beneath the
floodlights and the watchtowers.
If Jihan’s limbo
felt permanent, it mirrored the world around her. Many of her neighbors,
rafted together by war and dictatorship, and imprisoned for the sins of
their husbands and fathers, have nowhere to return to. Their homes have
been destroyed, or they have been disowned by family. Others elect to
survive on camp rations rather than brave the ravages outside. The camp
is in a region of eastern Syria controlled by Kurdish forces, who aren’t
recognized by any government. The territory’s four million or so people
are effectively stateless. Syria itself is merely lines on a map; as a
nation, it no longer exists. The country is carved into three zones—one
occupied by Russia and Iran, another by Turkey, the third by the United
States—and each territory has its guns pointed at the others. It’s
possible, and perhaps even comforting, for Western politicians to see
all this as the best of bad options, as responsible statecraft. For long
periods of time, the iniquities of the Middle East can appear frozen,
and, therefore, manageable. A tyrannical government, bankrolled by
foreign powers, stifles all political life; a theocracy seeks to
commandeer body and soul; an occupying power dispossesses a native
population, then subjects it to daily degradations. But at unpredictable
moments these injustices erupt into the open—and into our
consciousness—through great upheavals, or wanton acts of violence. We
then ask where the rage comes from, even though it has been simmering
under our noses all along.
This
past autumn, I brought clowns back to Al-Hol. Ali Batran was eager to
reprise his role, and had recruited two other performers. This time, I
prevailed upon Abu Hassan, the isis commander, to
tap into his network to hold off the religious police. I also had a
fence erected around the big top. Ahmed al-Shummari, the adult son of
Hamid, was there, helping supervise the children. Abu Hassan had brought
his daughters, who wore matching Minnie Mouse jackets. Standing apart
from the scrum, looking dignified in a sun hat and bracelets, was Raba. I
introduced myself. As I described what the show would be like, she
studied me with large, alert eyes. She was quiet but not shy; she told
me that her favorite animal was a rabbit, and that she had been born in
Homs.
Although it was blazingly hot, children
squeezed into the tent: girls in ponytails and flower dresses, boys in
tank tops and track pants. I spoke to an eight-year-old boy with long,
lustrous hair; he told me that he belonged to the Cubs of the
Caliphate—an isis youth group—and, with barely stifled ebullience, said that he’d never seen a clown.
With
the blast of a horn, a voice bellowed, “Are you ready?” The children
roared. Ali and his comrades burst through the curtain as Turkmen music
blared on the stereo. The children took turns waltzing with the clowns
and tumbling and tripping on Ali’s oversized shoes, provoking a riot of
laughter. Abu Hassan’s girls stepped to the center. In an open flap,
their father’s face appeared. “Don’t be shy,” he said, smiling. As drums
pounded, the clowns coaxed Raba to the center. She swayed her hips in a
tentative dance. The clowns waved gossamer scarves in the air, Ali’s
nose popped off, and I saw a smile on Raba’s face.
Ali
goose-stepped out of the tent, the children following as if he were the
Pied Piper. One of the clowns, a teen-age girl waddling about in a
penguin suit, produced a hula hoop, a device heretofore unknown in
Al-Hol. Many of the kids were desperate to give it a whirl, but Raba
wasn’t interested—she’d befriended Abu Hassan’s daughters. They drifted
from the throng, playing something like ring-around-the-rosy among
themselves. Then they sat in the shade. Raba showed off her bracelets
and asked about the girls’ tent. How many partitions did it contain? In
the gravel, she sketched her own tent, and said, proudly, “We have a
kitchen.”
One of Abu Hassan’s daughters told Raba
that she wanted to come over but didn’t know how to get there. Raba
stretched out her arm: “We live all the way over there.” She was
pointing past the tents, the guard towers, the barbed-wire fence, and
the gravel road separating the sections—a distance of a kilometre, and
the breadth of the known universe. “It’s really, really far,” Raba said.
“But you’ll like my home.” ♦
