The caliphate is gone, but damage runs deep in Raqqa

Updated

The injustices and trauma of living under the Islamic State caliphate will never go away. The city's young live with the damage every day.

Abood sits on the floor of his devastated family home. The windows are missing, the walls are falling and his family is silently bearing the hardship of the Raqqa winter.

The teenager is holding a cigarette in one hand, taking a break from wearing the plastic mannequin's hand he uses to mask his stump on the other arm — a souvenir from the brutal reality of life under Islamic State rule in Syria.

His right hand was cut off in 2016 when he was only 15 after he was accused of theft.

After the fall of the caliphate, Abood found the fake hand lying in the rubble of a shopping street and moulded it with a blow torch to fit to his wrist.

Suitable prosthetics aren't available in the city, so it's the best he can manage.

"I got this fake hand because I did not want to scare my children. I was hiding [the stump] in the pocket of my pullover."

It's more than a year since Raqqa's liberation by the American-backed Syrian Democratic Forces.

The city is still unrecognisable from the thriving centre it once was; its residents, too, struggle to rebuild their lives with the injuries and trauma sustained during the war.

Through the caliphate's four-year reign of terror, thousands of people suffered from imprisonment or torture.

Hand mutilation and amputation were justified by their own vision of the Koran.

Their self-made rule of justice, however, targeted innocent civilians the most. Accused of irrelevant charges or without even being found guilty, they suffered irreversible mistreatments.

'I was told to confess'

Cases like Abood's are common in Raqqa and in all territories that were occupied by the Islamic State.

Abood had been arrested and tortured after his neighbour accused him of stealing motorcycles. The prison was inside a civilian house.

Whenever they took someone out and executed him, they brought in a big-screen TV and prisoners were forced to watch.

"I was told to confess the untrue to the judge and everything would have been solved. But things got worse," Abood says.

Abood started to dig a hole in a hidden wall to escape but he was discovered and his torture intensified.

After 45 days, the worst came: "They entered the room ordering all of us to pack our stuff. When I left the room, one of them asked me, smiling, if I knew where I was going. I replied 'home' but he told me 'no, you're not going home'."

The prisoners jumped in a minivan and were driven around the city. Every time the bus stopped, it was someone's turn to be mutilated.

"At first they injected something into people to make them unconscious, then they gathered the public around ... everything was planned, as they also had a professional film maker," he says.

"When my turn came, they injected me twice, once in my hand and the second time in the neck. I was shouting. My body became completely unconscious but not my mind. We were on Sebt Ad-Daula Street.

"Around me there was a big crowd and a guy with a microphone was reading the charge. They tied my hand and with a pen they made a sign exactly on the wrist, where the two bones are. Then they took a knife and laid it on the point before pushing it down with an iron tube into the flesh.

"I fainted and I woke up at the hospital. When I pass that street, I feel frustrated and I want revenge".

Since then, Abood has been in unbearable pain and is no longer independent, relying on his mother for help with eating, dressing and washing.

"My life changed but I always hope to find a prosthesis that could change that."

'There were beheaded heads'

For Ahmed, 30, who is now a media officer with the Syrian Democratic Forces, there are reminders throughout the city of the fall of the caliphate.

"My wife was screaming when we first entered this square. Around us there were tens of beheaded heads," he says.

He's passing 9th Square, the central space that became famous as one of the focal points of Islamic State's brutality in the former caliphate's capital. The square was regularly lined with heads hung from fences.

Today in the centre of Raqqa, most of the buildings are destroyed. The streets are muddy and full of rubble. Even though traffic has started to circulate, the markets are open and some are trying to clean up, the majority of the population do not dare yet to come back. Services like electricity and water are poor, if not non-existent.

"I do not recognise my Raqqa anymore. It was the capital of happiness," Ahmed says.

Little help is coming to provide social and health care to the exhausted population and insecurity due to terror attacks is skyrocketing.

The disabilities office of the city hall led by Amira, 29, tries to provide help to disabled and mutilated people from the war.

"We have had so far more than a thousand cases of war-related mutilations. Of these, we could say 250 are hand amputations due to Daesh [Islamic State]. We can count more than 2000 in the whole area, of which 35 per cent are children and 30 per cent women," she says. "However, the special way that they used to cut off hands, makes it difficult to find a prosthesis that fits the wrist".

Bombs don't discriminate

The liberation war lasted five months and many residents, including Abood, embraced the Syrian Democratic Forces, a coalition of Kurdish, Arab and Assyrian militias.

Nevertheless, not everybody revolted against the caliphate. As a poor city, Raqqa was the perfect target for Islamic State.

"People could work under the Caliphate and this made it easy for them to control. Moreover there was food shortage since they controlled the supplies," says Ahmed, before entering the poorest neighbourhood of the city: Ad-Daryieh.

Coalition airstrikes didn't differentiate between supporters or opponents of the caliphate.

Ten-year old Aziza lost one leg and almost the other when a mortar fell in her family's kitchen, killing her mother and three sisters. Aziza survived despite being thrown against a wall and getting injured by shrapnel.

"I saw mum flying from the kitchen and landing here," says her little brother. "We were preparing food for the evening, it was Ramadan".

Conditions for Aziza's family are desperate. Her father is now jobless and survives with the help of the community. "At least under the Islamic State we had food and a job. Now the Kurds want you to take the weapons and fight along [with] them and they do not support us. They keep coming here signing papers, but no one has seen any help so far."

Aziza, perched in a wheelchair, is still processing the trauma of what happened to her.

"I would like to become a teacher. But my dream is to have a new leg for walking, because I feel sad when I see other girls walking".

On the walls of the house, the signs of the two mortars that shelled their home are still visible. But they came from the Kurdish side. "I blame everyone. The Kurds took my wife, my daughters. The others did not let us go outside while those bombed us. They destroyed everything. It was not necessary," her father says.

Their case shows how liberated areas without support could become a fertile ground for extremism and a return to terrorism. Raqqa is still a city on its knees.

Topics: unrest-conflict-and-war, world-politics, syrian-arab-republic

First posted