The fate of Raqqa during the caliphate

 Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, the city of The Arabian Nights. In 2013 Raqqa thought freedom was on hand with the arrival of the anti-Assad rebels. Now it succumbs in silence to jihadi rule.

What is Syria like under the Caliphate? The fate of Raqqa, the capital city of Islamic State (IS), bombed by French warplanes after the Paris attacks of 13 November, tells a tale emblematic of the Syrian war. A conflict involving first the fear of repression by state-sponsored shabiha militias from Bashar al-Assad’s regime, then the hopes raised by the rebels’ advance, and finally the dark reign of terror imposed by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s jihadis. But the fate of Raqqa, Syria and Iraq, also illustrates how complicated it will be to eradicate the jihadists, provided that we ever reach an international agreement to do so.

On 6 March 2013, Raqqa was filled with people celebrating, waving flags to welcome the entry of the victorious rebels. This was a harsh and humiliating defeat for Assad and his forces. This city of 200,000 inhabitants, 160km east of Aleppo, was the first regional capital to fall into rebel hands, thanks to an offensive that saw the Free Syrian Army (FSA) fighting side by side with the jihadist and Salafist groups of Jabhat al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham.

The joy soon turned to fear when the FSA brigades were ousted by the Salafist groups, believers in a radical and fundamentalist version of Islam. The Jabhat al-Nusra Salafis, who are affiliated with al-Qaeda, thought they had the situation under control. They had booted out the FSA (which is also supported by Turkey), including a range of affiliates, from deserters from Assad’s army to secular forces and Islamists.

At international conferences, the FSA was usually portrayed as the armed wing of the moderate opposition, at the time well entrenched along the border with Turkey. It controlled a few border crossings but was already losing followers to more extremist groups. Actually, the moderates have never had control of what was happening on the ground, and their Syrian ‘leaders’, whose five-star hotel bills were paid by the West, even less so.

The Salafi conquest of Raqqa turned out to be an illusion. With their bandoliers slung over their shoulders, they camped out in barracks abandoned by the regime’s army. They had raised their black monotheist al- Qaeda flags over the ancient ruins of Baghdad Gate as well as Qal’at Ja’bar castle, built on the left bank of the Euphrates during the Seljuk Turk dynasty.

Raqqa has a long history, full of significance for the Muslim world, despite what its anonymous suburbs would have one believe. In the seventh century, this Greek, Roman and Byzantine city was conquered by the second Muslim caliph, Umar bin al- Khattab, along with the rest of Syria. But the most important event in the eyes of Islamists came during the Abbasid dynasty, when for 13 years, from 796 to 809AD, Raqqa became the de facto capital of caliph Harun al-Rashid. He was the inspiration behind The Arabian Nights and used Raqqa as the launch pad for his military offensive against the Christian Byzantine enemy.

Even today the city still holds a strategic position, able to block Assad’s troops on the way to Aleppo. Thus, its location appeals to other groups too, apart from the Salafis, who imposed their cruel medieval version of Islamic law on the local population, including public beheadings.

Islamic State had already begun its advance and in a short time, it drove out the Jabhat al Nusra Salafis, consolidating its hold over the city with force and intimidation, attacking, capturing and executing both opposition fighters and peaceful demonstrators. Videos from that time show beheadings and militiamen firing at the crowd protesting against the jihadists.

This was the situation in Raqqa when Father Paolo Dall’Oglio, an Italian Jesuit priest, arrived in July 2013. According to local activists he went to IS’ headquarters to try to meet the group’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. He wanted to ask for a truce with the Kurdish militias and obtain information on the fate of a few kidnapped priests and journalists. And Raqqa was the last place Father Dall’Oglio was sighted, his whereabouts are still unknown.

By January 2014, IS had completely overrun Raqqa while transforming Syria and Iraq into a single battlefield. A few months later, it conquered the Iraqi city of Mosul, where al-Baghdadi proclaimed the caliphate, before taking over the Syrian oilfields at Deir Ezzor. The head of the caliphate, an Iraqi from Samarra and former acolyte of al-Qaeda’s Abu Musabal-Zarqawi, had managed to take advantage of the chaos in Syria and Iraq by combining his jihadist forces with those led by former officers and followers of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s Baath party. This advance had exploited the causes behind the revolt of Iraq’s Sunni minority against the Shiites and those of the Syrian Sunni majority against Assad’s Alawite regime.

Living in Raqqa these days is like being locked up in a big prison. This is the impression of the inhabitants in the northern Syrian town, once among the most liberal in the country. Since IS has taken over, the locals have been pitched headlong into a kind of medieval obscurantism. Al-Baghdadi turned Raqqa into his capital, governed with the iron fist of Sharia law, with its whippings and sermons doled out by the Hisba, the religious police, but also the distribution of free food and drink to the population. It is a rudimental welfare state, which, along with the looting, extortion and kidnapping, has imposed the zakat, a religious tax of 10% on all incomes. It was from this stronghold that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is thought to have ordered the Paris attacks, plunging the Eiffel Tower into darkness. And as a consequence, soon after, the lights were extinguished in this other capital which for centuries, since the time of Harun al-Rashid, the true caliph of The Arabian Nights, had been banished to the footnotes of history.