Souad Nawfal remembers when the anti-Assad protests gained traction in Raqqa. It was March 15, 2012, shortly after the death of Ali Babinsky, the first resident of the eastern province of Syria to be killed by regime forces. He was 17 years old. "We buried him and then when we had a funeral and protest on his behalf, they fired on us and killed sixteen of our people."
She also remembers when she started protesting the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), the al-Qaeda franchise in Syria - albeit the one unsanctioned by Ayman al-Zawahiri - which today rules Raqqa. "I started demonstrating because they took Father Paolo," she said, referring to the Italian Jesuit priest who for decades ran a parish north of Damascus and supported the Syrian revolution from its inception. After joining protests in Raqqa in late July, he was kidnapped by the Islamic State and has not been heard from since. "Paolo was my guest," Nawfal, a short, 40-year-old, hijab-wearing former schoolteacher told me during an hour-long interview on Skype. "He used to come to break the fast at Ramadan in my house. He was coming to speak out against ISIS. He wanted to stop the killings and secrecy, all the stuff the regime does. He went in to speak to ISIS but he never came out."
Nawfal has recently become a hero to Syrian activists, who loathe both Bashar al-Assad and al-Qaeda, as well as a minor internet celebrity for a four-minute video she made in which she lambasts the latter for their draconian rule and religious obscurantism. The video is titled "The Woman in Pants" in reference to her refusal to accommodate the Islamic State's dress code for women. Nawfal said that she's spent the last two months protesting the new ideologues of her province, whom she sees as not only tarnishes of Islam, but also as the mirror-image of the very totalitarians she and her fellow activists wanted to be rid of in the first place. "They treat people horribly. They're exactly like Assad's regime. They scare people into submission."
How?
"They grab people off the street and imprison them and no one can ask where they are or what happened to them. During Ramadan, someone wasn't fasting - he was eating freely in the street - and they arrested this man and locked him up until Eid. They took a journalist, Ziad al-Homsi, three days ago. They have taken a lot of the revolutionaries." Prisons, she said, are many and scattered throughout the province, and the Islamic State headquarters has its own detention facility.
Much like the mukhabarat during the early days of the protest movement, the Islamic State has also banned civilians from taking photographs or making any recordings of provocative behavior in Raqqa. "ISIS would beat people in the street with leather. If anyone was going around taking ‘illegal' pictures of this with a camera, they'd be taken into custody. In the month and a half I was protesting in front of the headquarters, no one would take my picture because they were scared."
The jihadi movement has succeeded, Nawfal believes, by preying upon the poverty, illiteracy, and wartime exigencies of this province to curry favor with the population. An especially effective tactic has been the brainwashing of Raqqa's children. "People that are poor and uneducated and not paying attention to what their kids are doing, their 10 year-olds will go out and then ISIS will promise the family food and money. They elevate these kids and call them ‘sheikhs' and give them weapons and power, turn them into child-soldiers. But these are 10-year-old boys who have never studied theology and now they're sheikhs! I am worried that this is really ruining the idea of what Muslims are and what Islam is."
