Lions will fight on, says women of ‘caliphate’
The UK’S national security may be put at risk if my people are left at the mercy of Turkey’s Erdogan
The woman’s face was hidden behind a black veil but her voice was full of defiance and pride for the caliphate that she had left just hours before. “You’re the first infidel I’ve seen in four years,” Umm Hamza said as The Daily Telegraph approached.
She gestured back towards Baghuz, the village in eastern Syria that is now the last fragment of territory claimed by Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil). “The brothers are lions. They will fight on,” she said. “The Islamic State remains. We are weak now but we will come back again.”
The 21-year-old was one of thousands of bedraggled women who emerged from Baghuz in recent days. They waited in a huddled mass in a clearing to surrender to the Kurdish fighters of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).
Mothers clutched dirty blankets and tugged suitcases through the mud while trying not to lose track of their exhausted children. A woman lifted her black abaya to defecate in a field. There was shouting as families shoved past each other to get to the trucks that would take them north to the refugee camps.
These are among the final citizens of Isil, the last people to have lived in the jihadists’ failed experiment in empire.
The SDF now estimates that around 5,000 civilians and 1,500 fighters remain in Baghuz, more than originally thought but still a fraction of the eight million people who once lived under the jihadists’ black banner.
Even in their hour of humiliation and defeat, many of the women still burned with the fanaticism that powered Isil for the past five years. They offered no remorse for the so-called caliphate’s crimes and vowed that it would one day return.
That was the promise of Umm Mohammed, a 37-year-old from the nearby town of al-bukamal. Like most Isil women she identified herself by her Arabic nickname, meaning Mother of Mohammed.
Whatever her oldest son’s real name was he is dead now. He was killed defending al-bukamal, she said, while a second son was cut down in the town of Sousa. Her five remaining children were huddled around her feet, their eyes wide with fear and faces caked with dirt.
Was it worth losing two sons in battle and subjecting her other children to horrors of war? “We stayed in the Islamic State because we want heaven. And we buy heaven with our souls and our children’s souls,” she said. “God didn’t create us for this life, he created us for the next life.” In between dense paragraphs of religious dogma and venomous condemnations of Shia Muslims, Umm Mohammed offered glimpses of the situation inside Baghuz. She and her family had been living in a tent made of rags for two weeks. “Our tents were like palaces because they were in the Islamic State,” she sneered. She said there were shortages of food and poorer families were unable to pay the high prices. Isil fighters had distributed some food but it was not enough. Without phones or internet access they had little sense of the scale of Isil’s collapse. They knew only that Western warplanes were overhead all night and all day.
As she spoke, a female Kurdish fighter searched the folds of an Isil woman’s abaya. The jihadist’s wife stood patiently as the young woman in the colourful scarf checked her.
As far as the Kurds knew, any one of these women could be a suicide bomber. Isil has no qualms with using women or children in attacks and none of these people had been searched for explosive vests before they reached the SDF’S lines.
The frantic hours it took to load the Isil families onto the trucks passed without incident under the watchful eye of Kurdish fighters. A column of American special forces drove past and bearded commandos peered through the windows at people from Baghuz.
There were moments when the women’s certainty seemed to crack. One mother said that the Isil fighters had promised them the UN would be waiting to receive them once they came out of Baghuz. Instead they found only their Kurdish conquerors and waiting journalists.
But she insisted Isil had not misled her. “There is no betrayal in the Islamic State.” The woman said Isil had ordered them to go as part of a deal between the jihadists and the SDF. Some suggested that the SDF agreed to let them out in return for Isil releasing Kurdish prisoners. The SDF strongly denied there was a deal but said that they welcomed civilians coming out of Baghuz. “We are fighting a terror group. Either they surrender or they have to fight and die,” said Adnan Afrin, an SDF commander.
The women said that was the intention of the remaining Isil fighters, who were heavily armed and prepared to launch suicide bombers to defend Baghuz. “The brothers have everything and they are ready. Even
‘We stayed in the Islamic State because we want heaven. God did not create us for this life, he created us for the next life’
the women are carrying guns and are ready to be suicide bombers,” said one.
SDF commanders have been shocked at how many women and children have emerged from the tiny pocket of Isil-territory. They had originally expected there were only around 1,500 civilians inside but so far more than 5,000 have come out.
The large numbers of civilians have made it difficult for the SDF to call in airstrikes and will likely confound the predictions of a quick victory made by Donald Trump and others. Cmdr Afrin said it was impossible to predict how much long the operation would take.
While most of the women continued to proclaim their loyalty to Isil, a few began a familiar routine of claiming that they had nothing to do with the jihadists. Umm Mohammed had some advice for the women who said that. “Everyone here is from the Islamic State. Every one of us. Anyone who says they are not is a liar.”
The so-called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) is expected to be defeated within days by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) – an alliance of Kurdish, Arab and Assyrian militias – in their final holdout in Baghuz. By then, the evil organisation will be deprived of all its territory (which at one point comprised an area as large as Great Britain).
Having recently toured Europe’s capitals, I cannot help but feel that the importance of the SDF’S victory over Isil is not appreciated enough. The anti-isil military campaign has been a low-cost, high-return campaign for the US and Europe. For Syria’s Kurdish, Arab and Christian population, however, the cost has been grave: about 8,000 fighters in the multi-ethnic SDF have given their lives to defeat Isil. And we need continued support from our allies to prevent the Isil sleeper cells that are scattered across eastern Syria from launching renewed attacks on civilians.
But we face a more significant threat than Isil. Turkey, a member of Nato, with weapons provided and maintained mostly by European countries such as Britain and Germany, is essentially lobbying Russia, Iran, the US and Europe for the green light for a military operation to strangle the democratic institutions we have built in Isil’s wake.
In 2018, the Turkish military invaded the majority Kurdish Syrian city of Afrin, which is also my hometown. Afrin, which managed to avoid destruction during the Syrian conflict, is famous for its abundance of olive trees, but the crop is currently being confiscated by the Ankara regime and resold across Europe. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Afrin’s former residents, mostly Kurds, have been displaced and are living in tents in nearby Tal Rifat region. Their houses and land are being occupied by settlers vetted by the Turkish state.
The Turkish invasion of Afrin was carried out with Russian military cooperation and was publicly supported by some Western politicians.
Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, now wants to carry out similar ethnic-cleansing campaigns in other parts of eastern Syria. We are ready to defend ourselves against a Turkish attack. And this time, the US and European countries should take a firm stance against it.
President Erdogan says that we are a threat to Turkey, but he is unable to substantiate his claims. In reality, it is Turkey who is a threat to us and our economic, democratic, secular and multicultural way of life.
The West ignores this escalating crisis at their peril. Instability in the Kurdish areas of Syria will have very serious consequences for Britain and the rest of Europe. It will ultimately foment unrest in eastern Syria and create the perfect conditions for Isil to re-emerge. The region could again become a base for the planning of terrorist attacks in Europe (the 2016 Paris and Brussels terror attacks were coordinated by a jihadist based in Raqqa, according to Belgian and French intelligence services).
A Turkish assault on Kurdish areas would also prompt mass migration from a region that has been largely stable in the past few years, despite the fight against Isil. And if we are subject to vicious attacks from Turkey, our forces may not be able to keep under control the Isil fighters currently imprisoned in eastern Syria.
To prevent such chaos, the UK should make use of its good relations with Turkey to put political pressure on the government. London could also mediate a peaceful solution to the crisis between ourselves and Ankara. We also want the British Government to push for the UN to include Kurds in future Geneva peace talks pertaining to the future of Syria.
And surely Britain should be lending its support to one of the few communities in the Middle East that shares common moral and political values with the West. Our way of life champions democracy and gender equality. Women in our region have not only fought on the front line against Isil, but are also well represented in our political institutions and government bodies.
We need help from Britain. And we believe that, by helping us, Britain will be helping itself, too.
Ilham Ahmed is the Kurdish co-chair of the Syrian Democratic Council