The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
Dispatches from Raqqa
The capital of the Islamic caliphate, Raqqa, is a place of violence, terror and unimaginable bravery. A new documentary reveals the extent of Isil’s brutality and the heroism of those who fight it. By Martin Fletcher
The citizens of Isil’s chosen capital have suffered unspeakable horrors and years of bombardment. Now, a brave group is fighting back using social media to combat guns and swords. By Martin Fletcher
Ayoung Syrian man named Hamoud stares at his laptop. A video on the screen shows an illuminated night-t ime scene. Three men wearing orange jumpsuits and blindfolds are bound with ropes to the tall, smooth trunks of trees. At first there is just the sound of cicadas, then three gunmen wearing military fatigues and black balaclavas step out of the darkness. They rip off the blindfolds, raise their pistols, aim directly at the prisoners’ foreheads and fire. The camera homes in on one of the victims – a bearded man, his head slumped for ward, blood soaking his jumpsuit.
Hamoud has watched this video many times before. He says nothing as he struggles to control his emotions. The bearded man was his fat her. Islamic State (Isil) killed him because Hamoud belongs to a group of astoundingly courageous citizen journalists who have been exposing the atrocities that Isil has inflicted on their home city, Raqqa, since declaring it the capital of its self-styled caliphate in 2014.
Finally Hamoud speaks. ‘In the end we are Muslim, and we believe he has gone to heaven,’ he tells the unseen cameraman who has been filming him watching the video.
The exchange features in City of Ghosts, a harrowing new documentar y about the g roup Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently (RBSS), which will be released in cinemas in Britain next Friday. But it tells only part of Hamoud’s grim story.
The 23-year-old had fled from Raqqa to neighbouring Turkey after Isil discovered he belonged to RBSS. Isil seized his father instead, and threatened to kill him if Hamoud did not name three RBSS activists in Raqqa. Hamoud refused to do so, knowing that the activists would be executed if he did.
He was compelled, in effect, to condemn his own father to death.
Raqqa, a dusty city of about 300,000 people on the banks of the Euphrates in north-eastern Syria, was quick to join the uprising against President al-assad’s regime that began in March 2011, the year of the Arab Spring. It was one of the first cities in Syria to liberate itself, and a clip in t he documentar y shows the triumphant rebels toppling a statue of Assad’s father, Hafez al-assad, in its main square. Thereafter Raqqa briefly became a refuge for those fleeing the fighting elsewhere in Syria, earning itself the nickname ‘the hotel of the revolution’.
But Raqqa’s euphoria was short-lived. Early in 2014 heavily armed Isil fighters arrived in their pickups, black flags flying, and seized control of the city from the Free Syrian Army.
The documentar y shows footage of fighters armed with AK-47S and rocket-propelled grenades addressing Raqqa’s citizens in Freedom Square. ‘Be with those who follow the religion of Allah,’ an Isil leader exhorts them. ‘Join us before we force it on you. Be with the believers before God’s punishments are done unto you.’
The nature of the new regime soon became clear. As in some dystopian novel, the city was sealed off from the outside world. Hundreds of men were arrested. Women were forced to dress head to toe in black. Daughters were compelled to marry the foreign fighters that poured into Raqqa from North America, Europe and elsewhere. Children were sent to camps where they were brainwashed, indoctrinated and turned into child soldiers – one Isil propaganda video shows an infant boy pretending to cut his teddy bear’s throat.
Schools and hospitals closed. Power was cut off for days at a time. Smoking and drinking were banned, and the streets were patrolled by a female morality police called the al-khansa Brigade. Arrests and executions became commonplace as all dissent was cr ushed. More g rainy footage in City of Ghosts
Women were forced to dress head to toe in black and children were sent to camps to be turned into child soldiers – one Isil video shows an infant boy pretending to cut his teddy’s throat
shows bodies lying in a square with their severed heads stuck on the spikes of railings.
‘This group was unlike anything the world had seen before. They painted our city black and shrouded it in darkness,’ said Aziz al-hamza, 25, a tall, softly spoken biolog y student. ‘We couldn’t sit by and watch Raqqa being silently slaughtered.’
Hamza formed RBSS with four friends who had been protesting against the Assad regime, and its membership quickly grew to 17. The group painted slogans proclaiming ‘Down with ISIS’ on walls at night. It covertly distributed anti-isil flyers. Above all, it started posting photos, video clips and reports of Isil barbarities on Facebook and other social media. It engaged the jihadists on the digital battlefield.
‘We had to turn the spotlight on our city and show people the truth about Isil and what was going on in Raqqa,’ Hamza said. ‘These were the first screams of RBSS.’
Many of the images it posted are used in the documentary, and they are not for the squeamish. They show executions, crucifixions, floggings, stonings, a bound man being thrown from a rooftop, someone’s hand being chopped off. There are clips showing long lines of women and children outside soup kitchens as food runs out.
Matthew Heineman, who directed City of Ghosts, decided to make the documentary after reading about RBSS in The New
Yorker magazine in 2015. He met two or three of its ex iled members when they were visiting Washington DC, made his pitch, and a few days later they agreed.
‘I was disturbed and fascinated by what was happening in the region, so when I finally found these characters who were rising up and fighting against [Isil] not with guns and weapons and bombs but with words and pens and cameras, I was immediately drawn into it,’ he told me.
It was important to show the reality of life under Isil, Heineman continued, but ‘at the same time we don’t want people to
‘Isil is an idea. It can’t be defeated by shelling and airstrikes… We are sure that our words are stronger than their weapons and their arms. Either we will win, or they will kill all of us’
r un out of the movie theatre because it’s too g r uesome. So ever y single frame, ever y single second, ever y single scene, every single act was argued about and debated and we tried to find a balance between these two things.’
RBSS’S posts were picked up by t he internat ional news media, whose own journalists couldn’t go anywhere near Isil territory. They gave the lie to Islamic State’s slick, Hollywoodstyle propaganda videos, which glamorise violence, urge Muslims from across the world to enlist, and portray the caliphate – in the words of its leader, Abu Bakr al-baghdadi – as ‘a paradise where the rivers flow in the gardens of Eden’.
By cont rast, the RBSS images were blur red and g rainy, snatched from speeding motorbikes or camera phones hidden inside clothing. But they were all the more powerful because they conveyed such a tangible sense of menace and danger.
Enraged, Isil set up checkpoints t hroughout t he city. It searched people and houses for hidden cameras. It banned satellite dishes, closed down internet cafés and placed bounties on the heads of RBSS members. ‘Oh God, freeze the blood in their veins and stop their breaths,’ a self-styled Isil imam tells worshippers in a mosque in the film.
Then, in May 2014, Isil a r rested a founder member, alMoutaz Bellah Ibrahim, at a roadblock and found information about RBSS on his laptop. He was tortured and executed, and several of the group’s members fled to Turkey or Germany to escape the same fate. One, Ahmed Mohamed al-mousa, was shot by gunmen in the city of Idlib as he was about to leave Syria.
Three years on, RBSS has 27 members: 17 men and women, all but one aged between 18 and 28, who work clandestinely inside Raqqa; and 10 outside. For security reasons the internal group do not know each other’s identities. Hamza will not say how they gather and transmit their images and reports – only that they are encrypted and sent in short bursts to thwart Isil’s roa ming detec t ion va ns. Once d i spatched, t he f i le s a re instantly deleted from their devices.
‘Isil either kidnaps, kills or disappears anyone it declares a media act iv ist,’ a masked RBSS act iv ist, ident if ied only as ‘Raqqa 12’, says in the documentar y. ‘They track our ever y move, every photo and every video we post. They are always tr ying to capture us. I certainly accept the idea that I can be murdered,’ he adds, ‘but the most important thing for me is that the campaign does not end. This is our message to Isil: “If you think killing three or four campaign members will stop the campaign, it will not.”’
The external group edits out any faces or places or details that could betray the sender’s identity, and delays publishing for added protect ion. But t he ex iled act iv ist s a re fa r f rom secure themselves, not even in Turkey or Germany.
In October 2015 an Isil death squad killed two of them, Ibrahim Abdul Qader and Fares Hamadi, in the Turkish town of Urfa. It cut t heir t hroats in Hamadi’s apar t ment, and t hen beheaded them. ‘ You will not be safe from the knife of the Islamic State. Our hand will reach you wherever you are,’ it said in a video of the corpses that it posted online.
Two months later, Isil g unmen killed RBSS’S mentor Naji Jer f, out side a re s t au r a nt i n t he Turk i sh border cit y of
Gaziantep a day before he was due to fly to France with his family to seek asylum. Jerf was a journalist who had instructed the activists in digital and personal security, and whom they affectionately called ‘The Uncle’.
‘Listen, you jour nalists fighting Islam and its state with your tong ues and your pens,’ Isil warned in another propaganda video. ‘Stop fighting us or you will meet the fate of those slaughtered silently by the soliders of the caliphate. And don’t think your presence in Europe will protect you. A sharp knife or a bullet in the head will be your fate.’
In other chilling messages on social media, Isil posted the names and pictures of RBSS members and, in one instance, a photograph of the hallway of an apartment block in Turkey where an activist lived. ‘I liked the entrance to your home. I look forward to seeing you next time,’ the text read.
Heineman – who risked his life exposing Mexican dr ug gangs in his previous film, Cartel Land – told me he was a little nervous even being in the activists’ company, so ‘omnipresent’ did Isil feel. ‘They’re incredibly courageous people who have been through more than any of us could ever know,’ he said.
Hamza still receives regular death threats. Isil publishes his picture on its websites and advertises the fact that he is living in Berlin. ‘They say, “We’re going to kill you. We’re going to behead you. Our lone wolves will find you and cut your head off,”’ he told me in a telephone inter v iew f rom Los Angeles, where he was promoting City of Ghosts. Mindful of the much greater dangers faced by his RBSS colleag ues still in Raqqa, he has refused police protection, but removed his name from the mailbox outside his flat. ‘I try not to give my address to anyone,’ he said. ‘I try to act normally and not draw attention to myself.’
As a student, Hamza liked to party and hang around in coffee shops. During the uprising he was imprisoned three times and tortured by the Assad regime. He fled to Germany in 2014 when Isil f ighters came looking for him at his home. His brot her, Moussa, escaped from Raqqa as well, but drowned while trying to reach Europe from Turkey – Hamza still sends him Facebook messages to say how much he misses him. Many of Hamza’s other friends and relatives in Raqqa have been killed.
The strain shows. Hamza smokes heavily, his hands tremble, and one of the most moving scenes in the documentary shows him experiencing something not far short of a breakdown in his flat one evening. He has no regrets, however. ‘We punctured a hole in the darkness,’ he says in the documentary. ‘It is sad to lose friends and colleagues but I can say it’s worth it,’ he told me. ‘They can’t stop us doing our work. We were able to shake Isil, t he most dangerous organisat ion in t he world. We drew the attention of the international media and international community. I believe we stopped many foreign people from going to join Isil.’
And so they have, but in one sense they have been too successful. Increasingly the outside world has come to see the Syrian conflict as a war between the Assad regime and Isil – especially since Isil began exporting its terror to Europe. The decent, brave Syrians who are caught in the middle, the original revolutionaries who were fighting for their basic human rights, feel betrayed and forgotten by the West, Hamza says. Indeed, those that have fled are now viewed with suspicion in Western countries, and President Trump – who appears to regard all Muslims as potential terrorists – has attempted to ban them from the US altogether.
One of the most concerning scenes in the documentary shows a demonstration against immig ra nt s in Berlin, wit h spea kers denouncing Muslim refugees like Hamza and his colleagues as pigs and demanding their deportation. ‘These g uys have been t hrough unspeakable hor rors,’ Heineman said. ‘For them to have to experience that antagonism on top of all they have been through, when they are actually allies in this fight against Isil and extremism, was almost Shakespearean… It was preposterous.’
Heineman hopes that City of Ghosts will help to change such misconceptions. ‘This issue of Isil and Syria feels like another world to people [in the West],’ he says. ‘It feels tragic and sad, and they get up in arms when there are headlines or photos or stats about how many people have died in Aleppo or how many civilians are currently being killed in Raqqa, but I don’t think they truly feel it. It comes and goes. They see this and then they move on and have their Cheerios. So my goal in making a f ilm about t his is rea lly to make you ca re. It’s to g ive you a strong sense of empathy for what’s happening there, and a stronger understanding on a human level.’
Hamza, likewise, hopes the documentary will show millions of people in the West that ‘Raqqa is not only Isil, that there are civilians living there and a resistance movement and normal people who are forced to be there and it’s not their choice.’
Not a lot remains of Raqqa after years of relentless bombardment by regime and Russian warplanes. What has survived is now being bombed and shelled by the Us-backed Arab and Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which have been at tempt ing to capture t he cit y since June. RBSS has been reporting on their attacks too. It accuses Isil of using civilians as human shields, and the SDF of using white phosphor us munitions, which are banned under international humanitarian law. Hamza believes the SDF have killed even more civilians than Isil.
At some point, possibly quite soon, Isil will be ejected from Raqqa. But Hamza will not rejoice when that happens because his city will be in ruins, and Isil will simply go elsewhere. ‘Isil is an idea. It can’t be defeated by shelling and airstrikes,’ he says. Bombing simply reinforces Isil’s claim that the West is out to kill Muslims, he argues.
Hamza believes Isil can only be truly beaten by exposing its depravity and discrediting its ideolog y in the way that RBSS has done. As he says in City of Ghosts: ‘We are sure that our words are stronger than their weapons and their arms. Either we will win, or they will kill all of us.’ City of Ghosts is in cinemas on 21 July