Rana Sweis

Mideast Blog

The children of Islamic State

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A couple of questions had taken me to that cold austere corner of war with its concrete, mesh and bars. The broken man seated before me had been a child recruit of al-Qaeda in Iraq. Under Islamic State he had grown old, though it seemed somehow as if the shadow of a boy still loitered somewhere in the room.

“Did you ever, on any occasion before, during or after killing, have cause to regret or doubt your actions?” I wanted to ask him. “Did you ever have any suspicion that what you were doing might be wrong?”

If I knew the answer to those questions, if I knew whether at some point – when as a teenager he had cut the heads from five prisoners who were lying face down, side by side, shoulder to shoulder – he had felt a sense of doubt or wrongdoing or remorse or regret, then perhaps I could better understand what might happen to the children of the caliphate the day Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s edifice finally crumbles to dust.

Could they be somehow retrieved and rescued, or would they be for ever lost to the darkness of unquestioning, murderous intent?

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Rana Sweis Articles

Mideast Blog

A Tale of Two Syrian Cities

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DAMASCUS and ALEPPO, Syria — In the upscale Damascene neighborhood of Mezze, Fadl al-Muhammad greeted customers enthusiastically. It was Nov. 7, the opening day of Yummy Falafel, his chic new restaurant, and glossy pictures of colorful spices and ripe carrots pulled from the earth covered the green walls. “Regardless of what you hear in the media, life has to continue,” the 43-year old management consultant said. “By opening this restaurant and two others, I’m trying to show that the crisis isn’t affecting us. That we are investing in our country.” 

At the Tche Tche café just 200 miles north in Aleppo, work was far from Ali Shwahni’s thoughts. He and his friends were smoking water pipes in a gray, cloud-filled room with three television monitors screening a British soccer game no one was watching. Rebels seized his family-owned textile factory, which he has not seen in almost three years, leaving him unemployed. “Our family has suffered, just like everyone else’s,” the 30-year-old said.

Regional rivalry among Syria’s four major cities has historically plagued the country, inhibiting the growth of a sense of national identity in the country. But it is the competition between Damascus and Aleppo, both of which have staked a claim to be Syria’s leading city, that has been most contentious. Though Damascus is the capital, Aleppo was Syria’s largest city before the war and its commercial hub. Before the Baath Party ended parliamentary democracy in 1963, each city had its own political party; rivalries between the Muslim Brotherhood’s Aleppo and Damascus factions, meanwhile, sparked an internecine conflict in the 1960s and 1970s that decimated the organization. According to a Catholic archbishop cited in U.S. diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks, Damascus’s Sunnis even refused to accept the country’s most senior Muslim cleric because he hails from Aleppo.

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