Syria 1st-Hand: Life in Islamist-Controlled Raqqa (Abouzeid)
Sunday, March 24, 2013 at 6:45Mass demonstration in Raqqa last Friday
Rania Abouzeid writes for Time magazine:
Raqqa City was once dubbed the “hotel of the revolution” because it became home to hundreds of thousands of people displaced from fighting elsewhere who sought refuge in a place considered firmly in the grip of Syrian President Bashar Assad. Earlier this month, however, the city in north central Syria, which was late to the anti-government revolt, became known for something else: It is the first and only provincial capital that Assad’s regime has completely lost — with the rebels taking control of it within the span of a week.
The regime will likely lose the entire province within days. There are only three remaining regime outposts in this vast eastern tribal area that extends all the way to the Turkish border: there’s Division 17 a few kilometers outside the city; the military airport at Tabqa about 40-to-50 kilometers away, and Brigade 93 in Ain Issa, some 70 kilometers away. All three positions are under heavy rebel attack and government counter-attack.
But here in Raqqa city, some 100 kilometers from the Turkish border crossing of Tal Abyad, the scars of war are faint. Warplanes still rumble in the air, mainly to aid the men besieged in Division 17, but, despite reports from earlier in the month, airstrikes and artillery shelling in the city are now rare.
The dusty streets are swept clean, unlike so many other areas in Syria where the state’s power has collapsed along with its services, and festering piles of fly-ridden garbage crowd the streets. The power outages are brief in most parts of the city although there have been days-long blackouts in areas around some damaged government buildings. The mobile phone service ceased a few days ago but the landlines still work.
There is fresh fruit and meat in the markets (albeit at inflated prices), and most of the stores along the main thoroughfare of Tal Abyad street are open, selling everything from carpets and women’s clothing to hardware and leather shoes. There are, however, long lines of people outside the bakeries, which only operate at night because Assad’s warplanes generally don’t fly in the dark. (In other parts of Syria, people waiting outside bakeries during the day have been the victims of air strikes.)
Perhaps what is most striking is that only a handful of the sand-colored flat-roofed three and four story buildings in this city have been damaged by fighting --- or its aftermath. Even some of Bashar Assad’s portraits remain in place. There’s one on the outer facade of the office of the Agricultural Worker’s Union, another on the civil engineering faculty as well as a two-starred Syrian regime flag flitting above the three-story women’s hospital. (The secularist rebels have a three-starred flag; the Islamist have variations of a black banner with Koranic script.)
But here in Raqqa city, some 100 kilometers from the Turkish border crossing of Tal Abyad, the scars of war are faint. Warplanes still rumble in the air, mainly to aid the men besieged in Division 17, but, despite reports from earlier in the month, airstrikes and artillery shelling in the city are now rare.
The dusty streets are swept clean, unlike so many other areas in Syria where the state’s power has collapsed along with its services, and festering piles of fly-ridden garbage crowd the streets. The power outages are brief in most parts of the city although there have been days-long blackouts in areas around some damaged government buildings. The mobile phone service ceased a few days ago but the landlines still work. There is fresh fruit and meat in the markets (albeit at inflated prices), and most of the stores along the main thoroughfare of Tal Abyad street are open, selling everything from carpets and women’s clothing to hardware and leather shoes. There are, however, long lines of people outside the bakeries, which only operate at night because Assad’s warplanes generally don’t fly in the dark. (In other parts of Syria, people waiting outside bakeries during the day have been the victims of air strikes.)
Perhaps what is most striking is that only a handful of the sand-colored flat-roofed three and four story buildings in this city have been damaged by fighting–or its aftermath. Even some of Bashar Assad’s portraits remain in place. There’s one on the outer facade of the office of the Agricultural Worker’s Union, another on the civil engineering faculty as well as a two-starred Syrian regime flag flitting above the three-story women’s hospital. (The secularist rebels have a three-starred flag; the Islamist have variations of a black banner with Koranic script.)
So far, the city has avoided the disorder of a post-regime security vacuum. Very few homes were looted. The banks and the money in them have been secured, while government and security offices were not ransacked, and the paperwork within them not burned. Instead the files have been collected and are being studied. The city’s two churches in this majority Sunni Muslim area are untouched and protected, although the townsfolk speak of Alawites being killed just for being Assad’s co-religionists.
So why and how did this happen in Raqqa? Put simply, it’s because the regime had diluted its forces here, deploying them to other parts of the country, and because the forces aligned against Assad were mainly Islamists, largely outside the broad umbrella of the more secular, loosely organized, and in some cases poorly disciplined Free Syrian Army (FSA).
The offensive was spearheaded by Jabhat al-Nusra (which the U.S considers a terrorist group with ties to al-Qaeda), the Salafist Ahrar al-Sham brigade and Jabhat al-Wahda al-Tahrir al-Islamiya (a grouping of some two dozen battalions)–all non-FSA groups who prefer the term Mujahedin (holy warriors) to revolutionaries, the label many FSA use to describe themselves.
A special unit of Ahrar al-Sham called Liwa Omana al Raqqa (or the Brigade of Security for Raqqa) was tasked with securing government installations after they fell, protecting public and private property and maintaining services to the city. The unit was specifically formed with this aim, according to its commander, Abu Tayf, a history graduate who used to work in real estate. “We had sleeper cells inside the city for a long time. When we entered the city, they rose and implemented the plan,” he says. “The project was devised a long time ago.”
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