The Syrians and the Russians did not hesitate to bomb civilian targets, but the Americans were more discriminating. Everyone agreed they were bombing less these days. No one knew why, but everyone had an opinion, especially the foreign fighters, who boasted that decadent, infidel America was losing the stomach for the fight. None suspected that the reason for the lull in American air activity was living among them, in a room with a single window looking onto al-Rasheed Park, with blankets that smelled of camel and goat.
Health care in Syria had been deplorable even before the uprising, and now, in the chaos of civil war, it was almost nonexistent. Raqqa’s National Hospital was a ruin, emptied of medicine and supplies, filled with wounded ISIS fighters. The rest of the city’s unfortunate residents received care, such as it was, from small clinics scattered amid the neighborhoods. Natalie happened upon one while searching for bread on her second day in Raqqa, and found it filled with civilian casualties from a Russian air strike, many dead, several others soon to be. There were no physicians present, only ambulance drivers and ISIS “nurses” who had been given only rudimentary training. Natalie announced that she was a doctor and immediately began treating the wounded with whatever supplies she could find. She did so while still clad in her clumsy, unsterilized abaya because a snarling husbah threatened to beat her if she removed it. That night, when she finally returned to the apartment, she washed the blood from the abaya in water from the Euphrates. In Raqqa, time had receded.
They did not wear their abayas in the apartment, only their hijabs. Miranda’s flattered her, framing her delicate Celtic features, setting off her sea-green eyes. While preparing supper that evening she told Natalie of her conversion to Islam. Her childhood home had been a distinctly unhappy place—an alcoholic mother, an unemployed, sexually abusive lout of a father. At thirteen she began to drink heavily and use drugs. She became pregnant twice and aborted both. “I was a mess,” she said. “I was going nowhere in flames.”
Then one day, stoned, drunk, she found herself standing outside an Islamic bookstore in central Bristol. A Muslim man saw her staring through the shop window and invited her inside. She refused but accepted his offer of a free book.
“I was tempted to drop it in the nearest rubbish bin. I’m glad I didn’t. It changed my life.”
She stopped drinking and using drugs and having sex with boys she scarcely knew. Then she converted to Islam, took the veil, and began to pray five times a day. Her parents were lapsed Church of England, unbelievers, but they did not want a Muslim for a daughter. Ejected from her home with nothing but a suitcase and a hundred pounds in cash, she made her way to East London, where she was taken in by a group of Muslims in the Tower Hamlets section of London. There she met a Jordanian named Jalal Nasser who taught her about the beauty of jihad and martyrdom. She joined ISIS, traveled secretly to Syria for training, and returned undetected to Britain. She was in awe of Jalal and perhaps a little in love with him. “If he ever takes wives,” she said, “I hope I will be one of them. At the moment, he’s too busy for a bride. He’s married to Saladin.”
Natalie was familiar with the name, but Dr. Hadawi was not. She replied accordingly.
“Who?” she asked carefully.
“Saladin. He’s the leader of the network.”
“You’ve met him?”
“Saladin?” She smiled dreamily and shook her head. “I’m far too low on the food chain. Only the senior leaders know who he really is. But who knows? Maybe you’ll get to meet him.”
“Why would you say something like that?”
“Because they have big plans for you.”
“Did Jalal tell you that?”
“He didn’t have to.”
But Natalie was not convinced. In fact, it seemed the opposite was true, that she had been forgotten. That night, and the next, she lay awake on her blanket, gazing at the square patch of sky framed by her single window. The city was entirely dark at night, the stars were incandescent. She imagined an Ofek 10 spy satellite peering down at her, following her as she moved through the streets of the black city.
Finally, shortly before dawn on the third night, not long after an American air strike in the north, she heard footfalls in the corridor outside her room. Four pile-driver blows shook the door; then it blew open, as if by the force of a car bomb. Natalie instantly covered herself with the abaya before a torch illuminated her face. They took only her, leaving Miranda behind. Outside in the street waited a dented and dusty SUV. They forced her into the backseat, these bearded, black-clad, wild-eyed warriors of Islam, and the SUV shot forward. She peered through the tinted window, through the tinted veil of her abaya, at the madness beyond—at the severed heads on iron skewers, at the bodies writhing on crosses, at the photos of faceless women in shop windows. I am Dr. Leila Hadawi, she told herself. I am Leila who loves Ziad, Leila from Sumayriyya. And I am about to die.
37
EASTERN SYRIA
THEY DROVE EASTWARD INTO THE rising sun, along a ruler-straight road black with oil. The traffic was light—a truck ferrying cargo from Anbar Province in Iraq, a peasant bringing produce to market in Raqqa, a flatbed spilling over with blood-drunk ninjas after a night of fighting in the north. The morning rush in the caliphate, thought Natalie. Occasionally, they came upon a burnt-out tank or troop carrier. In the empty landscape the wreckage looked like the corpses of insects fried by a child’s magnifying glass. One Japanese-made pickup truck still burned as they passed, and in the back a charred fighter still clung to his .50-caliber machine gun, which was aimed skyward. “Allahu Akbar,” murmured the driver of the SUV, and beneath her black abaya Natalie responded, “Allahu Akbar.”
She had no guide other than the sun and the SUV’s speedometer and dashboard clock. The sun told her they had maintained a steady easterly heading after leaving Raqqa. The speedometer and clock told her they had been barreling along at nearly ninety miles per hour for seventy-five minutes. Raqqa was approximately a hundred miles from the Iraqi border—the old border, she quickly reminded herself. There was no border anymore; the lines drawn on a map by infidel diplomats in London and Paris had been erased. Even the old Syrian road signs had been removed. “Allahu Akbar,” said Natalie’s driver as they passed another flaming wreck. And Natalie, smothering beneath her abaya, intoned, “Allahu Akbar.”