After dinner there was a program. A cleric preached, a fighter read a poem of his own composition. Afterward, Safia was “interviewed” on stage by a clever British Muslim who worked in ISIS’s promotion and marketing department. That night the desert thundered with coalition air strikes. Alone in her room, Natalie prayed for deliverance.
Her terrorist education commenced after breakfast the next morning when she was driven into the desert for weapons training—assault rifles, pistols, rocket launchers, grenades. She returned to the desert each and every morning, even after her instructors declared her proficient. They were no wild-eyed jihadis, the instructors; they were exclusively Iraqi, all former soldiers and battle-hardened veterans of the Sunni insurgency. They had fought the Americans largely to a draw in Iraq and wanted nothing more than to fight them again, on the plains of northern Syria, in a place called Dabiq. The Americans and their allies—the armies of Rome, in the lexicon of ISIS—had to be poked and prodded and stirred into a rage. The men from Iraq had a plan to do just that, and the students at the camp were their stick.
During the heat of midday, Natalie repaired to the air-conditioned rooms of the camp for lessons in bomb assembly and secure communication. She also had to endure long lectures on the pleasures of the afterlife, lest she be chosen for a suicide mission. Time and again her Iraqi instructors asked whether she was willing to die for the caliphate, and without hesitation Natalie said she was. Soon, she was made to wear a heavy suicide vest during her weapons training, and she was taught how to arm the device and detonate it using a trigger concealed in her palm. The first time the instructor ordered her to press the detonator, Natalie’s thumb hovered numb and frozen above the switch. “Yalla,” he beseeched her. “It’s not going to really explode.” Natalie closed her eyes and squeezed the detonator. “Boom,” whispered the instructor. “And now you are on your way to paradise.”
With the camp director’s permission, Natalie began seeing patients in the base’s old infirmary. At first, the other students were reluctant to call upon her for fear of being regarded as soft by the Iraqi instructors. But soon she was receiving a steady stream of patients during her “office hours,” which fell between the end of her bomb-making class and afternoon prayers. Their ailments ranged from infected battle wounds to whooping cough, diabetes, and sinusitis. Natalie had few supplies and little in the way of medicine, though she ministered patiently to each. In the process she learned a great deal about her fellow students—their names, their countries of origin, the circumstances of their travel to the caliphate, the status of their passports. Among those who came to see her was Safia Bourihane. She was several pounds underweight, mildly depressed, and required eyeglasses. Otherwise, she was in good health. Natalie resisted the impulse to give her an overdose of morphine.
“I’m leaving in the morning,” Safia announced as she covered herself in her abaya.
“Where are you going?”
“They haven’t told me. They never tell me. And you?” she asked.
Natalie shrugged. “I have to be back in France in a week.”
“Lucky you.” Safia slid childlike from Natalie’s examination table and moved toward the door.
“What was it like?” Natalie asked suddenly.
Safia turned. Even through the mosquito netting of her abaya, her eyes were astonishingly beautiful. “What was what like?”
“The operation.” Natalie hesitated, then said, “Killing the Jews.”
“It was beautiful,” said Safia. “It was a dream come true.”
“And if it had been a suicide operation? Could you have done it?”
Safia smiled regretfully. “I wish it had been.”
39
PALMYRA, SYRIA
THE CAMP DIRECTOR WAS an Iraqi named Massoud from Anbar Province. He had lost his left eye fighting the Americans during the troop surge of 2006. The right he fixed suspiciously on Natalie when, after a thoroughly unappetizing supper in the dining hall, she requested permission to walk alone outside the camp.
“There’s no need to deceive us,” he said at length. “If you wish to leave the camp, Dr. Hadawi, you are free to do so.”
“I have no wish to leave.”
“Are you not happy here? Have we not treated you well?”
“Very well.”
The one-eyed Massoud made a show of deliberation. “There’s no phone service in town, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“It isn’t.”
“And no cellular or Internet service, either.”
There was a short silence.
“I’ll send someone with you,” said Massoud.
“It isn’t necessary.”
“It is. You’re far too valuable to go walking alone.”
The escort Massoud selected to accompany Natalie was a handsome university-educated Cairene named Ismail who had joined ISIS in frustration not long after the coup that drove the Muslim Brotherhood from power in Egypt. They left the camp a few minutes after nine o’clock. The moon hung low over the northern Palmyrene mountain belt, a white sun in a black sky, and shone like a spotlight upon the mountains to the south. Natalie pursued her own shadow along a dusty path, Ismail trailing a few paces behind her, his black clothing luminous in the moonlight, a weapon across his chest. On both sides of the path, neat groves of date palms thrived in the rich soil along the Wadi al-Qubur, which was fed by the Efqa spring. It was the spring and the surrounding oasis that had first attracted humans to this place, perhaps as early as the seventh millennium BC. There arose a walled city of two hundred thousand where the inhabitants spoke the Palmyrene dialect of Aramaic and grew wealthy from the caravan traffic along the Silk Road. Empires came and went, and in the first century CE the Romans declared Palmyra a subject of the empire. The ancient city at the edge of an oasis would never be the same.
The date palms along the track moved in a cool desert wind. At last, the palms fell away and the Temple of Bel, the center of religious life in ancient Palmyra, appeared. Natalie slowed to a stop and stared, openmouthed, at the catastrophe that lay scattered across the desert floor. The temple’s ruins, with their monumental gates and columns, were among the best preserved in Palmyra. Now the ruins were in ruins, with a portion of only a single wall remaining intact. Ismail the Egyptian was obviously unmoved by the damage. “Shirk,” he said with a shrug, using the Arabic word for polytheism. “It had to be destroyed.”
“You were here when it happened?”
“I helped to set the charges.”
“Alhamdulillah,” she heard herself whisper. Praise be to God.
The fallen stones glowed in the cold light of the moon. Natalie picked her way slowly through the wreckage, careful not to turn an ankle, and set out down the Great Colonnade, the ceremonial avenue that stretched from the Temple of Bel, to the Triumphal Arch, to the Tetrapylon, to the Funerary Temple. Here, too, ISIS had imposed an Islamic death sentence on the non-Islamic past. The colonnades had been toppled, the arches smashed. Whatever ISIS’s ultimate fate, it had left an indelible mark on the Middle East. Palmyra, thought Natalie, would never be the same.
“You did this, too?”