Daily Life In Raqqa

From an article in the Irish Times:

“There is no security. Everybody has to be careful … A lot of armed Daesh are in the streets. Sixty per cent are foreigners – Afghans, Chechens, French, Italians, Turks, Germans, Chinese, Danes, Australians. Forty per cent are Arabs, Moroccans, Tunisians, Libyans, Saudis, Iraqis and Syrians. The Tunisians and the Saudis are the worst. The Saudis have a lot of money. Daesh does everything by force … The common language is bad Arabic. Fifteen thousand control Raqqa.

“They have tanks and heavy weapons they brought from Iraq [since the fall of Mosul last June], but no air force,” this man adds.

“Foreign fighters bring viruses and microbes but the Syrian ministry of health sends doctors with medicine and vaccines.” [The Sarc clinic closed recently. Some Sarc volunteers remain although others have left].

No cafes “It is like living in a prison. When we finish work, there is nothing to do. No cafes, no restaurants, no television, no books, no reading. You cannot open the radio. No mobile phones: the government stopped coverage, only satellite phones with Daesh that cost 50 Syrian pounds ($0.30) a minute, too expensive. We can have computers in our houses and there is foreign internet, not Syrian. Daesh publishes a newspaper,” he continues.

“Daesh collects taxes, 30 per cent of earnings, in US dollars. Food is available at high prices. We get three hours of electricity every 24 hours from private companies. We are going back 800 years.”

Raqqa was once the summer capital of Harun al-Rashid, he points out, the great Arab caliph who ruled from 789-806 AD and whose cultivation of learning made his reign the Golden Age of Islam. “They destroyed his statue and the statues of lions in the park and looted some things from the museum. The archaeologists moved most things to Damascus.”