The Foreign Service Journal, May 2021

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | MAY 2021 47 control. It was also my privilege to work closely in the field with U.S. Special Forces, with whom I was embedded, during my long sojourns in Syria beginning in early 2018. Warned before my first deployment about the remote location and sketchy Wi-Fi, I understood that the experience represented an opportunity—in off-duty hours—to put some deep notches in the reading belt. I looked forward to knocking out a few books I had long eyed warily but slunk away from. Perhaps that explains how I ended up with Dante in my carry-on as I headed out on that first trip to Syria. I had begun The Inferno (Robert Pinsky’s relatively recent translation) before finishing my service as ambassador in Bahrain in late 2017, and hadn’t gotten far. But when I rode into the largely destroyed city of Raqqa for the first time, in late February 2018, just a fewmonths after the four- month military campaign had liberated it from ISIS, I had a jolt of recognition. I was seeing a vision of Dante’s hell before my eyes. A “Great Wasteland” of Destruction In a line of armored jeeps accompanying a few visiting senior U.S. officials and escorted by both U.S. Special Forces and ele- ments of our SDF counter-ISIS partners, we entered the city from the northwest. It was a cloudy, cold morning, with a bit of fog drifting through the streets. I had never seen anything like it—blocks and blocks where every single building had been hit. It reminded me of World War II photographs of the destruction of Dresden. Roofs were knocked off, some hanging like a lean-to down to the ground, against floors pancaked into crashing vec- tors of destruction. Slabs of concrete jutted out at wrong angles, like fractured limbs broken beyond what any cast would ever repair. More concrete hung from blasted ceilings, dangling in a mesh of wrinkled steel rebar like large insects caught in some horrific, oversized spider web. Here and there, spray-painted, quasi-official graffiti notations were visible, in Arabic and sometimes English: “Clear,” meaning the building had been cleared of ISIS-planted mines or impro- vised explosive devices by one of the U.S.- or internationally funded nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) doing critically important, and dangerous, demining work. (At war’s end, Raqqa had the distinction of being one of the most heavily mined little corners of the globe.) At other points along the route, once- ominous ISIS graffiti were visible—Arabic voices from the grave, Driving through Raqqa in late February 2018 was to witness a “great wasteland” of destruction.