The Foreign Service Journal, May 2021

48 MAY 2021 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL so to speak, still declaiming the wonders of the Islamic State or cryptically insisting “We remain.” The destruction went on as far as one could see. (A subsequent helicopter ride over the city revealed that the blocks accumulated into square miles of devastation. Assessments by the Reconstruc- tion Committee of the Raqqa Civil Council, the local post-liber- ation governing body for the city, estimated that 30,000 to 40,000 homes—65 percent of the total in the city—and an equivalent or greater number of nonresidential buildings had been leveled or damaged beyond repair.) To my eye the destruction was fantastical, where old struc- tures melted away or were staved in beyond recognition, frozen in contortions of havoc. A giant cell tower near the town square, struck by coalition bombing, was bent in half, like a monstrous praying mantis. Some scenes were reminders of the evil that ISIS had visited on the city: The front of the amphitheater, for example, was adorned with rows of unused mass graves ISIS had dug to intimidate residents with some “you next” iconography. There, and at Naim Traffic Circle (where ISIS declared Raqqa the capital of the caliphate in 2014), group executions had been common. Even in the most desolate parts of the city, there were a few people around—some working to clear rubble in front of what seemed to have been their shops or dwellings, others trying to tear down the most thoroughly wrecked parts of structures they hoped to save. Aman with a jackhammer, alone on the heavily damaged roof of a three-story building and clearly heedless of any personal safety issue, pounded away at outsized slabs of upended concrete. With a mix of brutal realism and a clear lack of familiarity with how fiercely locals would remain attached to their little piece of Raqqa, no matter how destroyed, someone in my car suggested it would be easier to rope off the catastrophically destroyed city and build a new one nearby. I thought about the guy with the jackhammer, silhouetted in the early afternoon sun, pounding away in a gesture consisting of equal part futility and defiance, and understood that would never happen. Near some of the most destroyed structures, scrappy Raqqawi entrepreneurs had gathered mangled steel rebar in large squiggly hairballs. They were using technology that seemed faintly medieval to straighten the rebar into long spa- ghetti strands they could resell. Others weren’t as industrious; they just sat outdoors on decrepit furniture they had appar- ently dragged out of their homes or buildings. They drank tea, smoked cigarettes and just hung out, stuck in some postapoca- lyptic scene that blended ordinary, urban Arab domesticity with horrific devastation. Each seemed to be saying with his body language, “I’m back, remaking this place into my place, one broken piece of furniture or cracked brick at the time, if necessary.” Women in black abayas, partially or fully veiled, with hands often gloved in black as well, hurried past, with a child or two accompanying in varying degrees of compliance. The older, unaccompanied children we saw were invariably friendly, smiling and flashing V for victory signs. But the adults, mostly men, seemed sullen and reserved. In Raqqa there were blocks and blocks where every single building had been hit, roofs knocked off, floors pancaked into crashing vectors of destruction.