The Foreign Service Journal, May 2021

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | MAY 2021 49 In less destroyed parts of the city, neighborhoods like Mishlab or Jezra on the outskirts, there were more signs of coming back to life: workers sweeping dirt and rubble out of their shops and garages, recently refurbished bakeries selling bread—a key staple in Syria—to long lines of people, kids zipping in and out of traffic on rickety bicycles, welding shops firing off sparks, and stands selling drinking water, while drinking-water delivery trucks circu- lated nearby, sloshing with contents recently pumped out of the Euphrates or more sketchy canals the river fed. Eventually, as the returning population swelled past 150,000 during 2018, running water was restored tomost of the city, and its recovery moved forward slowly, as schools, businesses and health clinics progressively reopened. The Department of State’s Syria Assistance Transition Response Team, known as START Forward, coordinated the U.S. government’s stabilization assistance program aimed at restoring essential services in northeastern Syrian locales like Raqqa, working closely with NGOs and local implementers. Listen and Learn After that first ride through Raqqa, back in my CHU (container- ized housing unit) at the makeshift U.S. military outpost on the ramshackle grounds of an abandoned cement factory a couple hours’ drive from Raqqa, I reflected on what I’d seen. I reviewed Canto XXV of The Inferno , which describes a series of horrible transformations that characters undergo: two heads merging into one, serpents growing feet, the hind paws of a creature merging to form the “member that man conceals.” Dante’s intense, bizarre, even grotesque imagery seemed to my mind to capture the depth of suffering and destruction in Syria. The sense of sorrow was overwhelming. As Dante traversed the circles of his Inferno , he notes repeatedly that “pity overwhelmed” him. He speaks of being “half lost in its coils” and of being unable to speak because of the pity he felt, despite regular moments of stern judgment (consistent with the work’s context in 14th-cen- tury battles over papal authority). One could hear similar tones of judgment, though of very different origin, in Raqqa. Someone, often not originally from the city, would invariably insist, for example, that some Raqqa notable, or swaths of the commu- nity, had at one time pledged allegiance to ISIS, with the usually unspoken implication that the city’s suffering was, on some level, not completely undeserved. Throughout his journey, Dante emphasizes the importance of listening to people, seeing their suffering and listening to their tales of woe, nomatter how difficult it is to remain on that “deep and savage road” of sustained empathy. At one point his guide, Virgil, urges him to “speak directly” with the suffering soul they encoun- ter and “hear fromhim about himself.” Each time I visited Raqqa over the next two years, I tried to listen carefully—to the complaints from locals about the slow pace of recovery, the perceived small scale of assistance in comparison with the huge scale of destruc- tion, and to residents’ usually surreptitious complaints about what