The Foreign Service Journal, May 2021

50 MAY 2021 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL they viewed as heavy-handed, intrusive Kurdish political influence and security presence in the overwhelmingly Arab city—influence that had come in during the fight against ISIS and stayed. Sometimes I did not understand precisely what people were trying to tell me. One afternoon in front of a severely damaged school building, a man asked defiantly why I was there, indicating that the visit of a U.S. diplomat was not helpful. “Who did this?” he said, pointing to the destruction all around. “Who will fix it?” He mentioned the importance of respect; the citizens of Raqqa were experiencing its opposite, he opined, given what he viewed as a stingy international response in the face of so much destruction. He spoke warily, eyeing the Kurdish security escorts accompa- nying our group whom he viewed as outsiders bent on preventing critical views from being heard. I struggled with my rusty Arabic to pry out more meaning from his enigmatic and disjointed, but piercing observations. Recalling the conversation later, I thought of Dante, who describes becoming “like those who, feeling laughed at, hesitate / Not comprehending what’s been said to them / And helpless to reply.” Just as Dante leaned on Virgil, I relied on trusted guides to lead me through Raqqa’s inferno. They included a small number of talented Foreign Service officers and members of that START Forward team, as well as the U.S. military’s civil affairs teams, who also focused on restoring basic services such as repairing water pumping stations and small bridges, and cleaning out irrigation canals. My guides in the city also included dedicated local officials and first responders, often affiliated with the Raqqa Civil Council or the municipality. They described in detail—and took me on inspection tours of the city to showme—the overwhelming levels of destruction and make clear the massive assistance needed to rebuild the shattered city. I talked to many others, as well, like the local attorney who knew the ancient history of Raqqa and guided me over its long- forgotten (and abbreviated) heyday as a capital of the storied ninth-century Abbasid Caliphate and the city’s lineage centuries later as an Ottoman-era customs post. His historical references to Islam reminded me of Dante’s recognition of the great contribu- tions of Muslim philosophers like Avicenna and Averroes, and brought to mind scholarly commentary making the case that the Prophet Mohammed’s night journey fromMecca to Jerusalem represented possible source material for Dante’s great allegory. One of my most faithful and talented guides did not himself escape the inferno. Raqqa Civil Council adviser Omar Alloush led me through the political maze that constituted Arab-Kurdish rela- tions and shared the backstories behind the effort to help Raqqa recover and rebuild. A Kurd who played a critical role in the effort to stand up local governance and improve the sometimes thorny relations between Arab and Kurdish communities in northeast- ern Syria, he was killed in his nearby hometown of Tel Abayad in October 2018 by unknown assailants. Hope and Fear Since late 2017 when ISIS was driven out of the city, Raqqa has struggled with limited international assistance flows. This is the result, in part, of the obstructionist Syrian regime, whose toxic presence in Damascus dried up prospects for larger-scale reconstruction assistance (for which stabilization assistance typically prepares the way) and, frankly, by inadequate funding for stabilization assistance from donor countries, including from the United States. After President Donald Trump, irritated that coalition partners were not contributing more to this effort, froze $200 million in U.S. government stabilization assistance in 2018, partners stepped up with funding to support the U.S. programs; but by mid-2019, that burden-sharing effort lost steam. And as of the fall of 2020, most stabilization programming for Raqqa, like the rest of northeast Syria, faced a cascading series of shutdowns as funding streams dried up. (Funding for humanitarian assistance, focused on the desperately poor and vulnerable in refugee and displaced persons’ camps, meanwhile, has been more robust, with the U.S. leading the way.) As of this writing, a third of 40-some schools in the city have been refurbished to rudimentary levels and are operational. Most of the hospitals in the city are operational at varying levels. But only 30 percent of the electrical grid in the city is currently opera- tional, with the vast majority of residents still relying on genera- tors. And while close to 80 percent of Raqqa province relies on agriculture, the pumping stations, irrigation canals, grain silos and the rest of the farming infrastructure remain severely damaged. On visits to the city in 2018 and 2019, I noted particularly the remains of the two bridges across the once-majestic Euphrates, now shrunk by persistent drought and upriver Turkish damming Only 30 percent of the electrical grid in the city is currently operational, with the vast majority of residents still relying on generators.