the streets, women in black abayas moved like black ghosts through the markets. Natalie had been given her abaya shortly after she crossed the Turkish border. It was a heavy, scratchy garment that fit her like a sheet thrown over a piece of furniture. Beneath it she wore only black, for all other colors, even brown, were haram and could provoke a thrashing by the husbah. The facial veil rendered her features all but indistinguishable, and through it Natalie viewed a blurry world of murky charcoal gray. In the midday heat she felt as though she were trapped inside her own private oven, roasting slowly, an ISIS delicacy. There was danger in the abaya, the danger that she might believe herself to be invisible. She did not succumb to it. She knew they were watching her always.
ISIS was not alone in altering the cityscape of Raqqa. The Syrian air force and their Russian accomplices bombed by day, the Americans and their coalition partners by night. There was damage everywhere: shattered apartment buildings, burned-out cars and trucks, blackened tanks and armored personnel carriers. ISIS had responded to the air campaign by concealing its fighters and weaponry amid the civilian population. The ground floor of Natalie’s building was filled with bullets, artillery shells, rocket-propelled grenades, and guns of every sort. Bearded black-clad ISIS fighters used the second and third floors as a barracks. A few were from Syria, but most were Saudis, Egyptians, Tunisians, or wild-eyed Islamic warriors from the Caucasus who were pleased to be fighting Russians again. There were many Europeans, including three Frenchmen. They were aware of Natalie’s presence but made no attempt to communicate with her. She was off-limits. She was Saladin’s girl.
The Syrians and the Russians did not hesitate to bomb civilian targets, but the Americans were more discriminating. Everyone agreed they were bombing less these days. No one knew why, but everyone had an opinion, especially the foreign fighters, who boasted that decadent, infidel America was losing the stomach for the fight. None suspected that the reason for the lull in American air activity was living among them, in a room with a single window looking onto al-Rasheed Park, with blankets that smelled of camel and goat.
Health care in Syria had been deplorable even before the uprising, and now, in the chaos of civil war, it was almost nonexistent. Raqqa’s National Hospital was a ruin, emptied of medicine and supplies, filled with wounded ISIS fighters. The rest of the city’s unfortunate residents received care, such as it was, from small clinics scattered amid the neighborhoods. Natalie happened upon one while searching for bread on her second day in Raqqa, and found it filled with civilian casualties from a Russian air strike, many dead, several others soon to be. There were no physicians present, only ambulance drivers and ISIS “nurses” who had been given only rudimentary training. Natalie announced that she was a doctor and immediately began treating the wounded with whatever supplies she could find. She did so while still clad in her clumsy, unsterilized abaya because a snarling husbah threatened to beat her if she removed it. That night, when she finally returned to the apartment, she washed the blood from the abaya in water from the Euphrates. In Raqqa, time had receded.
They did not wear their abayas in the apartment, only their hijabs. Miranda’s flattered her, framing her delicate Celtic features, setting off her sea-green eyes. While preparing supper that evening she told Natalie of her conversion to Islam. Her childhood home had been a distinctly unhappy place—an alcoholic mother, an unemployed, sexually abusive lout of a father. At thirteen she began to drink heavily and use drugs. She became pregnant twice and aborted both. “I was a mess,” she said. “I was going nowhere in flames.”
Then one day, stoned, drunk, she found herself standing outside an Islamic bookstore in central Bristol. A Muslim man saw her staring through the shop window and invited her inside. She refused but accepted his offer of a free book.
“I was tempted to drop it in the nearest rubbish bin. I’m glad I didn’t. It changed my life.”
She stopped drinking and using drugs and having sex with boys she scarcely knew. Then she converted to Islam, took the veil, and began to pray five times a day. Her parents were lapsed Church of England, unbelievers, but they did not want a Muslim for a daughter. Ejected from her home with nothing but a suitcase and a hundred pounds