The True Story of ISIS’s Rise in Syria
In 2012, Manbij became one of the first Syrian cities to wrest itself from the tyranny of the dictator Bashar al-Assad. After the uprising began, with citizens calling for democracy outside the central mosque, the Syrian government attempted to crush it. But the regime, besieged by insurrections across the country, abandoned Manbij. At first, the city, which is near the Turkish border and has two hundred thousand residents, revelled in its liberation. Dozens of newspapers and magazines were launched, and for the first time in forty years people formed organizations without securing approval from the state. But, before a year was up, freedom had begun to feel like chaos. The new city government, controlled largely by business owners and other élites, seemed oblivious to the problems of the poor. The price of bread soared as bakery owners—no longer subject to price controls imposed by the regime—shamelessly profiteered. Rents doubled, then tripled, as more and more displaced Syrians crowded the city. And crime became so rampant that some citizens wondered if the revolution had been worth it. What good were “international human rights” when you were afraid to send your daughter to school because of kidnappings? What good was a republic that couldn’t provide law and order? Amid all this instability, a new group insinuated its way into Manbij: the Islamic State.
An opening for the Islamic State came one day in June, 2013, nearly a year after Manbij’s liberation, when the body of a young man was discovered by a shepherd outside town. Blood was streaked across the man’s pale face, and a section of his right temple was missing. The victim’s name was Musa Jasim. From the age of eleven, he’d accompanied his father, a plumber, on the job. They unclogged drains for the municipality—a tiring and thankless profession, but one that allowed them to build a nest egg, culminating in the purchase of a silver Saab. Musa started working as a taxi-driver. At eighteen, he married, and within a few years he had three young children and a fourth on the way.
One day, Musa was idling in his Saab at a roundabout when he accepted a few passengers and drove off. He did not return home. Ten days later, the authorities stopped a Saab, which had a new paint job, at a car wash. An inspection confirmed that the car was Musa’s. The driver was taken in for questioning, and he explained that he had recently bought the vehicle from a certain Manhal Hammoudi—supposedly, one of Musa’s friends. The authorities tracked down Hammoudi, who admitted that he and several others had asked Musa for a ride into the countryside, and that one of the passengers, Karoom, had pointed a pistol at Musa’s head. “Guys, quit screwing around,” Musa said. “This isn’t funny!” Karoom pulled the trigger. He and the others dumped the body in the bushes, repainted the Saab, and sold it for seven hundred and fifty dollars.
The murder appalled the city, and Musa’s family demanded justice. Karoom and the others were arrested, but a proper trial seemed unlikely. The new city government, supported by the Free Syrian Army, which had helped liberate the city, was underfunded and barely functional. Some authorities proposed executing the accused then and there, to show the public that the government was serious about countering crime. But for others this was a line they could not cross. Not only did it violate every precept of justice but what would the world think? What would Western capitals and human-rights organizations say if it emerged that the Free Syrian Army were executing unarmed civilians?
As the authorities dithered, people across the city grew restless. One activist decided to take matters into his own hands. Abdul Hadi Bisher was an energetic member of the Revolutionary Youth Movement, a pro-democracy organization that had organized protests against Assad. He’d been jailed after shouting “freedom” in the streets—and in detention he’d been sodomized and waterboarded. In the year since Manbij’s liberation, though, he’d grown disgusted with the city’s dysfunctional government, under which crime and inequality had become pervasive. He began to wonder if, in order to win justice for Musa, it was time to look for a more daring alternative.
Not long earlier, a hitherto unknown group called ISIS—the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria—had set up an office in town, unfurling a black banner that proclaimed “There is no god but God, and Muhammad is His Prophet.” ISIS members milling outside the building were heavily armed, but it wasn’t obvious to residents what their plans were for Manbij. Some of the members were foreigners from Egypt and Iraq, but others hailed from the countryside outside the city.
Abdul Hadi sought out an ISIS commander and explained the frustrations of Musa’s family. The commander listened patiently but replied that ISIS could not interfere with the judicial process in the city, because they were just one faction among many—that is, unless the people themselves demanded it. If the public lost faith in the judicial institutions of Manbij, then, and only then, could ISIS intervene.
On June 13th, under a blazing sun, Abdul Hadi gathered with some two hundred residents for a rally, with Musa’s relatives in tow. “The people want the execution of criminals!” they chanted, while marching toward the old cultural center. From within, ISIS guards watched the throngs. The door did not open.
Abdul Hadi led the procession toward Main Street. Protesters held banners decrying criminality and calling for law and order. Men and women stepped onto their balconies, watching the crowd stream past—not an unusual sight there since liberation, except that now there were no tri-star revolutionary flags, no banners calling for freedom. Instead, the word that the protesters shouted was “justice.” They wanted to be able to sleep soundly at night, to be able to send their children to school, to make a living, to simply live. As the mass moved down Main Street, it grew. Soon there were six hundred people. The procession passed the headquarters of various Free Syrian Army factions, at whom the protesters hurled bitter insults for failing to protect the city. By late afternoon, the crowd had reached the central courthouse, where the five suspects had been detained, and demanded swift justice.
Suddenly, three vehicles raced toward the crowd. Some ten ISIS members jumped out—perhaps the entire group then in Manbij—and stationed themselves around the courthouse. The ISIS commander with whom Abdul Hadi had spoken approached the building’s guards and demanded to enter. The policemen refused and ordered him back.
The commander opened his vest to reveal a bomb strapped to his chest. “I’ll use it!” he shouted. “I have no fear!”
The police backed away.
“The people of Manbij and the relatives of the deceased have asked for justice,” the commander declared. “The people have asked us to deal with this case, and we’re here to fulfill their wishes.” The stunned policemen opened the door. ISIS members gathered the suspects and stuffed them into their vehicles. As they drove off, a cheer went up from the crowd.
Later, Abdul Hadi met with several friends to discuss the astonishing episode. He hailed the commander’s follow-through—he had done exactly as he’d promised, waiting for residents to call for ISIS to intervene. These people aren’t afraid of anything, one of Abdul Hadi’s friends exclaimed. Perhaps they were exactly what the city needed.
Locked in a room at ISIS headquarters, the five suspects desperately tried to work out a plan. It turned out that only three of them, including Manhal and Karoom, had been present at the murder scene. One of the other two was Manhal’s brother, Ayman. He was just sixteen, and he had known nothing about the crime. Manhal was pacing the room, near tears. Ayman, moved by his brother’s plight, offered to confess to the crime. Because he was underage, he expected lenience.
At the time, ISIS was an obscure organization. But it soon became known around the world as an armed group bent on establishing a caliphate governed by Sharia law. For most Westerners, the phrase “Sharia law” conjures images of sword-wielding fanatics with medieval sensibilities. Traditionally, though, less than ten per cent of Sharia—which means “religious law” in Arabic—relates to criminal injuries like murder, rape, or theft. The rest concerns prosaic matters of marital and family relations, commercial transactions, and ritual.
In the early years of Islam, when states hardly existed as such in the Arab world, Sharia helped communities to manage their own affairs, based on a set of guidelines drawn from the Quran and on the sayings of the Prophet. The system emphasized community stability and accord. In the case of murder, for example, the victim’s next of kin had the power to decide remedial action: they could choose retaliation, or accept blood money, or grant a pardon. Judges often encouraged the payment of blood money, and, in the early centuries of Islamic rule, capital punishment was applied far less than one might expect. Other penalties, like stoning in the case of adultery, were severe but almost impossible to implement in practice: there had to be four male witnesses to the act of penetration.
Sharia law waned in influence as many Arab lands succumbed to foreign domination. In the post-colonial era, Arab dictators established secular laws, but these legal systems favored the ruling clique. By the nineteen-seventies, some Arab thinkers had begun looking with nostalgia to the halcyon days of early Islam, when everyone, from the caliph to the lowliest peasant, was—so they imagined—subject to the same law.
In Syria, this remained a minority view. At the beginning of the revolution in Manbij, almost no one called for imposing Sharia. The collective dream was for a new, democratic structure that could replace Assad’s ossified legal regime. But, after eleven months of self-rule led to a surge in violent crime and yawning inequality, nostalgia for a purer form of justice began to crop up in the pages of the press and in public lectures.
One day, half a dozen foreigners from ISIS held a meeting with Abdul Hadi and other members of the Revolutionary Youth Movement. An ISIS commander told Abdul Hadi that his group harbored no interest in accruing political power in the city. Instead, members devoted every waking breath to restoring Sharia and, by doing so, heralding a new era of blind and impartial justice. Abdul Hadi came away fascinated.
The ISIS contingent then invited Musa’s father to visit their headquarters, where the suspects remained in their custody, and presented him with an option straight from Sharia: As next of kin, what redress did he want for the spilling of blood?
Musa’s father was a kindly old man, and he said that he was willing to pardon everyone in the car that day—or almost everyone. He was stuck deep in the recesses of shock and grief at the loss of the boy who’d labored by his side for so long, a boy who’d never harmed anyone and who had sat behind the wheel of that silver Saab from sunrise to sundown for the family. He could not, try as he might, forgive Karoom, who pulled the trigger. “Let the others go,” he said, weeping. “Let them go, but, for God’s sake, I don’t forgive Karoom.”
The next morning, July 5th, gunmen appeared atop the Manbij Hotel, which overlooks the city’s central square. Flowing from the roof to the street was the massive tricolor flag that revolutionaries had hung on liberation day. Over the months, citizens had written on the fabric the names of men and women lost to strikes by the Assad regime. The flag had become a landmark, a giant adornment in the heart of downtown. The gunmen removed the revolutionary flag and replaced it with the black banner of ISIS. The new flag was four stories long.
Jihadi singing blared through the speakers. Masked ISIS members set up a stage. Across town, word flew from tongue to tongue that the group would announce its judgment against the murderers. A large crowd—including senators and other members of the city’s revolutionary government—gathered outside the hotel. At the entrance, busy setting up tables and pasting ISIS flags onto the wall, was Abdul Hadi. He’d never had much time for religion, but he was impressed by the group’s seriousness.
A jeep drove up, and a man wearing a vest laced with explosives stepped out. Three men, hooded and shackled, were herded onto the stage. The singing ceased. The man wearing the explosives took the microphone. He introduced himself—in an Egyptian accent—as the “prince” of a nearby ISIS branch. “I swear by God, we did not come here with the aspiration of ruling over you,” he began. “We only want to implement God’s law on earth.” He spoke about the role of Sharia throughout history, its application in the glory days of the early Islamic empires, its disappearance with colonialism and the secular dictatorships. He announced that the time had come to revive God’s law.
Because ISIS feared God, the Egyptian went on, it wanted the people of Manbij to fear God, as well. God had prescribed in the Holy Quran the limits of human behavior, and those who feared His majesty should submit to His laws. No human community can survive, he continued, without justice. A community in which man is free to kill or rape is no community at all—it is the jungle. “Here, in Manbij, the people have suffered the rule of the jungle, and the God-fearing among you have beseeched us to apply God’s law,” he said. He then recounted the murder of Musa Jasim, his betrayal by people he believed to be his friends, the stolen car, the confessions. He added that the criminals had been a gang that had raped and killed others—they had kidnapped a ten-year-old girl, repeatedly raping her for a week and then killing her.
A gasp went through the crowd. No one had heard of these additional crimes.
The Egyptian declared, “It has fallen to our judges to implement God’s wishes, and because of these heinous crimes, these men”—he read three names, including those of Karoom and Ayman, the sixteen-year-old who had made the false confession to save his brother—“are hereby sentenced to death.”
A cry rose from other ISIS members: “God is great!” The crowd was silent.
Masked ISIS fighters chiselled three indentations into the hotel’s façade. The three prisoners were dragged to the wall and made to kneel, their backs to the crowd, their heads fitted into the indentations. A fighter in a balaclava read out a statement containing several verses of the Quran pertaining to the punishment of criminals, and pronounced that “these people were not wronged by anyone, but they wronged themselves by committing murder and theft.”
The gunmen took aim. The prisoners remained still. No one in the crowd budged. Maybe they wanted to understand this new order, to fill their hearts with it. Maybe they had simply had enough. Maybe some stayed for the sheer pornography of it all. Shots were fired, the bodies jerked, and the cry rose again from the masked men: “God is great!”
ISIS fighters loaded the bodies onto the back of a four-by-four and drove this grim exhibit slowly through the streets. The crowd did not disperse.
Suddenly, someone shouted, “Airplane!”
There was a mad scramble—people running in every direction, some tumbling over others. But when they eventually looked up, they saw nothing but blue. The cry had been a ploy by ISIS to get everyone to leave.
That evening, a relative of Ayman, the slain sixteen-year-old, went to the old cultural center and confronted the Egyptian ISIS leader. “How can you execute someone?” he demanded. “Who gave you the right?”
“We are only implementing God’s law.”
“But, according to Sharia, the next of kin has the choice, and he chose to pardon Ayman.” The relative reiterated that Ayman had confessed only to save his brother. The ISIS leader countered that Ayman was guilty of heinous crimes, including rape.
“Which girl is this that they raped? Show her to me.”
He did not receive an answer, and was asked to leave. In fact, there had been no rape, no criminal gang—the trumped-up charges were ISIS’s way of insuring popular support for the executions. The group even spread the fake news to various newspapers, which soon reported that all three of the deceased had been guilty of rape.
Abdul Hadi had helped set up the stage; he’d even arranged for the sewing of the black flag. But he had not expected executions in a city square—he’d been certain that there would be a timely public trial, followed by imprisonment. He told his friends that he felt as if someone had plunged a knife into his stomach. He could not sleep for days. He found one of the executioners, a Tunisian, and asked how he could sleep at night. The Tunisian replied, “It was the first time I’ve killed, and let me tell you, in my entire life I have not slept with such peace as I slept last night.” Abdul Hadi found himself without words. He swore to his comrades in the Revolutionary Youth Movement that he’d never go by the ISIS headquarters again. But they could not hide their disgust. “What did you expect?” a friend demanded. “Do you know who you are dealing with?” One by one, they quit the Revolutionary Youth Movement and avoided Abdul Hadi. He was now on his own.
The next day, a freshly painted message was written on the wall of the old cultural center: “The Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria invites citizens to register any concerns about life in the city with us.”
With the loss of his friends, Abdul Hadi began turning up at ISIS headquarters, spending hours sipping tea and watching battle videos. He wasn’t sure what to make of the wild-haired men at the cultural center, or if he could even trust them, but with them, at least, he did not feel alone. He had often mocked rival brigades for adopting Muslim names; now he quit drinking and studied the Quran. His former friends joked that he had begun dressing like someone from Afghanistan.
The executions had shaken many Manbij residents, but others—disturbed by the crime and disorder—were grateful that someone was finally willing to take a stand.
ISIS, emboldened, began to make forays into the city’s political life. It launched the Fertile Crescent, an assembly that held Quran-memorization competitions for children, conducted lectures on Islamic history, and distributed alms to the poor. ISIS also founded a charity, which held lectures on Sharia, Arabic, math, physics, and chemistry, to “raise awareness of science.” At the start of Ramadan, ISIS members handed out dates and figs to families displaced by the war, and contributed to citywide collection efforts to provide poor families with a free iftar meal, to break the day’s fast. These activities, in the context of rising prices and insecurity, won the newcomers growing respect. A newspaper called al-Ra’y al-Horr (“Free Opinion”) ran an interview with a preacher who declared that ISIS fighters have a “zeal for religion and God’s law . . . but they can’t rise up on their own.”
The Fertile Crescent Assembly resolved to “clean up” the city by scrubbing the walls of slogans praising democracy. Supporters of the revolutionary government, which had been chosen in a citywide election, watched ISIS’s campaign with alarm. They vetted the imams of the city’s forty-two mosques, to insure that they were still preaching the local Sufi brand of Islam, which was not hostile to democracy.
The city council, meanwhile, cracked down on drug peddlers and shut down Manbij’s sole bar: they could not afford to let ISIS paint the government as dissolute. City officials also proposed banning black flags at demonstrations. They lost the vote—not because the majority favored such flags but because some politicians worried that the law would trample free-speech rights. In the end, the proposal backfired, as residents who harbored little interest in black flags began hoisting them as an assertion of their freedom of speech. Islamist groups in Manbij began organizing rallies with a sea of black fabric waving in the wind.
ISIS decided to up the ante.
The Great Mosque in downtown Manbij offered free lessons on Quranic interpretation, and the instructor, Sheikh Abu Saeed al-Dibo, was one of the city’s most respected scholars. He’d published books of poetry, a history of Manbij, and a treatise on Orientalism.
On July 9, 2013, he was delivering a lesson when an argument broke out between him and a young Tunisian in the class, who was a member of ISIS. At issue was Sheikh Dibo’s description of the prayer that locals tend to say when visiting a grave; to the ISIS member, such prayers were sacrilege. The heart of the matter lay in when, or to whom, one might pray. Sheikh Dibo was schooled in Sufism, one of the dominant strains of Islam in northern Syria. Sufism held at its center the strange, fantastical, miraculous figure of the saint, to whom one might pray for miracles.
To ISIS, which owes its theological roots to the austere Islam of Saudi Arabia, worshipping at the tombs of saints was rank superstition. In fact, praying to saints or ancestors elevated them above the status of mere mortals, effectively denying the singular might of God. Sheikh Dibo’s instructions on how to pray at the grave, as innocuous as they may have sounded to most Manbij residents, struck the Tunisian ISIS member as a disavowal of monotheism itself.
As the argument grew heated, Sheikh Dibo could not believe the young foreigner’s insolence. The sheikh had studied religious law at Damascus University and earned a master’s degree in Lebanon; the Tunisian had not completed a day’s worth of religious study in his life, relying instead on YouTube videos and stray sermons. “I have as many qualifications as you have years in age,” Sheikh Dibo declared. To the Tunisian, though, that was precisely the problem: Islam was saddled with such men, who acted as gatekeepers to true knowledge. Saints, imams, and sheikhs stood between the individual and God. By rejecting such figures, ISIS was attempting something akin to the Protestant Reformation for Islam, in which the religion would be open to anyone who chose to believe, direct and unmediated. To Sheikh Dibo, this sounded like madness. “If you want to learn about your religion, I’ll teach you!” he thundered.
That evening, ISIS summoned Sheikh Dibo to its headquarters. They debated doctrinal issues, and finally ISIS made a plea for pluralism: in a free city, the people should have the right to hear different views on the question of saints. Let different ideas compete in Manbij; let the people decide. To which the Sheikh responded, “I’ll give you the pulpit over my dead body.”
While Sheikh Dibo sparred with ISIS, a rumor spread through the city that he’d been detained. Hundreds of people collected across the street from the old cultural center. Under the glow of streetlamps, they chanted, “Out, out, out! The Islamic State get out!” A man shouted into a camera, “ISIS is just like the Syrian regime!” A protester later exclaimed, “We’ve been praying here since our grandfathers’ and great-grandfathers’ time. Now these foreigners are going to tell us how to worship God?”
When the news reached ISIS headquarters, the commanders there allowed Sheikh Dibo to leave. This was the first time demonstrators had called for the group’s expulsion. ISIS members realized they might have gone too far.
The following evening, ISIS and its Fertile Crescent Assembly organized a lecture in front of the old cultural center. An ISIS member announced that the organization would be holding a religious-trivia contest that night, followed by a talk on the current state of Manbij. Among the prizes on offer were figs, gilded Qurans, and perfumes. ISIS had also organized activities for children, including hide-and-seek. A comedian delivered riffs about Assad, about how he’d been sired by donkeys, and the audience was in stitches.
An ISIS member took to the dais and argued that Manbij should be ruled by religious law—not by drunkards and thieves—and that people should not be seduced by democracy, which promises the world but cannot even put food in bellies. A bag of bread now cost a hundred liras—seven times what it had cost when Manbij was “liberated.” Olive oil and other staples were similarly out of reach.
ISIS, he explained, had fought many battles outside the city, and was building a new empire—an Islamic caliphate where nobody would go hungry or live in fear. “Peace and prosperity will only come with Sharia!” he shouted. The crowd applauded.
That September, ISIS seized the city’s grain mills, on the ground that the ruling élite was changing so much that everyday people were starving. But the group still didn’t control the city. All autumn, ISIS continued its propaganda offensive, holding seminars detailing life under religious law. They culled examples from the history of early Islam, when the differences between rich and poor were, they said, minimal, when leaders were bound by a moral code that superseded their earthly whims. They told stories of the leaders of the first Muslim communities—caliphs—who kept greedy merchants at heel, enforcing price controls. They extolled zakat, the ancient practice of giving alms to the poor, one of the five pillars of Islam. They disseminated videos and pamphlets promoting the glories of living in a caliphate—universal public housing, free health care, cities so secure you could leave your doors open at night. No more kidnappings, no more checkpoints. No more families torn apart, with sons in far-flung lands, sweating under the hot sun in construction sites, returning home only once a year. The picture was of an Islamic welfare state, where cities were ruled not by the wealthy or the well connected but by the just.
ISIS members opened educational centers in Manbij to teach basic science and history. They dispatched volunteers to visit the ill and the wounded in hospitals, distributing dates and milk. They gave Qurans and perfume to patients. They took up collections at mosques for displaced people. Wherever they went, they swore that, under an Islamic state, the government would provide such services. Manbij had known fear and division for too long; under their rule, it would know brotherhood and sisterhood. The greatness of the city would be measured by the fates of the least among them.
The revolutionaries who ran Manbij could not understand the allure of such a message. They hadn’t risked their lives for free health care and price controls—they had braved bullets and prison for values greater and more noble than material goods. In a statement, the elected senators of Manbij reminded the city: “We declare that this revolution is a revolution of dignity and not a revolution of the hungry! Because if we were hungry, we would have accepted the Assad regime, under which bread cost fifteen Syrian liras!”
After a year of crisis upon crisis, these words felt tone-deaf to most residents. Those who spoke loudest about “dignity” were those who did not have to worry about their next meal. They did not have to send their sons off to foreign lands to beg for work.
One morning, two masked men approached Sheikh Dibo and fired. He died instantly. ISIS then began warning the city’s independent newspapers and threatening its elected politicians. The pro-democracy revolutionaries attempted to rally the masses to march against ISIS, as they had over the summer. But now, after months of spiralling prices, few people were willing to stand with the elected city government.
In December, Manbij witnessed a freak blizzard, one of the harshest in memory. ISIS members immediately seized the advantage. They plowed roads and markets, and volunteered as traffic police. They distributed free bread in the central square and in the camps for displaced people. They demanded price controls and denounced rapacious landlords. ISIS was now the most popular entity in the city, armed or civilian.
Eight months of painstaking political work—building coalitions, establishing civic front organizations, circulating propaganda, well-timed theatre—had won ISIS a decisive following. Revolutionaries had braved bullets and prison to overthrow the dictatorship and build a fledgling democracy. In the beginning, they had the allegiance of the masses, who marched through the alleyways and plazas chanting in praise of freedom. But now people spoke only of the prices at the grocer, the cost of rent. The city had exhausted itself, and people hoped not for liberation but deliverance.
Syria is hardly the only example of this phenomenon. Persistent economic inequality has long sounded democracy’s death knell. In the latter years of the Roman Republic, landowners amassed unprecedented riches while plebeians floundered, spawning resentment that infected many corners of society. In the context of this soaring inequality—that is, of ordinary people’s loss of power—there appeared, for the first time, populist politicians like Julius Caesar, who promised reforms while accruing dangerous degrees of power themselves. Other élites fiercely resisted the populist surge but refused to make meaningful concessions to address the citizenry’s core grievances. Ultimately, civil war led to the fall of the Republic and the rise of dictatorship.
In 1848, a popular uprising in France overthrew the monarchy, demanding universal manhood suffrage and wealth redistribution. The revolution established government-owned workshops that employed the poor, but were bitterly opposed by the wealthy. A conservative government shut them down, prompting bloody riots. Eventually, the masses voted for Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, a nephew of the famed emperor, in a landslide. He styled himself as all things to all people—a paragon of order to the right, a champion of the poor to the left. As soon as he was elected, he cracked down on the freedoms of press and assembly, and later dissolved parliament. Before long, he declared himself emperor.
Aspiring tyrants inevitably promise security and food on the table. The masses, demeaned and starved, see in tyranny a tantalizing elixir of equality and self-respect, which will liberate them from élite domination and deliver them from want and anxieties.
On January 24, 2014, ISIS took over Manbij. That morning, Abdul Hadi climbed onto the roof of a grain silo. He ran his eyes over the vista below—the concrete blocks and warrens smelling of exhaust. He would inhabit a new city, one different than he’d ever known—the streets without squalor, the streets busy with purpose, peopled by men and women joined in common struggle. It would be a city of workshops and warehouses, simple mosques and well-kept cemeteries, but there would be no gates or lines, no rich or poor. This would be his city of justice.
The Islamic State’s tyranny drew on the cultural resources of the Middle East—Islam—while Assad’s tyranny drew upon a different but also uniquely Middle Eastern heritage, Arab nationalism. Yet the tyrannical impulse of authoritarian populists is the same across the world. In one context, the authoritarian is railing against non-Muslims; in another it is immigrants. No matter the trope, the forms of mobilization are identical: those who feel powerless and hopeless, who are embittered by the rapacious greed of élites controlling their democracy, will begin to question the idea of democracy. If tyranny is where democracies go to die, inequality is the cause of death.
The caliphate ruled Manbij for two brutal years—years of summary executions and punitive amputations. Once people realized that the Islamic State’s promises were false—that the only security they were granted was one of desolation—it was too late. One by one, residents who’d been enthralled by ISIS’s message tried to escape the city. Sometimes they succeeded, but often they were hunted down. By the time Abdul Hadi realized how wrong he’d been, there was nowhere to turn. An American-backed coalition obliterated the group and destroyed large parts of Manbij. Abdul Hadi spent his days hiding in hovels in distant parts of Syria, turning his mind obsessively over the old days of revolution, over fleeting encounters and terrible choices. He has never been able to return home. ♦
This is drawn from “Days of Love and Rage: A Story of Ordinary People Forging a Revolution.”