Raqqa Was the Capital of ISIS. Can It Ever Be Home Again?

RAQQA, Syria — Eissa Ali’s family left Raqqa, which was the capital of Islamic State territory for more than three years, after he was detained and beaten by jihadis for playing cards.

Now that the bombs have stopped falling and the militant group known as ISIS is gone, they came home to find the top two floors of their house missing. Most of the neighborhood was gone, erased by airstrikes. They patched holes in the walls, cleaned out the rubble and moved back in anyway.

We came to Raqqa to see how people are trying to recover their lives. People here remain in shock, trying to make sense of the destruction. Residents we met were glad that the jihadis were gone. But there isn’t enough money to rebuild. They wondered whether it was necessary for a U.S.-led coalition to destroy the city. And it was unclear what it would take to recover from scars left by ISIS.

More than 3,000 buildings were destroyed and hundreds of civilians were killed after the U.S.-led coalition dropped thousands of bombs on the city to get ISIS out. It’s part of a much bigger civil war in Syria that has lasted more than seven years and killed hundreds of thousands of people.

We visited Paradise Square, which used to be a thriving commercial center.

The square became famous in 2014 when ISIS announced its caliphate and spread images of its fighters celebrating there with a military parade. It used to be lined with shops and cafes. ISIS used it for executions. Prisoners were beheaded in the street, their heads impaled atop a metal fence and their bodies dumped on the sidewalk below.

Yasser Hamadihad an unwanted front-row seat to the brutality from his snack shop on the square. Now, his shop has reopened, but business is slow. Those who have returned have little money to spend.

Mohammed Ali, who has a barbershop, was caught smoking and was detained for three days and beaten. He had been forbidden to trim beards or buzz the sides of people’s heads. Now, the most popular cut for kids is buzzed on the sides, with racing stripes.

Many people have come back, preferring their damaged homes to refugee camps. But there is little outside aid to rebuild.

As people dig through the rubble, they find new horrors. Abdul-Rahman Abdul-Kareem can smell the stench of a dead body somewhere in the rubble of a neighbor’s house. He doesn’t know whose body it is, and he has no way to dig it out.

A destroyed soccer stadium is where ISIS made its last stand in the city. The basement still had cells where prisoners were held. Now it is deathly quiet. On the wall of one cell were 47 X’s, probably someone counting their days in jail.

Along a main road, we saw the remains of five bodies exhumed from a mass grave. Had they been killed by ISIS? By American bombs? No one knew.

Fear lingers. The city is being run by a local council under the protection of Kurdish-led forces backed by the United States. But for how long? Will the Syrian government will come back, or the jihadis?

Kids no longer need the conservative clothes they had to wear under ISIS. But Khilfa Shawa told me she had stored them away, just in case. Many kids have not been to school in a long time.

These boys got plastic guns as holiday gifts and imitated what they had seen the adults doing. One promised to liberate the neighborhood. When I asked whom they were liberating it from, or for, they said they didn’t know.

“We thank the coalition for getting rid of ISIS for us, but was ISIS behind every wall?” Abdul-Kareem said. “Did there need to be this much destruction?”