A Year After the End of ISIS Control in Raqqa, a Ruined City Looks to Rebuild

One morning in mid-October, a gravedigger called Abu Ahmed struck his shovel on a paving stone buried under four feet of dirt in Raqqa’s Panorama Park. Once among the greenest places in the city, this denuded square on the northern bank of the Euphrates River is now a graveyard for some fifteen hundred people. In part to protect the water supply, and partly in an effort to identify isis victims, the provisional municipal government ordered the bodies exhumed and removed to a cemetery in the outer desert. Wearing latex gloves and a kaffiyeh wrapped around his face, Abu Ahmed overturned the stone to expose a white body bag. It was the fifth corpse that he and his team of seven had found that day. As he jostled the bag free of the soil, it ripped, spilling out a jumble of greenish bones, stained rags, and a loose tuft of beard. “This one is isis,” he said, indicating the camouflage pattern on the rotting cloth. “All his bones, broken. He is killed by warplane.”

Panorama Park is just one of about two hundred mass graves thought to exist in Raqqa, a city with a prewar population of perhaps half a million. For three years Raqqa was the capital of the Islamic State, and it was the last isis stronghold to fall. Last summer, a Kurdish-led coalition of militias known as the Syrian Democratic Forces, or S.D.F., invaded from the north. Backed by American airpower and thousands of U.S. commandos, they spent four months battling to take the city one house, one building, one street at a time. On October 17, 2017, the S.D.F. captured Paradise Square, the downtown roundabout where isisexecutioners used to flog and stone and crucify people.

Although the battle left the city in ruins, refugees are now returning by the tens of thousands. The week I visited, gangs of workmen were breaking up rubble with sledgehammers, straightening rebar, and pouring concrete in a constant din of jackhammers and generators. Running water had been restored to every neighborhood, if not to every house, and many areas had electricity again. The bazaar was crowded with pedestrians and jammed with honking vehicles. There were colorful displays of textiles and jewelry and produce set out on the sidewalks, and the smell of kebabs grilling over charcoal mixed with diesel exhaust. But every other storefront was filled with rubble, and many people were missing limbs or moving about on crutches.

“The planes of U.S.A. did a lot of mistakes,” a twenty-two-year-old native of Raqqa named Ibrahim told me. He took me to a small house on a dirt lane to meet his friend Majed, a twenty-year-old who lost nine family members in one air strike, in December, 2016. Majed’s brother-in-law, Mustafa Kasim, a forty-year-old schoolteacher, decided to move his family in the middle of the night to escape heaving shelling. They had just settled into a brick house on the road to Ayn Issa when the building was hit by an American missile. All of Kasim’s family was killed save Majed’s sister, who is now paralyzed, and her six-year-old daughter, the only one who was physically unharmed. I asked Majed if he blamed the United States for the loss of his family and in-laws. “I don’t care about America,” he said, wiping tears from his eyes. “I believe in destiny.”

According to Airwars, a nonprofit monitoring group based in London, American and European warplanes dropped more than twenty thousand bombs on Raqqa. “Almost eighty per cent of the city was destroyed,” Abdulwahab Tahhan, an Airwars researcher from Aleppo, told me. “The coalition dropped leaflets on people telling them to stay away from isis places, but it’s not like they were free to do what they wanted. isis used them as human shields. The videos and photos coming out were really graphic. We could not publish them in Western media. That’s always the case with air strikes.” The Pentagon has acknowledged causing a hundred and four innocent deaths in Raqqa, but Airwars has documented at least fourteen hundred and fifty. Even that figure is “very underreported,” Tahhan said, in part because of the Muslim custom of immediately burying the dead. “People could not really go to the cemetery, so they would bury them under houses, or inside flats. People were burying their loved ones in parks and gardens or the medians of streets. From one median, they recovered fifty bodies.”

For the people now returning to Raqqa, the greatest danger is landmines. Jerry Guilbert, the chief of programs at the State Department’s Office of Weapons Removal and Abatement, told me that territory liberated from isis control is as badly contaminated with landmines as Afghanistan. “We’re talking about a World War II level of contamination,” he said. “As bad or worse than any other post-conflict situation in the world.” In July, 2017, while embedded with the S.D.F. in Raqqa, I heard stories of mines being wired to light switches, hidden inside mattresses, in refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, and other appliances, concealed in hollowed-out Qurans, sewn inside of Teddy bears, even placed beneath a live baby that isis fighters left bawling in a stroller, attracting two Kurdish fighters who were killed when they tried to pick up the child. “Some have two or three different mechanisms,” Guilbert said. “Trip wires, remote controls, pressure plates, which are long strips of metal that you step on. Crush wire, which is like a string of prayer beads with dozens of individual switches. In some cases they put an I.E.D. inside a wall and poured concrete around it, with one little motion-detector eye. You need a lot of experience to disarm something like that.”

Donald Trump has repeatedly said that the United States will not pay for “reconstruction” in Syria, but in January, 2018, the State Department allocated some two hundred and thirty million dollars toward Raqqa’s “stabilization,” including de-mining efforts. That was a relatively modest sum, about a hundredth of what the U.S. has spent on bombing the Islamic State. Nevertheless, in August, Trump cancelled the grant. “We got a stop-work order from the State Department,” the C.E.O. of one of the American companies involved in the relief efforts, who didn’t want to be named for fear of jeopardizing his government contract, told me. “Our de-mining and counter-I.E.D. projects immediately got downsized by half.” He initially employed some five hundred Syrian workers, a substantial jobs program in a city where unemployment is nearly as big a problem as the lack of security. “One person on our task force committed suicide,” he said. “He was a guy with children, a wife. He was told, ‘As of Friday, your job’s over with.’ He put his rifle under his chin and blew his head off.”

The Trump Administration’s argument was that other countries should pay to stabilize Raqqa, given the threat that the Islamic State poses to the wider Middle East and to Europe. Eventually, a number of nations did step up to pledge about three hundred million dollars, allowing work to continue in April. Yet the confusion was typical of Trump’s erratic management of American soldiers, diplomats, and contractors in Syria. “There’s no clarity,” the C.E.O. said. “We’re going on a wish and a prayer.”

For the past year, the State Department has overseen an effort to clear Raqqa of mines and other unexploded ordnance through the Raqqa Reconstruction Committee, part of the Raqqa Civil Council, a provisional municipal government under the S.D.F.’s protection. The work has been limited to infrastructure like dams, bridges, and electric and water facilities, as well as hospitals and schools, but progress has been slow. American citizens are not allowed to work in Syria because it’s a designated sponsor of terrorism, and the State Department can only work with foreigners who have been vetted. The overarching de-mining contract is held by Tetra Tech, a construction and engineering firm based in California, with security provided by TigerSwan, a private military contractor out of North Carolina, and there are a number of European nonprofits involved. But work on the ground is largely subcontracted to companies in Iraqi Kurdistan, which have the wherewithal to clear the State Department’s bureaucratic hurdles. “We gave all our employees’ names, nationalities, dates of birth, time with the company, e-mail addresses, and mobile numbers,” Saman Atrushi, a general manager at PowerGate, a transport and trading firm based in Dohuk, told me. “It took six months.”

Local Syrians, mostly former S.D.F. fighters, do the dirty, dangerous work of clearing rubble and defusing explosive remnants of war, or E.R.W., as they’re called in State Department parlance. In practice, when someone finds an unexploded munition, it gets reported to the Reconstruction Committee, which is headed by a middle-aged lawyer named Abdul Arian, whom I met in his third-story office in Raqqa. In the first months after the battle, Arian said, mines were killing ten to twelve people a day. Now, with much of the rubble removed, the number is more like one a week, but the work will take years to complete. (To put things in perspective, he said that in 2014, a live American bomb was found in Hamburg, Germany—nearly seventy years after the end of the Second World War.)

Arian’s office was filled with people coming and going in clouds of secondhand smoke. At one point, when he was distracted by a commotion of squawking radios, he explained that an unexploded rocket had been reported in the wreckage of a house on the north side of town. I asked if we could go see. Arian could not go himself, he said, because the security forces on the scene were Kurdish, “and I am Arabian person,” but he radioed my request to the Kurds. While we waited to hear back, drinking Bedouin espresso, Arian aired some grievances typical of Raqqa’s Arab residents. isis fighters did not come from around here, he said, but from all over the world, and were allowed to do so by Western spy agencies, so that they could be more conveniently killed in one place. “Not us bring this terrorists to our land,” he said, tapping my knee for emphasis. “The world decided to get rid of in Raqqa all this garbage, and they killed a huge number of poor people. We paid, the people of Raqqa, for this crisis. At least the world must be responsible now.”

On the way to the house where the rocket was found, my Kurdish guide expressed some countervailing sentiments typical of Raqqa’s Kurdish residents, namely that the Arabs are all isis sympathizers and would much prefer isis rule to occupation by the S.D.F. “You will see it on the faces of them,” he said. “They are still isis in the mind.” If the United States pulls out of Syria, he said, lowering his voice, “they will drink our blood.”

Just then, the armored Land Rover we were following slowed to a stop. After a long wait, we were told to turn around. Back at the council building, I learned what had happened. At an electrical station near our destination, two de-mining workers had been killed trying to disarm a mine with an internal laser mechanism that can detect the slightest motion. Their names were Sameer Nami and Matab Khalaf, both twenty-five years old. They were the sixth and seventh de-mining workers killed that week, but, like the number of people slain by air strikes, executed by the Islamic State, or buried in mass graves, no one could give me the total with any degree of confidence.

By the end of the workday, Abu Ahmed and his comrades had exhumed ten corpses. They were lined up side by side in bright blue body bags, some of them pitifully small, containing the remains of children. Each was marked with the date, the location, and the gender of the deceased. An elderly forensic doctor named Mahmoud Hassan noted any distinguishing characteristics in his notebook. “We record everything,” he said. “Male or female. Children or adult. Fighter or civil. In pieces or complete. Any remarks, like ring, earring, teeth, shoes, weapons, girdle. Color and type of hair. Length of body.” He said earthmoving machines, a DNA screening lab, and hepatitis vaccinations for the gravediggers were badly needed, but not to be had.

In the first weeks after the battle ended, Abu Ahmed and the others took it upon themselves to collect bodies left in the streets. No one asked them to do it, and they didn’t get paid. Now they receive a small salary from the Reconstruction Committee, but their motivation hasn’t changed. “It’s our job,” Abu Ahmed explained. “Reduce the suffering of people when they know the relative who died.” Hassan said they might succeed in matching a name with a body in one in a dozen cases.