Dear Deeply Readers,

Welcome to the archives of Syria Deeply. While we paused regular publication of the site on May 15, 2018, and transitioned some of our coverage to Peacebuilding Deeply, we are happy to serve as an ongoing public resource on the Syrian conflict. We hope you’ll enjoy the reporting and analysis that was produced by our dedicated community of editors contributors.

We continue to produce events and special projects while we explore where the on-site journalism goes next. If you’d like to reach us with feedback or ideas for collaboration you can do so at [email protected].

BROWSE THE SYRIA DEEPLY ARCHIVES

Christian Science Monitor: Woman Uses Hidden Camera to Expose Life under Islamic State

A Syrian woman walked the streets of Raqqa with a camera hidden in her niqab. The video offers a rare glimpse of what life is like in the IS stronghold, where the group has imposed a radical interpretation of Islamic law.

Written by Anne Steele Published on Read time Approx. 2 minutes
Syria DeeplySyria Deeply

A woman in a full niqab veil walks with a toddler to the children’s playground in Raqqa, Syria; an AK-47 slung over her shoulder.

There is no music, no entertainment in the streets. Businesses are closed, forced to shut down multiple times a day for prayers.

Such is life in the Islamic State-controlled city of Raqqa, as shown through the lens of a woman living there. The northern Syrian city has been in the clutches of the militant Islamist group for more than a year, and the footage was recorded by an unidentified Syrian woman for news station France 2. She agreed to hide a camera in her IS-mandated black niqab as she walked through sections of the city.

The footage, narrated in French and dubbed in English, offers glimpses of daily life: busy streets filled with cars and bicycles, a market with piles of vegetables, and the predominance of men in public areas, many of them brandishing guns.

At one point, the woman filming is noticed by a religious police officer. He reprimands her because he can see her face. “You have to pay attention by covering up,” he says. “God loves women who are covered.”

While some women in Raqqa are suffering under such repression, an increasing number of foreign women have traded their lives and families in France to join the jihadi society. In an internet cafe, a woman – one of around 150 French women now in Syria, according to the France 2 report – on the phone explains to her mother back in France that she is determined to stay.

“I did not take the risk by coming here to go back to France,” she says in perfect French. “I do not want to return because I am doing well here, mom.”

Women coming to Syria to get married or join their husbands are an essential element of the propaganda and strategy of IS’s fundamentalist campaign, France 2 reports.

Bereaved families on the other end of the line are having trouble grasping the radical choice their daughters have made, according to the report. Especially when the stories they hear about IS treatment of women are so dire.

Sameera Salih Ali Al-Nuaimy, a human rights lawyer and activist, was seized from her home and tortured for five days by IS before being publicly executed in Mosul, Iraq, according to a statement today from the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI). UNAMI said she was taken on Sep. 17 following posts on her Facebook page that were “critical of [IS’s] destruction of places of religious and cultural significance” and convicted by a so-called “Shari’a court” for apostasy.

In interviews with The Christian Science Monitor Syrian women described the difficulty of living under the radical and unforgiving interpretation of Islamic law.

“Before Daash (IS), I was able to travel to Denmark and Beirut and all over Syria on my own. Now I can’t even go around the corner in Raqqa without having a male escort,” a 60-year-old woman returning to Raqqa with her two daughters from Turkey said. They were going back to Syria because they were unable to make a living in Istanbul.

Another woman said it was like having “20,000 Assads,” and added “The worst is their women – they walk about carrying guns, grenades, and suicide belts. You are always worried that one of them will go off by accident.”

This post originally appeared in The Christian Science Monitor

Syria

Republish this article

Our mission is to empower stakeholders and the wider public with high quality information, insights, and analysis on critical global issues. To help achieve this, we encourage you to republish the text of any article that contains a Republish button on your own news outlet.

By copying the HTML below, you agree to adhere to our republishing guidelines.

By copying the HTML below, you agree to adhere to our republishing guidelines. Click to expand

  1. In republishing any of our articles:

    Ensure that you include a line of our HTML tracking code on every article you republish. This is a lightweight, efficient way for us to see the number of page views of each specific article published on our partners’ websites. This does not affect page layout, nor does it provide any information about your users, other web pages on your site, or any further data. By copying and pasting the HTML code in the box below, the tracking code is automatically included.

    If, for any reason, you do not copy the code prepared for you, you must paste this code snippet into the end of the article in your CMS: 

    <img src="http://ping.newsdeeply.com/pixel.gif?key=98048&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.newsdeeply.com%2Fsyria%2Farticles%2F2014%2F09%2F26%2Fchristian-science-monitor-woman-uses-hidden-camera-to-expose-life-under-islamic-state" alt="" />

  2. Adhere to the guidelines below:
    • Edit our stories only to reflect references to time (e.g. "today" to "yesterday"), location (e.g. "New York" to "here") or editorial style; do not edit the wording of our articles.
    • Include all the links within the story.
    • Credit our authors and partner institutions — ideally in the byline. We prefer “Author Name, Institution”
    • Note at the top and/or bottom of the story that it originally appeared on Syria Deeply. This note should include a direct link to the original article and a sentence that offers the reader the opportunity to join the Syria’s mailing list. Our recommended example is:
      • This should read : “This article originally appeared on Syria Deeply. You can find the original here. For important news about the war in Syria, you can sign up to the Syria email list.”
    • Do not republish a photo without our written permission. Some sources don't allow their images to be republished without permission.
    • Do not translate a story into another language without our written permission.
    • We often republish pieces from our partners. If you want to republish a partner’s story, you must credit the original partner and include a “via News Deeply” link.
    • Note that News Deeply considers the publication date to be the date marked on the story, and is not responsible for any content that you choose to repost.
    • After republication on the partner website, if you make an accompanying post on social media referencing the republished article, you must include the relevant Deeply social media handle in such post. For example, (i) for Twitter posts this means adding the appropriate @Deeply tag such as @SyriaDeeply, @WaterDeeply, or @WomensGirlsHub and (ii) for Facebook this means tagging the appropriate Deeply page in your Facebook post.
    • News Deeply material may not to be provided, in whole or in part, directly or indirectly, to third parties or affiliates for redistribution through those entities, unless you have received prior written approval from News Deeply.
    • You may not automatically or systematically republish any material from our sites; all stories must be chosen individually for republishing.
    • You may not sell our content or republish it for commercial purposes without our prior written consent.
    • We reserve the right to request that any partner ceases republication of our content, including but not limited to if the guidelines listed above not being followed.
    • If you have any questions or concerns please contact [email protected]

Suggest your story or issue.

Send

Share Your Story.

Have a story idea? Interested in adding your voice to our growing community?

Learn more