“Fuck Raqqa, Fuck Raqqa!” scream at us a little more than twenty-year-old soldier in the only English words he knows, as soon as we go inside the headquarters of Syrian Christian troops who are fighting house to house to conquer what once was the capital of the Islamic State.
We are inside Raqqa, in the western part of the city liberated by the Syrian Kurdish forces in northern Syria. The scenario is desolating: it reminds us of the one seen only in some 1945 Berlin documentary. Like Nazi Germany, the Islamic State, or whatever is left of it, graps the last resources and enrolls young militants of fourteen or fifteen years, sending them in disperate suicide operations against enemy soldiers. “You are the future of Islam,” they tell them convincing and deceiving them to be sent at a certain death.
“Daesh throw against us children and civilians with hidden bomb belts,” tells Kino, a spokesman for the Syrian Christian Military Forces (MFS), more than a thousand soldiers incorporated in the SDF, the US-backed Kurdish forces. “They use children and civilians as human shields. We do our utmost to prevent the deaths of civilians but at the moment it is extremely complicated.” It’s a crude, miserable war that saves no one, not even the children.
They invite us to go with them to the front, in the closest part to the last positions of the “black flags”. The inevitable crucifix on the dashboard of the car and a holy card of Jesus Christ, proudly displayed make understand the determination of these young soldiers not to hide their faith against those who have committed a genocide against their people, raping and grabbing those lands, cradle of Christianity.
Rubble over rubble, swept buildings. Only the pillars were left standing. The rest was torn mercilessly by the battle fought to win over even just a few meters. The sound of the bombings goes with us all the way. Some survivors walk on the side of the road where pick-ups and armored vehicles leap to go to or come back from the front.
We park the vehicle under what we were told was a hotel, now impossible to recognize. Crossing a square with a deafening silence, we are told to follow exactly the steps of the soldiers. Two days before their comrade was blown up on a landmine a few meters from where we are. The area was not cleaned up and some mines are still hidden under stones.
Inside a building, we repair behind a black curtain covering us from the notorious Chechen snipers of ISIS. From the location we can see the roofs of what once was a city.
“We Christian fighters are proud of not having fled. We are Christians and these lands belong to us. All we could do was pull up the rifles to fight honoring our fathers and giving our children a future at our house! “Says the soldier Matthew, battle nickname in sake of Matthew the evangelist.
While we interview, we suddenly heard a deafening roar. The air moves and we cower there for shelter. Just a few hundred meters away a car bomb exploded. The sky over Raqqa becomes black from smoke. From the radio we learn that the suicide attack was aimed just against a Christian check post.
They tell us it’s better to go back. We hear fired shots. The soldiers make us queue one at a time and running we cross back the square. At a glance we see a pink shoe in the rubbish: was it lost by a girl running away, or placed there by the “black militias” connecting it to an explosive? We are told that there are many traps put cowardly by Islamic fundamentalists to claim more victims: Bibles, children’s strollers and toys connected to explosives ready to kill.
Returning to the headquarters, we meet the famous Christian women fighters just back from the front. They smile melancholy. In their Middle Eastern eyes, there is a mixture of pride and sadness at the same time. Syrian, Kurdish, Christian or Yazide women, embracing arms, and by showing the world that they too could fight and suffer alongside men at the front, have contributed much more to the fight for women’s rights that decades of Western feminism, with their bicycle pumps for home-made abortions, pink masks in shape of vagina and rainbow-colored Islamic veil.
We leave Raqqa at sunset. The devastated horizon is interrupted only by the minaret of a mosque that no one dared to break down even during the fighting. Just outside the city we see children play by skipping the rope on the roofs.
Right from these children, without education for more than six years and used to public executions and tortures every day, Syria have to resume in order to guarantee itself not only a political future, but above all a future as humans.
Source: Gli occhi della guerra