Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS

by Azadeh Moaveni

It is arguably the most defining conflict of our time, and yet, has there ever been a modern conflict so readily misunderstood? The Syrian civil war, now drawing to a close, is most often viewed as a sectarian war between Shia and Sunnis, a proxy conflict between Iran and Gulf Arab states, and a contest for the upper-hand among those Arab states themselves. Those who wish to excuse America’s role in exacerbating the conflict call it a war of Iranian aggression, abetted by Russia; those who wish to challenge U.S. hegemony minimize Assad’s war crimes and paint his opposition as al-Qaeda fanatics. All these descriptions carry whispers of truth, but they elide Syria’s many other divides—the fractures among Syrian Sunnis themselves, along class and geographic lines, degrees of religiosity and secularism; the frightened early turn of Syria’s other religious minorities, the Christians and the Druze, in favor of Assad, whose decades of familial authoritarian rule seemed safer than any alternative that might replace it; the decision of millions of Syrians to simply stay put, not out of loyalty but because they wearied of fighting, or chose the regime as a lesser evil.