Civilians looked out into their neighborhood in Palmyra, Syria, on May 18, the day after ISIS fired rockets into the city.
Credit
Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
BEIRUT,
Lebanon — Hours after they swept into the Syrian city of Palmyra last
week, Islamic State militants carried out scores of summary executions,
leaving the bodies of victims — including dozens of government soldiers —
in the streets.
Then,
residents say, they set about acting like municipal functionaries. They
fixed the power plant, turned on the water pumps, held meetings with
local leaders, opened the city’s lone bakery and started distributing
free bread. They planted their flag atop Palmyra’s storied ancient
ruins, and did not immediately loot and destroy them, as they have done
at other archaeological sites.
Next
came dozens of Syrian government airstrikes, some killing civilians.
That gave the Islamic State a political assist: Within days, some
residents had redirected the immediate focus of their anger and fear
from the militants on the ground to the warplanes overhead.
In
Palmyra, the Islamic State group appears to be digging into power in a
series of steps it has honed over two years of accumulating territory in
Iraq and Syria.
But
Palmyra presents a new twist: It is the first Syrian city the group has
taken from the government, not from insurgents. In Raqqa, farther
north, and in Iraq, the group has moved quickly and harshly against
anyone perceived as a rival.
The
Islamic State alternates between terrorizing residents and courting
them. It takes over institutions. And it seeks to co-opt opposition to
the government, painting itself as the champion of the people — or at
least, the Sunnis — against oppressive central authorities.
That method has helped the group entrench itself in the cities of Raqqa, Syria, and Mosul, Iraq, and is now unfolding in Palmyra.
The
Palmyra takeover was detailed by half a dozen residents of the city,
including supporters and opponents of the government, via phone or
electronic messaging. All asked not to be fully identified, to avoid
reprisals from the government or from the Islamic State, also known as ISIS,
ISIL or Daesh. Most cast themselves as caught between the threats of
government airstrikes and ISIS beheadings or other killings.
On
Wednesday, for example, several residents reported that the Islamic
State had killed 20 army soldiers in an ancient amphitheater. Others
recalled seeing the bodies of soldiers burned alive or beheaded by
militants.
“They
slaughtered many,” a cafe owner exclaimed about ISIS, then switched to
the subject of air raids that he would later blame for the deaths of
several friends: “God knows what they’re bombing, it’s so scary!”
Some
expressed surprise that so far ISIS abuses had not been even worse —
while at the same time they worried that the group might be refraining
from wider brutality while it courted support.
“They
are treating Palmyra’s people as if they were captured as human shields
by the regime,” said a Palmyra native who is outside Syria and receives
daily updates from family members there.
The
resident, who asked to be identified by a nickname, Dahham, said the
group’s message to everyone but pro-government fighters seemed to be:
“We have nothing to do with you. We know that you were under this regime
and nobody helped you.”
That
was unexpected, Dahham said; he had feared ISIS would punish Palmyra
for the freewheeling approach of its heavily Bedouin population, and
what he called its relationship with the West. Traditional and tribal
but not always strictly religious, many mixed easily with the foreign tourists whose business long sustained them.
But
in Palmyra, where a small local insurgency was crushed in 2012, there
is no armed antigovernment rival. Perhaps feeling less threatened, ISIS
militants have not immediately attacked activists who oppose both them
and the government.
One
such activist, Khaled al-Homsi, said he had relatives in ISIS and was
able to sit and talk with a group of fighters. The largest number, he
said, were foreigners, mixed with a few locals and many Syrians from all
over the country.
Their only demand, he said, was to discard his cigarette, saying he could smoke in his house, not in public.
“Daesh are trying to show some leniency,” he said. “But I don’t know how long it will last.”
Asked
how residents viewed the group, Mr. Homsi, who uses a nom de guerre for
safety, said civilians had little choice but to submit.
“They can do nothing,” he said. “Of course, we have a few who support the Daesh presence since their sons are with them.”
Ali,
a government security officer from another province, told a different
story, saying some residents helped ISIS. He had served for years in
Palmyra and fled last week “with my weapon only, no clothes, no
nothing.”
“The
civilians didn’t collaborate with us,” he said. “How do you expect the
government to operate if a sniper uses your building and you don’t
notify the army?”
Ali
said most of those summarily executed were soldiers and government
employees. Residents described personally seeing 30 to 80 corpses,
mostly soldiers and some civilians, including some known as recruiters
for pro-government militias.
Mr.
Homsi said he saw the bodies of a large group of soldiers burned in a
truck, perhaps while preparing to flee, and another four who refused to
come out of a house, and were burned inside.
By
contrast, residents in the security forces who had been avoiding the
battlefield — by paying bribes to stay home — were offered a chance to
“repent,” Dahham and others said.
Members
of prominent families are calculating where to throw their support. The
director of the Palmyra Museum, Khalil al-Hariri, a government
supporter, fled. One of his relatives, said to be a pro-government
militia recruiter, was killed. Another, residents said, pledged
allegiance to ISIS.
In
speeches broadcast from mosque minarets, residents say, ISIS has been
laying out rules and intentions. It has ordered them to surrender any
soldiers hidden in their houses. It has distributed black, flowing
chadors to stores, saying women should wear them. It has declared that
people can leave town for Raqqa, but only with permission.
So
far, ISIS appears to have placed a priority on establishing Palmyra as a
new outpost of its self-declared caliphate, rather than immediately
harming or looting the city’s magnificent Greco-Roman ruins, one of the
best preserved remnants of antiquity.
ISIS’
record of destroying or smuggling artifacts in Syria and Iraq has
raised worldwide alarms, particularly after it bragged of having
bulldozed ancient sites near Mosul this year.
On
Wednesday, in a radio broadcast, a man identifying himself as Abu Layth
al Saudi, the leader of the group in Palmyra, offered a clue to its
plans. The sprawling ruins “won’t be damaged, God willing,” he said. “We
will not touch it with our bulldozers as some tend to believe.”
But
he said the fighters would smash statues “worshiped by infidels in the
past.” (ISIS members had already entered Palmyra’s museum once, Mr.
Homsi said. Most portable statues had already been removed by officials,
so they smashed plaster statues depicting prehistoric life in the area,
locked the door and left.)
On
Wednesday, though, according to Mr. Homsi and others, ISIS used the
ruins to stage a macabre spectacle, shooting 20 government soldiers in
an ancient amphitheater better known in prewar days for a music
festival.
Residents
focus on a survival strategy, cowering from airstrikes and digging
wells when the pumps fail. The cafe owner, now in another city, said he
had lost several friends in bombardments; seven people from two families
died, including a gym teacher and a general’s wife. Now, he said, was
fretting over how to evacuate his parents.
“We will lose a lot of martyrs in the upcoming days,” he said.
Ahmad,
the owner of a souvenir shop, said he had driven all the way to Raqqa
to fill his car with canned food. Roads to government-held Homs were
impassable, he said, with military forces stopping Palmyra residents,
“calling them traitors because they didn’t fight with them,” and
arresting some.
“I
feel sorry for the civilians: They are being used as fuel,” he said.
“Between us, I might become an infidel to all the world’s religions.”[source]
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