Raqqa Will Rise Again
For the third time in its history, the Syrian city of Raqqa is in ruins. Its revival will help reveal the secrets of humanity's past.
FOR THE third time in its history, the city of Raqqa is in ruins. It was first destroyed by the Persians in the early sixth century when it was known as Callinicum but was rebuilt by the Byzantine emperor Justinian shortly thereafter. The second time it was destroyed—by the Mongols in the mid-thirteenth century—it took centuries for the city to be rebuilt; its time as a political and intellectual center of the Islamic world had come to an abrupt end. The once and future capital of the Islamic caliphate was described as uninhabited ruins by historian Abu al-Fida in the early fourteenth century.
Several centuries after Raqqa’s second destruction, the Ottoman Empire took over the area in 1516 AD, and early in their tenure, a small population returned to the area. Members of the Abu Sha’aban tribe arrived in Raqqa in the mid-sixteenth century from Iraq, the first of several tribal migrations to the area during Ottoman rule, and a tax census from the 1560s records fifty-seven Muslim households and fourteen non-Muslim households in the town. However, according to tribal lore, the initial Abu Sha’aban tribesmen believed the abandoned city to be occupied by genies and demons and did not enter at night, living just outside the ruins.
It wasn’t until the late nineteenth century that the city really started to come back to life. Tribes in the area were settling down from their nomadic lifestyle, with others arriving from Iraq and Turkey, and, leading up to World War I, Circassian refugees were settled in the town after fleeing the Russian conquest of the Caucasus. They would be followed by survivors of the Armenian Genocide in 1915–16, who were by-and-large protected from the Ottoman government by locals. Residents started building houses out of the mud bricks that had made up the palaces of the likes of Harun al-Rashid, one of the most famous caliphs in Islamic history and star of A Thousand and One Nights. The Ottoman Imperial Museum was concerned that the site was being pillaged but was powerless to stop it. Raqqa’s famous medieval pottery made its way onto the antiquities black market.
In the twentieth century, Raqqa became a city again. By 1960, the town’s population had grown to 13,000. The 1970s brought the construction of Tabqa Dam just upstream on the Euphrates River, providing cheap electricity for industry and steady water for modernized irrigation. By 2004, the population was 220,000. But in 2017, after a century of steady growth and more than seven hundred years after the Mongols swept through and destroyed Raqqa, the city was once again largely destroyed. American, French and British airstrikes, which allowed the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) to oust the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) from the city, turned it into a skeleton.
BUT THIS time around it will not take centuries to rebuild Raqqa. In fact, the effort is already well underway and began almost immediately after the SDF took the city from ISIS in October 2017. The Raqqa Civil Council oversees the city’s reconstruction, and tangible progress has been made. I was accompanied on a trip into the city in December by Abu Ali, the “Fox of Raqqa” as his colleagues called him, who was astonished at the progress made in the city over the course of the last year. Gone were the berms and rubble that impeded movement throughout the city shortly after ISIS left. People were going about their business in the city, which was quite active the day we visited. On a second visit to Raqqa in April, I saw progress continuing at a steady pace, though the amount of work that remains is staggering.
Running water is now available throughout the city and public buses are running again. Electricity is not yet available everywhere—local generators fill the gap until the grid is functional again throughout the city. The most dangerous task at hand has been dealing with the mines ISIS left behind. Impatient residents began going back into their homes and offices before they had been cleared, and lost lives or limbs as a result. An estimated 3,700 residents are in need of prosthetics, and work on demining continues.
The campaign to remove ISIS from Raqqa came after a turbulent several years for the city. Before 2011 it was a relatively quiet provincial capital, mostly removed from Syria’s political machinations. When the Syrian uprising began in March 2011, calling for the ouster of President Bashar al-Assad, things evolved more slowly in Raqqa than elsewhere. But when a young man named Ali al-Babinsi was killed by police during the protest commemorating the first anniversary of the revolution in March 2012, the city erupted. Within a year, the city became the first provincial capital to fall out of government control, and local activists scrambled to prove that the regime could leave a major city and governance would not immediately fall apart.
Unfortunately, young protestors and activists were not the only ones with designs on the city, and the chaos brought about by the departure of an all-encompassing regime allowed groups of all stripes to surface and vie for control. Islamists emerged from inside and outside the city. ISIS eventually kicked everyone else out—Islamist or otherwise—who had a claim on authority, and jihadists came from all over the world to participate in ISIS’ experiment: the revival of the Islamic caliphate, which hadn’t existed since the Ottoman Empire’s collapse at the end of World War I. The city became the terrorist group’s de facto capital, and was made famous for all the wrong reasons: public beheadings, stonings, disappearances and the revival of slavery.
However, the world’s attention turned to the new hub of a terrorist organization that launched attacks in Europe and elsewhere, and the United States and its allies backed the Syrian Democratic Forces’ campaign to take Raqqa from ISIS. The battle was devastating to the city, leaving it in ruins for at least the third time in its history. But it wasn’t just houses and public buildings that were damaged during the battle to retake the city—many of the historic sites in and around the city were also damaged. Most buildings in modern Raqqa date to the twentieth century, but around the city lie scattered remains of the Raqqa that existed before its destruction by the Mongols in the thirteenth century.
The many crimes of ISIS include the group’s attempts to erase history that they deemed heretical or unsuitable to their iconoclastic vision of Islam. The group famously destroyed important landmarks in the historic city of Palmyra/Tadmor in the desert south of Raqqa and the al-Nuri Mosque in Mosul. In Raqqa itself, the group destroyed the Uwais al-Qarni shrine—a modern Shiite mosque dedicated to two early Islamic figures killed at the Battle of Siffin, an early battle in the emerging Sunni-Shiite divide which took place about thirty-five miles west of Raqqa along the Euphrates. Other sites in the city fared better, but war and neglect took their toll even on sites that the group left alone.
NOW THAT Raqqa is liberated from ISIS, and reconstruction is well underway, the hard work of documenting what is missing or destroyed, and preserving what is left, falls to residents of Raqqa and those willing to help them. During my visit to the city in December, staff from the Raqqa Civil Council’s Office of Museums and Antiquities showed me around the city’s museum, where many of the artifacts from historic sites from northern Syria had been kept. First built as an Ottoman police outpost, the building was later used by French authorities during France’s mandate in Syria between the two world wars.
Nearly every piece at the museum was looted during and even before ISIS’ takeover of the city and has presumably made its way onto the antiquities black market. The pieces that remain were probably just too difficult to move, including larger stone inscriptions and statues kept in the museum’s garden, and mosaics hanging on the museum’s walls. The Office of Museums and Antiquities is working to document missing pieces. This information will be key to enabling Interpol, the international policing agency, to intercept artifacts and return them to their rightful owners: the people of Raqqa.
After the city’s liberation, the most immediate task was to make the museum safe to enter. Mines, left behind by ISIS, were removed by internal security forces and the international coalition. The roof, damaged by artillery, was repaired and the building itself cleaned up. This work at the museum is an important step in preserving Raqqa’s heritage, but it is the historical and archaeological sites in and around Raqqa—a living museum of thousands of years of human history—where the real work of keeping the city’s history alive will be done.
THE OLDEST archaeological site in Raqqa’s immediate vicinity is Tell Zeidan, located about three miles east of the city near the confluence of the Balikh and Euphrates rivers. Humans lived at Tell Zeidan from about 5800 BC to 3800 BC—in other words, for a span of time equivalent to all of Christian history thus far—and there does not appear to have been any war or major disruption to life here during those two millennia. The site was excavated over the course of three summers, from 2008 to 2010, by Syrian and American archaeologists. The situation in Syria from 2011 on has prevented further work at the site, but what was revealed during the initial excavations was significant.
The span of human habitation at Tell Zeidan covers three prehistoric cultures and eras, known as Halaf, Ubeid and Uruk. The Ubeid-era settlement is the most revealing and encompasses most of Tell Zeidan’s history. Other Ubeid-era sites in Syria have been buried under newer habitations, but Tell Zeidan revealed, for example, that the Ubeid culture spread from southern Mesopotamia nearly a thousand years earlier than previously believed. Scholars had believed that this movement occurred around 4500 BC, but Ubeid-era artifacts found at Tell Zeidan, along with improved methods for matching radiocarbon dates and calendar dates, suggest an earlier date closer to 5300 or 5400 BC.
During the Ubeid era at Tell Zeidan, residents began to rely on domesticated animals for meat and materials, though they continued to hunt for meat as their predecessors had done. They were part of mankind’s transition from hunting and gathering to domestic agriculture. They traded, directly or indirectly, for obsidian that originated 300 kilometers away at Nemrut Dag in modern Turkey. The world was getting smaller. Towards the end of the Ubeid era, residents began smelting copper.
Archaeological work at Tell Zeidan was in its infancy when the war in Syria prevented work from continuing. Presumably much remains to be discovered; the site is relatively undamaged, and prehistoric pottery and obsidian are still visible on the surface of the main hill. But now the priority for local Raqqans is preserving the site to allow for future excavations when the war has ended. The uncertainty of the political situation, and the instability of the security environment, make resuming excavations here or elsewhere in the area unfeasible. The Office of Museums and Antiquities is instead focused on documenting the damage done to the sites and protecting them from further harm, so that someday archaeological work can return to Raqqa.
AS THE human settlement of Tell Zeidan ended in the fourth millennium BC, a new settlement emerged several miles to the west. Presumably, some factor, human or natural, caused those living at Tell Zeidan to relocate to the site of Tell Bi’a, just northeast of the modern city of Raqqa. By the third millennium BC the city had become known as Tuttul, and many of the cuneiform tablets found at the site were housed at Raqqa’s museum until ISIS and others looted it. Tuttul was caught between the two regional powers of the day: Ebla and Mari. Ebla, 125 miles to the west in the modern province of Idlib, was excavated by an Italian team of archaeologists starting in the 1960s. Mari is about 145 miles downstream from Raqqa on the Euphrates River, almost to the Iraqi border, and was excavated by French archaeologists starting in 1933. Over the course of fifty years of fighting in the third millennium BC, the two cities appear to have fought each other to a point of weakening both sides sufficiently to enable the Akkadians, based to the southeast in modern Iraq, to take over the entire area.
Following the decline of Mari and Ebla, Tuttul watched as northern Mesopotamia progressed from kingdoms to empires, with the Akkadians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Achaemenids and others taking over the area. The city had since ceased to exist, but Alexander the Great marched through the area in 331 BC, and brought with him the Hellenistic Greek culture that would change the face of the area. The city of Raqqa, initially called Nikephorion, was founded during the successor state to Alexander’s conquest of this area, the Seleucid Empire. The name was eventually changed to Callinicum, and the city fell on the frontier between the Greeks and Romans in the west, and the Persians in the east. St. Ambrose of Milan, addressing the Christian community’s burning of Callinicum’s synagogue in 388 AD, described the city as an unimportant frontier town (he was opposed to the Jewish community’s request that the Roman emperor fund the synagogue’s reconstruction). In the sixth century, the Persians sacked the city, but it was rebuilt and fortified by the Byzantine emperor Justinian.
Raqqa was, before and after the Islamic conquest, a center of Syriac Christian thought and politics. On the site that had previously been Tuttul, just northeast of the city, the Deir Zakka monastery produced a number of Syriac Orthodox patriarchs, and hosted a synod in 567 AD that attempted to reconcile the Syriac and Greek Orthodox churches, which separated following the Council of Chalcedon in 451 AD. Alas, to no avail; the schism remained. Arab tribes, mostly Christians themselves, roamed the area.
Tell al-Bi’a, site of Tuttul and subsequently of Deir Zakka monastery, means “hill of the church,” and is so named because of the Deir Zakka monastery that once sat here. German and Syrian archaeologists dug at this site from 1980 to 1994, and uncovered the remains of the monastery and the city of Tuttul. The hill is now occupied by families living in tents, and sheep roam the site. The dig site is no longer visible, and the level of activity there now is unlikely to upset further excavations at the site provided an alternate location is found for the families currently living there. ISIS dug a defensive trench at the base of the hill, but otherwise the site remains largely intact.
The Deir Zakka monastery remained an integral part of the city into the Islamic era. Islamic caliphs and emirs visited the hunting grounds surrounding the monastery. A thirteenth-century compilation of Arabic poetry and literature by Yaqout al-Hamawi tells the undated story of Sa’ad, a Muslim papermaker from al-Ruha (modern-day Sanliurfa in Turkey) and his love for Issa, the son of a Christian merchant from the same city who joined the monastery at Deir Zakka. Sa’ad could not bear to be separated from Issa, and followed him to Raqqa, where he ultimately died outside the monastery, the monks having refused to let him in. As the story goes, before he was found dead, a passerby found him speaking in Arabic verse to a pigeon residing in the monastery:
By your religion, o pigeon of Deir Zakka
And by your Gospel and your cross
Arise, and carry a greeting from me
To he who is like a moon on a dew-damp branch
…
Tell him: your poor Sa’ad complains
Of a burning love hotter than a flame
So allow him a look at you from afar
If you won’t allow from near
And if I die, then write on my grave
A lover, dead from the abandonment of his beloved…
WHEN THE Islamic conquerors took the city circa 639 AD, commanded by Iyad bin Ghanm, the city’s history took a drastic turn. The first Islamic caliph to give serious notice to Raqqa was Hisham bin Abdul Malik, who set up residence at Resafa, about twenty-five miles to the south of Raqqa. The caliph al-Mansour decided to construct a literal companion city, al-Rafiqa, west of the existing Raqqa, and the two became one of the largest cities of the Islamic world at that time. The city reached its heyday under Harun al-Rashid, who moved his capital from Baghdad to Raqqa in 796 AD, drawing poets, scholars and scientists from the reaches of the Islamic empire.
Most of the historic sites that remain inside Raqqa today date to the Abbasid era, which includes Harun al-Rashid’s reign. The most prominent is the city wall of al-Rafiqa. The wall was initially built as two walls, one outer and one inner with a moat between the two, but in the twentieth century, as the city reemerged and grew, the outer wall was bulldozed. Today only Baghdad Gate, leading to the southeast and towards the modern Iraqi capital, remains from the outer wall. The inner wall, however, remains largely intact despite three airstrikes damaging three sections of the wall during the campaign to liberate the city from ISIS.
Parts of the old mosque of al-Rafiqa remain, now forming a park in the center of the city. The minaret was damaged during the liberation of the city, but the outer wall remains largely intact. During my visit in December, two teenagers were smoking cigarettes among the ruins of the mosque—unthinkable when ISIS was in control of the city. Freedom has its terrible price, however, and these two young men were a potent reminder: one was pushing the other in a makeshift wheelchair, his friend having lost both of his legs—whether from an American airstrike or an ISIS mine I didn’t ask.
Also remaining from Harun al-Rashid’s time in the city is Qasr al-Banat, literally the “girls’ palace.” Locals believe the name refers to al-Rashid’s daughters who may have inhabited the palace, but there is no written record of the name’s origin. Sitting inside the historic city walls, the palace was neglected and ISIS dug a tunnel from inside the site. The tunnel was presumably used for protection from airstrikes, but it has not yet been examined to see how long it is or where it leads.
Just west of Raqqa sits the site of Heraqla, also dating to Harun al-Rashid’s rule in the city. After defeating the Byzantines at Heraclea, Rashid built what is known as a mastaba—a flat, brick platform—which served as a monument to his victory. The platform is rectangular, with four iwans—vaulted entryways—on each side. Each iwan faced a gate in the wall that surrounded the structure. The sites of those gates are still visible, though just barely.
The modern-era storehouses near the mastaba in Heraqla became the external storage site for a considerable number of artifacts that would not fit in Raqqa’s museum. Many of these artifacts disappeared during ISIS’ rule over the city, and even pieces that remain—such as mosaics from Deir Zakka monastery—are threatened by damage to the storage buildings, which exposed them to the elements. However, four kilns at the site are once again making traditional bricks in the style that has been used for millennia in Raqqa. These bricks will serve to accurately restore damaged sites throughout the area, like the city wall, museum and Qasr al-Banat.
Upon Harun al-Rashid’s death in 809 AD, his widow Zubeyda moved the caliphate’s capital back to Baghdad. Raqqa declined in importance over the next several centuries, though it remained a center of thought and writing. The city would find itself caught between aspirants to regional power in Aleppo and Mosul, reminiscent of its position in the third millennium BC between Ebla and Mari, and later between the Greeks/Romans and the Persians in the classical era. It would experience a short revival before its destruction by the Mongols in the mid-thirteenth century, but would then be mostly dormant until the twentieth century brought it back to life. The supposedly enlightened twenty-first century would bring mostly death and destruction.
SO WHAT does the future hold for Raqqa’s past? After two years of revolution, a chaotic interim, more than three years of ISIS rule, and a brutal air and ground campaign to liberate the city, it is struggling to survive. Given the immediate human needs of Raqqa’s population, is preserving the past much of a priority? Abdul Salaam Al-Ojeili, Raqqa’s most famous author (and doctor, and politician) of the twentieth century (d. 2006), didn’t think the Arabs cared much for old buildings and ruins generally. He wrote that poetry was the true expression of the Arab spirit, as it traveled with Arabs in their nomadic lifestyle; care for ruins was a Western concern, static and not dynamic. The efforts of those in Raqqa working to preserve the city’s architectural and archaeological heritage would suggest that Mr. Ojeili’s maxim did not apply to his hometown, at least not in 2019. Mohammad al-Izzo, the living memory of Raqqa’s historic sites, says that it certainly did not apply to the writer himself; he says Mr. Ojeili was in fact very interested in the architectural heritage of his city and country.
Should the United States decide to withdraw its troops from the area, a move proposed by President Donald Trump at the end of last year, the work to recover Raqqa’s archaeological heritage could be undone. ISIS cells remain under the surface and if the United State leaves, those cells, and others looking to upset the city’s precarious balance, will try to destabilize the city, putting Raqqa’s people, and their history, in danger once again. Turkey has threatened to invade areas under the control of the Syrian Democratic Forces, who currently control Raqqa. A Turkish-backed invasion of Afrin in the northwest led to massive destruction of historic and religious sites.
Restoration and preservation efforts in Raqqa have a long way to go. Is the day near when archaeologists can return to Tell Zeidan and uncover what other mysteries that site may reveal? When will the city’s museum be open again for visitors? And for what visitors? However unlikely it may seem now, the long sweep of Raqqa’s history would suggest that life will return to normal in this thrice-destroyed city.
Samuel Sweeney is a former Congressional staffer and is now a writer and translator based in the Middle East. He has a master’s degree in Islamic-Christian Relations from l’Université Saint-Joseph in Beirut.
Image: Reuters