By satellite phone and email, people living in ISIS-controlled Raqqa, Syria, say fighters have stolen their houses, killed family members and even forced them to pay rent on properties they already own.
ISIS fighters parading through the streets of Raqqa
RAQQA— The ISIS terror group has transformed Syria’s Raqqa province into what can only be described as an enormous prison. The Islamist fighters prohibit most people from traveling beyond the borders, even to other provinces, and communication with the outside world is limited.
Raqqa has also become a gathering place for the thousands of foreign fighters from dozens of countries who now dominate ISIS’s ranks. Locals say they have become virtual slaves to these extremist militants, who use brutal methods to maintain control. They also say that many have died at their hands, although the claims are impossible to verify. ISIS is also alleged to have seized thousands of houses from Kurds and others in the towns of Tal Akhdar, Tal Fandar and al-Yabisa, near the Tal Abyad area. These they have given to their fighters, who have come from around the world, including Uyghurs from China. Similar incidents have been reported in other parts of the province.
To understand what's happening inside Raqqa, Syria Deeply spoke by satellite phone and email with people living in the province. These are their stories.
"My brother, cousin and my brother’s friend were killed before my eyes when ISIS fighters stormed our house. They encircled the house and shot dead my brother, his friend and my cousin, who were trying to flee the house. Another bullet hit my 9-year-old sister. After they searched the house, they found nothing unusual there.
"Later, my 14-year-old cousin and I were arrested and taken to a basement that was used as a detention center. One ISIS fighter asked me whether I smoked. I said no. He sniffed my clothes and did the same with my cousin.
"I was pretty sure he was from the Arabian Gulf because of his accent. He said, "I know you are secretly selling tobacco." I answered, "Is this why you killed my brother and cousin?" A week later, we were released, and nobody did anything about what happened to us."
One of the major plotlines of the fourth season of Netflix's hit show, set in 1986, takes inspiration in the real satanic panic that swept the United States in the 1980s.
In Stranger Things' fourth season, Eddie Munson gets accused of flirting with the occult
From Kate Bush to Russian villainy, Season Four of Stranger Things revives many parts of the 1980s relevant to our times. Some of these blasts from the past provide welcome nostalgia. Others are like unwanted ghosts that will not go away. The American Satanic Panic of the 1980s is one of these less welcome but important callbacks.
In Stranger Things, season four, some residents of the all-American but cursed town of Hawkins hunt down the show’s cast of heroic misfits after labelling them as satanic cultists. The satanism accusation revolves around the game Dungeons and Dragons and the protagonists’ meetings to play it with other unpopular students at their high school as part of the Hellfire Club.
Mistaking a harmless game played by a pack of nerds for a satanic conspiracy, the athletic and popular Jason Carver wrongly blames its players for the very real supernatural horrors at the heart of the plot.
Satanic worship, sodomy, suicide and murder
The false link in the show between Dungeons and Dragons and an occult conspiracy is based on real history. In the 1980s, TV pundits, politicians, and religious leaders really thought the game was an entry point to satanic worship and an imagined vast conspiracy of satanic cults that supposedly permeated the United States and the entire world.
In the first episode, Eddie, the leader of the Hellfire Club and its Dungeons and Dragons game, derisively recites absurd accusations made at the time. These panicked allegations suggested Dungeons and Dragons promoted “satanic worship, sodomy, suicide, and even … murder!” During the season, Eddie himself becomes the victim of similar accusations.
Occult rituals, orgies and human sacrifices
The campaign against Dungeons and Dragons was part of a larger hysteria about a supposed enormous conspiracy, frequently called today the Satanic Panic.
The proliferation of belief in this conspiracy is tied to anxieties from accelerating social changes.
Central to it was the idea that networks of cults were conducting occult rituals, orgies, and human sacrifices, involving the abuse and murder of children. This ritual abuse was similar to the claims made in an influential but discredited book, Michelle Remembers (1980).
Stories like Michelle Remembers popularized the idea of large, inter-generational satanic networks that were taking down American society from inside. Specialists tie the proliferation of belief in this conspiracy to anxieties resulting from accelerating social changes.
These included women surging into the workforce, increasingly sensationalized crime reporting, the “decay” of traditional values, and the rise of the religious right in America.
McMartin Preschool in Manhattan Beach, California, was at the heart of a satanic conspiracy theory in the 1980s.
Belief in satanic conspiracy during the 1980s and 1990s destroyed many lives. Especially in North America, there were hundreds of accusations that resulted in numerous trials. Recent books and podcasts explore specific cases such as Martensville, Saskatchewan or the McMartin Preschool near Los Angeles.
At McMartin, it was alleged that hundreds of children had been sexually abused at underground orgies. Even in an atmosphere of panic, the evidence was insufficient to secure any convictions.
Accusations elsewhere frequently tried credulity, suggesting the murder of preposterous numbers of children and infants. These claims were false. For example, a 1994 study examined 12,000 accusations of organised satanic ritual abuse. It concluded there was no evidence for organised satanic cults that sexually abuse children.
Studies of specific accusations, such as at McMartin, often emphasise how adult investigators created accounts of abuse that fit their preconceptions of satanism. They did it, often unknowingly, by getting suggestible children to say what they expected to hear.
The models of ritual abuse investigators reproduced have a history. Early modern witch hunts are one frequently cited analogue, but the similarities run much deeper and further back in time. The secret meetings, orgies, and ritual abuse attributed to modern cults correspond to what Norman Cohn called the nocturnal ritual fantasy. Similar, accusations were made against witches, Christian heretics, Jews, and early Christians.
Satanic panic today
As author David Frankfurter suggests, the many different versions of supposed demonic conspiracies display patterns. One of the most worrisome and ironic is that historically verifiable atrocities take place not at the hands of non-existent cults – but rather during mistaken attempts to destroy them.
It has taken on new forms, as part of Pizzagate or QAnon.
One atrocity is the minimisation of the real abuse of children. By tying it to imagined conspiracies, delusions like the Satanic Panic avoid grappling with the actual social structures that facilitate abuse.
The Satanic Panic, or demonic occult conspiracy theory, is still with us. Actually, it has taken on new forms, as part of Pizzagate or QAnon. Believers of both conspiracies frequently allege that their social and political enemies ritually abuse children following ancient tropes of cult evil.
As in the past, such accusations can justify violence ironically performed in the name of eradicating evil. Belief in discredited, but familiar, demonic conspiracies makes it likely this familiar mistake will happen again.
One of the major plotlines of the fourth season of Netflix's hit show, set in 1986, takes inspiration in the real satanic panic that swept the United States in the 1980s.
The fate of Mykolaiv and surrounding areas of southern Ukraine are crucial in the next stage of the war. A reporter visits local villages ... and the troops on the front line.
Regardless of rising summer temperatures, Iran's Islamic authorities say they'll be punishing women not properly dressed and veiled at work. But some women are resisting.
Central to the tragic absurdity of this war is the question of language. Vladimir Putin has repeated that protecting ethnic Russians and the Russian-speaking populations of Ukraine was a driving motivation for his invasion.
Yet one month on, a quick look at the map shows that many of the worst-hit cities are those where Russian is the predominant language: Kharkiv, Odesa, Kherson.
Then there is Mariupol, under siege and symbol of Putin’s cruelty. In the largest city on the Azov Sea, with a population of half a million people, Ukrainians make up slightly less than half of the city's population, and Mariupol's second-largest national ethnicity is Russians. As of 2001, when the last census was conducted, 89.5% of the city's population identified Russian as their mother tongue.
The martyrdom of Mariupol
Between 2018 and 2019, I spent several months in Mariupol. It is a rugged but beautiful city dotted with Soviet-era architecture, featuring wide avenues and hillside parks, and an extensive industrial zone stretching along the shoreline. There was a vibrant youth culture and art scene, with students developing projects to turn their city into a regional cultural center with an international photography festival.
There were also many offices of international NGOs and human rights organizations, a consequence of the fact that Mariupol was the last major city before entering the occupied zone of Donbas. Many natives of the contested regions of Luhansk and Donetsk had moved there, taking jobs in restaurants and hospitals. I had fond memories of the welcoming from locals who were quicker to smile than in some other parts of Ukraine. All of this is gone.
Putin is bombing the very people he has claimed to want to rescue.
According to the latest data from the local authorities, 80% of the port city has been destroyed by Russian bombs, artillery fire and missile attacks, with particularly egregious targeting of civilians, including a maternity hospital, a theater where more than 1,000 people had taken shelter and a school where some 400 others were hiding.
The official civilian death toll of Mariupol is estimated at more than 3,000. There are no language or ethnic-based statistics of the victims, but it’s likely the majority were Russian speakers.
So let’s be clear, Putin is bombing the very people he has claimed to want to rescue.
Putin’s Public Enemy No. 1, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, is a mother-tongue Russian speaker who’d made a successful acting and comedy career in Russian-language broadcasting, having extensively toured Russian cities for years.
Rescuers carry a person injured during a shelling by Russian troops of Kharkiv, northeastern Ukraine.
Yes, the official language of Ukraine is Ukrainian, and a 2019 law aimed to ensure that it is used in public discourse, but no one has ever sought to abolish the Russian language in everyday life. In none of the cities that are now being bombed by the Russian army to supposedly liberate them has the Russian language been suppressed or have the Russian-speaking population been discriminated against.
Sociologist Mikhail Mishchenko explains that studies have found that the vast majority of Ukrainians don’t consider language a political issue. For reasons of history, culture and the similarities of the two languages, Ukraine is effectively a bilingual nation.
"The overwhelming majority of the population speaks both languages, Russian and Ukrainian,” Mishchenko explains. “Those who say they understand Russian poorly and have difficulty communicating in it are just over 4% percent. Approximately the same number of people say the same about Ukrainian.”
In general, there is no problem of communication and understanding. Often there will be conversations where one person speaks Ukrainian, and the other responds in Russian. Geographically, the Russian language is more dominant in the eastern and central parts of Ukraine, and Ukrainian in the west.
A daughter of Kyiv
Like most central Ukrainians I am perfectly bilingual: for me, Ukrainian and Russian are both native languages that I have used since childhood in Kyiv. My generation grew up on Russian rock, post-Soviet cinema, and translations of foreign literature into Russian. I communicate in Russian with my sister, and with my mother and daughter in Ukrainian. I write professionally in three languages: Ukrainian, Russian and English, and can also speak Polish, French, and a bit Japanese. My mother taught me that the more languages I know the more human I am.
At the same time, I am not Russian — nor British or Polish. I am Ukrainian. Ours is a nation with a long history and culture of its own, which has always included a multi-ethnic population: Russians, Belarusians, Moldovans, Crimean Tatars, Bulgarians, Romanians, Hungarians, Poles, Jews, Greeks. We all, they all, have found our place on Ukrainian soil. We speak different languages, pray in different churches, we have different traditions, clothes, and cuisine.
My mother taught me that the more languages I know the more human I am.
Like in other countries, these differences have been the source of conflict in our past. But it is who we are and will always be, and real progress has been made over the past three decades to embrace our multitudes. Our Jewish, Russian-speaking president is the most visible proof of that — and is in fact part of what our soldiers are fighting for.
Many in Moscow were convinced that Russian troops would be welcomed in Ukraine as liberating heroes by Russian speakers. Instead, young soldiers are forced to shoot at people who scream in their native language.
Starving people ina street of Kharkiv in 1933, during the famine
Putin has tried to rally the troops by warning that in Ukraine a “genocide” of ethnic Russians is being carried out by a government that must be “de-nazified.”
These are, of course, words with specific definitions that carry the full weight of history. The Ukrainian people know what genocide is not from books. In my hometown of Kyiv, German soldiers massacred Jews en masse. My grandfather survived the Buchenwald concentration camp, liberated by the U.S. army. My great-grandmother, who died at the age of 95, survived the 1932-33 famine when the Red Army carried out the genocide of the Ukrainian middle class, and her sister disappeared in the camps of Siberia, convicted for defying rationing to try to feed her children during the famine.
On Tuesday, came a notable report of one of the latest civilian deaths in the besieged Russian-speaking city of Kharkiv: a 96-year-old had been killed when shelling hit his apartment building. The victim’s name was Boris Romanchenko; he had survived Buchenwald and two other Nazi concentration camps during World War II. As President Zelensky noted: Hitler didn’t manage to kill him, but Putin did.
Genocide has returned to Ukraine, from Kharkiv to Kherson to Mariupol, as Vladimir Putin had warned. But it is his own genocide against the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine.