“Khadija” … a lady who refused to live in ISIS black robes

Story NO 6

From: Raed Al Warraq
Edited by: Lana Haj Hassan

The story of Khadija is a story of hundreds of women in Raqqa and in areas controlled by ISIS, stories that carry a lot of pain, sadness and fear.

“Khadija Al-Hamoud” is a 31-year-old woman from Raqqa, married with three children living in a popular neighborhood in Raqqa.
She begins the story by saying:
I was arrested by ISIS after defending the 19-year-old daughter of our neighbors after seeing ISIS members trying to arrest her for violating the Islamic dress which was imposed on them.
As a result, ISIS operatives summoned the female Hisba, who arrested and referred me to a building belonging to them to al-Mu’awiya school in, north of Raqqa city center, on charges of arguing with religion affairs and standing with falsehood.
I spent 15 days in the school that the organization turned into prison. I saw daily about ten girls brought to the prison and put many charges on them, including going out without a mahram or finery and adornment or insulting the divine self and not paying zakat … and other charges.

During her talk, she pointed to those days that she lived with a fear that does not leave her as she mourns her fate whether she will beheaded or lashed, will she be released from prison, will she be tortured to death, questions that led to her puzzling and hallucinations of lack of sleep and too much thought about her fate.
She adds “I was in the period of my detention hearing the voices of torture from inside the prison for women believed to have been arrested from villages where the group is crawling, or as the organization claims to be wives of infidels and apostates, and this is the hardest thing I have ever heard.”

On the ninth day of my arrest, one of the women of the organization entered to us with a machine gun, wearing a quiver of fighters, full of black, calling me and then taking me to the juridical judge in the prison, who was of Moroccan origin.
Ali was sentenced to carry out a legitimate course through which they are brainwashing women and when the debate is repeated and defending those who violate the law of God or the soldiers of the state are crucified until she dies.

Khadija completed the Islamic organization course, half of it inside the prison and the other half outside at the mosque of Al Nour, where lessons and certificates are given in order to restore her identity card from which the organization took them.
During the session inside the mosque, which lasted for two hours after the pray of Maghrib and during her detention, the most difficult concern was to target the detainee or gather together the members of the organization and to lose their lives among them and the people of Raqqa think they belong to them and not being here with them for fear of death.
She says: legitimacy cycle and has ended and I got my identity card and returned to the practice of normal life and nightmares of detention isn’t absent from my mind Whenever I drank or ate or sat I remember the detainee and hear the sounds of torture and see the walls of black color.
After I left, I was kept in isolation from the outside world after hearing many rumors about me that I was imprisoned and that I was raped inside by ISIS while drugged.
I stayed in Raqqa until the end of 2016 and then the family of Khadija and her husband decided to send her to her brothers outside the city of Raqqa to relax her psychologically after her health deterioration and isolation from the outside community and not to mix with anyone and stay for long hours inside the room alone to be agreed with a smuggler to take her out of the city.

Khadija al-Hamoud returned to the city of Raqqa after liberation from the organization. The first thing I visited was the place where I was arrested to see the school has returned, to try to start her life again by opening clothes shop in the city of Raqqa, which was taken by the organization, in an attempt to start a new page of Her life.