Descent into hell

In my work as a reviewer, a small, steady proportion of all the books publishers send me concern the Holocaust. With middle age has come a curious foreshortening of my perspective on modern history so that, paradoxically, the Nazis’ inhumanity has begun to seem less distant in time and, therefore, more horrible still. Fortunately I can reassure myself that, objectively, it happened long ago and that even the atrocities of eastern Europe and Rwanda are now a couple of decades safely in the past.

Such consolations vanish when confronted by The Raqqa Diaries, which is shockingly of the present. It is a terrible reminder that we are unwise to impute any kind of teleology to history. Raqqa is the capital of the so-called Islamic State and this is a portrait of daily life there by the pseudonymous author. He smuggled it out at the risk of beheading and it was first broadcast on Radio 4’s Today programme. It has now been collected into this slim volume.

To begin with, Raqqa is wrested from the Assad regime by a coalition of the Free Syrian Army and two Islamist groups. Samer believes his city is free from oppression, but then Isis seizes control and a descent into hell begins. By now we know the broad lineaments of Isis’s mistreatment of civilians, but Samer’s straightforward account carries an intense, claustrophobic horror.

He witnesses sexual slavery: his girlfriend is blackmailed into marriage with an Isis fighter to gain her brother’s release from captivity. There is financial extortion: he sees jihadists demand exorbitant sums of money from tradespeople, driving them to destitution. Yet it is compulsive, barbaric and pitiless murder that lends Isis notoriety. If the Nazis attempted to keep their atrocities hidden (as even Assad does), Isis has no such scruples.