“The only people left in my hometown are women and old people who can’t leave. The men are all gone. It doesn’t seem like this will end. I don’t think Bashar al-Assad is going anywhere. It’s been four years, and he’s still there. I don’t care about Assad. He’s not a good man. But before this happened, Syria was beautiful. You, as a woman, could go across Syria in the day or the night and pass every checkpoint, and no one would bother you. That would never happen now. We have become Iraq. Saddam was not good, but he was better than what came after. And no one can bring Iraq back to what it was. The Syrian people said they wanted freedom. This is not freedom. This is chaos.”
Syrian kidnap victim, recounting life as an ISIS hostage.
Every time I read one of these stories, I think about what led to all this. One narrative is about the emergence of wahabism, but another narrative is really a series of actions starting with a botched US election 13 years ago. This chaos isn’t simply the chaos of things falling apart. It’s the chaos of bad incentives and bad faith.
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