The New Yorker Magazine (№ 27th April 2020) by David Remnick (Editor In Chief)

Author:David Remnick (Editor In Chief) [Remnick, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: culture, politics, art, jounalism, magazine, non-fiction
Publisher: Conde Nast
Published: 2020-04-20T09:01:49+00:00

sand people are thought to live there. In

addition to former residents returning

home, and people fleeing the Turkish in-

vasion, the city has been inundated with

Syrians displaced by the regime—from

Aleppo, Hama, Deir Ezzour, and else-

where. Every habitable niche has been

claimed. After a week or so, I learned to

identify signs of human life within the

ruins: drying laundry, bricked-up holes,

plastic-covered windows, and small gray

satellite dishes affixed to half-collapsing

walls. (The Civil Council sells gener-

ator-powered electricity for about two

dollars a week, and everyone, no matter

how destitute, seemed to have a tele-

vision with several hundred channels.)

Sometimes tower complexes were so

thoroughly damaged that only a single

apartment retained a modicum of struc-

•

•

tural integrity. One day, I noticed a man

sweeping debris from the roof of a three-

story building whose top and bottom center, the stadium has a synthetic track stalled for years, and few people expect floors had no exterior walls; he lived in that people now jog around.) Yassin it to succeed. The Western aversion to the middle. When he invited me inside, waved a stack of papers—his backlog durable investment in Syria more likely I found the living room impeccably re-of would-be tenants seeking accommo-

arises from a broad but unspoken rec-

stored, with plush carpets and decora-

dation. “It’s like that everywhere in ognition that Assad is winning the war.

tive plaster molding. A polished wood-

Raqqa,” he said.

“It’s political,” the humanitarian officer

and-glass display cabinet had survived

During the day, the city resonates said. “We don’t want to do anything the battle; on its shelves, porcelain figu-with the din of banging hammers, power that will eventually benefit the regime.”

rines and delicate teacups were arranged tools, and machinery. Wood shops fab-Even though the State Department

on lace doilies.

ricate furniture; boom trucks and bull-

and U.S.A.I.D. no longer have person-

Most people in Raqqa live in far more dozers clog the roads; venders hawk sal-nel in Syria, they still determine how

squalid and hazardous conditions. Large vaged brick, tile, metal, and marble. But the majority of foreign funding is spent families are often crowded into one or almost none of this industry is geared there. The U.S. government distin-two rooms with bowed ceilings and toward creating new structures. At a guishes between “stabilization” and “re-bulging walls—masses of blasted con-

high school flattened by an air strike, a construction,” allowing the former and crete literally pressing in on them. Given crew of workers contracted by the Civil proscribing the latter. Stabilization proj-the state of these apartments, I was sur-

Council explained their work to me. As ects are subject to guidelines that for-prised to discover that there are few backhoes clawed through heaps of con-bid, among other things, the building

squatters in Raqqa. Almost everyone I crete, raking out gnarled rebar, laborers of load-bearing walls. In practical terms, met, including Khairi, paid rent.

fed the steel rods through a straighten-

this means that, if a school was mini-

At one of the dozens of real-estate ing machine. Earthmovers then exhumed mally damaged by an American air offices downtown, Hassan Yassin, a mid-the foundation, so that the school could strike, the U.S. can finance basic refur-dle-aged agent wearing a kaffiyeh and be resurrected on its original footprint.

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