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First Person: In Raqqa, you can’t go home again This article was originally published on The New HumanitarianMazen Hassoun – 30 April 2018The streets were my favourite part of Raqqa. No matter the distance, I rarely took taxis, I never drove. I always walked to visit my friends or family.I thought about this as I watched a video my friend Ahmad recently made with his phone, in the city where we both grew up. Raqqa was a mess. He told me that bodies were still being pulled from the destroyed buildings, and sometimes the stench was too strong to even go outside.“To walk down the street and watch your beloved city turned into rubble and ruins is really hard to accept,” he messaged me on WhatsApp, which I read here in Germany, where I now live.My name is Mazen Hassoun. I’m 21, a Syrian born and raised in Raqqa, and now a citizen journalist. I don’t know if I’ll ever go home again.Growing up, I thought I’d become a doctor, perhaps an engineer. I never thought I would become a journalist, let alone report on the downfall of my city. I never thought I would become a refugee. And I never thought I’d have WhatsApp chats about crucifixions, and now the destruction of the streets I once played in.But that’s exactly what happened. After so-called Islamic State took over Raqqa in early 2014, I managed to escape to Turkey, and later to Germany.From “abroad” – my new home – I began tweeting, posting on Facebook, and writing for various Arabic websites to spotlight the suffering of my friends, classmates, and family members. I wrote about what I was hearing from those still inside Raqqa: executions, fear, and a reign of terror by IS. I also wrote about hunger, deteriorating health services, and airstrikes.Like many people from Raqqa, I was relieved when IS was kicked out of the city last October, after months of fighting.Ahmad, who risked his life to send me updates and then spent much of his savings to be smuggled out of the city to a camp and then a village nearby, was similarly relieved to hear the fighting was over. When he heard IS had really gone, he told me the feeling was so amazing it was as if he had a new child. “IS was like a nightmare,” he texted. “Thank God we’ve woken up now.”Going back?There’s no future for someone like me in Raqqa. Right now, I plan to stay here. I’ve still got to finish high school in Germany, and I want to study journalism. I’m also not keen to live under the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the mostly Kurdish US-backed forces that helped defeat IS and now control the city.Ahmad was more eager than I to face what was left of our home – he’s 25 and had been sheltering in a three-room house with eight families, where his wife gave birth to their first child in what he called an “extreme situation”. He and his wife went home as soon as they could – he made the trip last December, and his wife and child followed the next month.In some ways they were lucky – they found that their house in Raqqa was still standing, although the furniture had all been looted.My uncle and grandmother tried to go home, but their two-storey house was completely destroyed, apparently by an airstrike, and along with it my childhood memories. The rubble is where I played with my cousins, and where I slept on the roof and watched the stars.My parents’ house was hit by some shells, but it’s still standing. But even if I could go back to the balcony where I used to smoke shisha every day, I’m not sure I would want to.I wouldn’t recognise the alleyways where kids used to play football using stones as goalposts, and so many of my friends and family have died, and will never return.Of course it is not just about me and my friends and family. I know that the whole city is reeling.Rebuilding in a minefieldThe UN says many parts of Raqqa are still mined, and that 70 to 80 percent of buildings are destroyed or damaged.Salal al-Muftah, a member of the citizen journalist group Raqqa is Being Silently Slaughtered, which provided information to the world during IS control, told me that 260 civilians have so far been killed by mines left from the IS occupation. The UN estimates there are 50 casualties from unexploded ordnance every week.I recently spoke to Mohammad Alobeed, the manager of Early Recover Team ERT, an organisation that is working on rebuilding Raqqa, including clearing the city’s streets.His team is trying to repair the water network. It hopes to get to the electricity too, but doesn’t have any plans (or funding) to get to that just yet.The UN says “conditions are not conducive for returns”, because of the mines, the damage to infrastructure, and the lack of basic services.But that isn’t stopping people like Ahmad and 100,000 others from going home, to a city that once had a population of more than 300,000 in the city itself, and nearly one million in the wider province.There aren’t any hospitals in working order yet, but recently Médecins Sans Frontières opened an emergency room and a small clinic in east Raqqa, where Ahmad’s baby saw a doctor for the first time.Ahmad has re-opened his car repair shop, and he is trying to get on with his life. But he has to buy water by the 20-litre barrel in order to drink,  wash dishes, or shower. His family needs five barrels a day, and each costs 200 Syrian pounds. That’s only $0.40, but it’s a lot for many people in Raqqa.And at night, he says, without electricity, the city sinks into complete darkness.Watching all this from my phone’s screen has been devastating. But I’m trying to believe in a saying we have in Raqqa, a city on the banks of a famous river: “As long as the Euphrates lives, Raqqa will never die.”

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ISIS Has Left the Syrian City of Raqqa, but Its Landmines Continue to Maim and Kill This article was originally published on The Global VoicesMazen Hassoun – 12 February 2018For nearly four years, between 2013 and 2017, Syria’s Raqqa city remained under the control of one of the bloodiest jihadist groups of this century: ISIS, also known as ISIL, Daesh, and Islamic State.During its reign, ISIS forced inhabitants of the city, which it had declared to be the capital of its “caliphate,” to follow its extreme rules. Those who disobeyed were killed by crucifixion or other brutal methods of public execution.In October 2017, after a four-month-long battle, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) — a US-backed alliance of Kurds, Arabs, Assyrians and other groups — managed to take control of the city and drive ISIS out. The retaking of Raqqa reportedly included an agreement between SDF and ISIS through which ISIS fighters and their families would be allowed safe passage to Deir Ezzor in Syria’s east, according to the BBC.But despite the group’s defeat in Raqqa, ISIS wasn’t finished with inflicting damage on the city’s population. As one ISIS fighter told civilians before withdrawing from the city, “The land will fight for us”.One of the ways “the land” is “fighting” for ISIS is through landmines.Speaking to Global Voices over the phone, Abu Fares, a 53-year-old man who lost two of his sons to landmines planted by ISIS, said in a voice full of sorrow:When the SDF and the international coalition attacked the city, we were forced to leave. However, we couldn’t leave at the beginning of the fight, because ISIS used us as human shields. I lost one of my sons while we were trying to flee the city in the Shahdah district when a landmine exploded.Abu Fares lost his second son a month after the battles were over:A month after the battles ended we were allowed to return to our homes. I sent one of my sons to check our home near the clock roundabout, but when he arrived, the landmines were waiting for him in front of the house’s door”.A total of 220 civilian have been killed and dozens have been injured in Raqqa since the SDF victory due to mines planted by ISIS, according to a member of “Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently”, a group of local activists who document violations in the city.When operation “Wrath of Euphrates“, the codename for the anti-ISIS operation, started in November 2016, ISIS began to plant a large number of mines to prevent SDF forces from advancing towards Raqqa. But rather than hit their intended targets, these landmines often killed civilians fleeing the battles.The explosive devices have also killed several SDF fighters, including British volunteer Oliver Hall who lost his life months ago while he was clearing the mines. As of the time of writing, the SDF has yet to announce the number of fighters killed due to these mines.A voluntary organization called “Roj” (short for Rojava, a region in northern Syria and western Kurdistan) is working in the city on removing thousands of mines with the help of Raqqa’s Civil Council and international organizations. “The number of unexploded ordnance in Raqqa is something that we never seen before”, UN assistant secretary general Panos Moumtzis told news agency Reuters in February 2018.But that work isn’t happening fast enough for some residents. Amira, 35 years old, told Global Voices that she had to pay 50,000 Syrian pounds (approximately 100 US dollars) to a private person to clear the mines in her house after the organizations working to clear them in the area rejected her request, saying that her neighborhood’s turn hasn’t come yet.She said she had to return to Raqqa after initially fleeing because of the terrible living conditions in the camps in the north for internally displaced people:ISIS planted mines everywhere, under beds, among the rubble, inside fridges and wash machines even inside an electric lamp experts found a mine.According to residents, the Al-Tayar, Al-Mishlab and Al-Darriah neighborhoods were the only residential districts that have been completely cleared of landmines so far.The process of de-mining in Raqqa is going very slow because of the lack of funds and resources available to the Civil Council. This situation is forcing civilians to return to their unsafe homes, causing regular casualties in a city that has already suffered under ISIS occupation for nearly four years.