1. Not being white or Western:
Like most of the rest of the world, it seems that ISIS is obsessed with whiteness, whether it’s the crazy Belgian guy who loves to wave the black flag and scream out the few Arabic phrases he knows, to any of the straggly bearded recruits who have shown up from this or that part of Europe: whiteness rules.
The white fighters get the most face time before the media, the nicest places to live, the easiest jobs.
If you’re not actually white yourself, it helps if you come from a white country, like the UK or France; speaking a western language and being from a mostly white land makes you almost white on the ISIS scale, a candidate for leadership and representation and much boasting.
If you’re brown or black and from a country like Pakistan or Egypt or Somalia your job in ISIS is to dig trenches, clean up the muck and lurk around in the sidelines.
2. A passport that can pass no ports:
Coming from a poor country like Pakistan or Afghanistan, whose official passport doesn’t really get you many places at all, you were excited at the prospect of burning this passport and getting a new one; any passport, you figured, must be more useful than the one you had.
You were wrong.
Beyond the nifty black cover and the ancient looking Arabic lettering, the passport isn’t worth anything at all. After you and some fellows from other brown countries burned yours up, a man just handed everyone blank and black passport books and asked that they fill out their names and details themselves.
In simple terms, the whole thing was a farce and a disappointment and you’re secretly convinced that the people from the UK and France and Canada didn’t burn their passports at all.
3. The bureaucracy in getting a proper posting:
When you arrived in ISIS territory, you were told that your skills would be matched with the needs of the group. You were very clear about the fact that your greatest skills lay in math and accounting (which were your favorite subjects in school and since you thought they were most untainted by Western propaganda).
Therefore, you asked that you be placed immediately with the Accounting Department so that you could help collect taxes from the non-Muslim infidels, tally up the ransoms from kidnappings and count up revenues from illegal oil sales.
The ISIS career counselor that met you those first days made it seem that the job was yours and in a matter of days you’d be handed a laptop and a desk and be merrily crunching numbers and earning blessings for the afterlife.
Six months have passed and this has not happened; the closest you have come to counting anything is the kilos of onions and flour in the communal kitchen where you are currently deployed.
4. The obsession with social media:
Sometimes it feels like ISIS existed only on Twitter and YouTube and now that you no longer have your laptop (you gave it up as community property for the ummah when you arrived) it seems that you are no longer a part of it.
If you can’t tweet the message, see the number of hits; you have no way of telling if the movement is growing.
Add to this, the qualms of your conscience.
Once upon a time, long before you joined the ISIS and when you were first considering just how impure and Western influenced Muslim societies had become, social media was the first of the culprits you could point to.
Twitter and Facebook, were after all invented by infidels in foreign countries and it seems they could only lead Muslims astray.
You were always worried about this and asked forgiveness in every prayer for every tweet. Here in ISIS, however, there seem to be no such doubts; all the leaders are also tweeters, Facebookers, Tumblrs and YouTubers. If you hadn’t given up your laptop for the ummah, you probably would be too.
5. The beard, the desert and the damage:
In keeping with the look adopted by most ISIS fighters, you grew a beard a long time ago, long before you made it to the region, long before you took the oath of allegiance and long before you burned your passport.
The beard has been your friend along all these transitions, always near, always there. There are some challenges, however, relating to upkeep.
Back in the more humid climate of your native land, it remained happily attached to the end of your face, smelling pretty from the conditioning shampoo you applied to it once a week or sometimes more.
Here in the desert, no such upkeep is possible. The dry climate means sand particles are consistently caught in it, along with bits of grit and dirt that fly around in the air. Because you spend many hours of your shift in the kitchen, it often smells of friend onions.
Finally, and worst of all, you discovered the other day, while caressing it in a pensive moment, like you are wont to do, that it actually has split ends.
Like your dreams of utopia, the hair in your beard has become damaged and you simply do not know how to make it all come together again.
