Raqqa Showcases Syria’s Tumultuous Past

We arrived within days of the government’s takeover of the northeastern Syrian city of Raqqa, and one of the first things we saw was protesters in the main square.

A group of lawyers and activists, stalwarts of the 2011 Arab Spring uprising against the dictator Bashar al-Assad, had gathered to hoist Syria’s national flag. They had seen on social media that a group of Islamists was on its way to raise a religious flag on the square and they wanted to pre-empt them.

“We sacrificed a lot for the revolution, and we will not let others raise their flag,” Duha Fraih, 48, a lawyer who wore the green, white and black flag of the revolution — now the national flag — around her shoulders, told us.

The protest was small, but it revealed the divisions that run through Syrian society, and nowhere more so than in Raqqa.

Raqqa became infamous as a center of terrorism when the Islamic State, or ISIS, under its black banner made it the capital of its caliphate in Iraq and Syria 12 years ago.