Abu Ibrahim al-Raqqawi’s voice is calm and measured as he describes life inside the city ISIS claims as the capital of its so-called caliphate. But the horrors he details are harrowing.
Airstrikes. Executions. Forced blood donations and marriages to ISIS fighters.
Al-Raqqawi isn’t his real name. It’s the identity the former medical student who helped found an activist group called “Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently” uses to speak out. ISIS fighters have already tortured and executed one member of the group, he says, and they’ve made it clear they want the others involved dead.
Still, al-Raqqawi tells CNN’s Brooke Baldwin that won’t stop him from sharing what he sees.
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“There is a big wall between the civilians and foreign fighters. It’s like two different lives inside the city of Raqqa,” al-Raqqawi says. “Yes it’s heaven for some of these foreign fighters, because they give them a lot of money. They give them the fancy houses. They give them the fancy cars.”
But for some, it’s not the paradise they imagined, al-Raqqawi says. Rumors swirl, he says, about foreign fighters being killed after trying to defect.
“ISIS takes their passports and if anyone tries defection from this, they will kill them immediately,” he saiys. “The problem, it’s not how to go inside the city of Raqqa. The problem is how to get out.”
