Jihad and the West - Black Flag over Babylon Chapter Six Podcast Three

Health Care—Deadly Medicine             Westerners accustomed to European health care standards are often shocked by the primitive conditions in their new Middle Eastern home. By 2015, most of the Caliphate’s hospitals had fallen into disrepair. Citizens without money or influence receive the most rudimentary health care or none at all. In Raqqa, the hospital’s dialysis machines and incubators stopped working soon after the Caliphate’s conquest. Humanitarian aid was blocked from Raqqa because it came “from the infidels.”               The Caliphate’s medicine is particularly agonizing for women giving birth. The State curtailed Caesarean operations, which it considers Western and effeminate. The clerics determined that Muslim women should be stoic enough to endure childbirth pains without modern medicine. Muhammad’s wives and daughters did not receive anesthesia or antibiotics, and they should serve as exemplars.               Women doctors are terrified by al-Khansaa, and most have stopped treating patients at the larger hospitals in Raqqa. They are too scared of being whipped. After the clerics assumed control of the Raqqa National Hospital, only one female physician, Raheb, continued to practice there.               With health care in chaos and resources insufficient, physicians help boost hospital funding. Some harvest organs from living or recently deceased individuals for sale on the black market. This is legal according to the State’s mullahs, as long as the organs come from non-Muslims or apostates. The Caliphate’s Fatwa Sixty-Eight declared that “the apostate’s life and organs don’t have to be respected and may be taken with impunity.”               Health care administrators relieve their hospital’s overcrowding by killing some patients. For example, HIV-positive fighters have been ordered to carry out suicide attacks, freeing the State of its medical costs. If there is a shortage of blood, Christians and Yazidis are forced to give blood for transfusions. A Christian woman said, “They even take our girls’ and old women’s blood. They use it for their wounded ISIS fighters.” By summer 2016, State fighters in embattled Fallujah grabbed healthy-looking pedestrians off the streets or dragged them from their homes and forced them to give blood. This left some drained and dying in the city streets.               Some of the medical services are healing; some are marginal; most are substandard; some are lethal. In the Caliphate, there is little room for “defectives.” For example, the Caliphate issued a fatwa to kill babies and children with Down’s syndrome. They were to be suffocated. Medical clinics can be death centers for enemies of the State. Hospitals sometimes lure State opponents in for care and then inject them with poisons. Some of the victims had no idea that they were on a list of enemies until they began to die.               Some medical experiments resemble those conducted by the Germans during World War II. The Caliphate’s foreign fighters, particularly French, Tunisians, and Libyans, injected poisons into the veins of prisoners. One of the prison guards said that corpses taken out of these rooms “looked like skeletons, only an hour after being injected with the needles.”               By summer 2016, Caliphate militants began injecting severely injured soldiers with potassium chloride. Leaders calculated that pictures of injured, disfigured, or maimed soldiers might lower morale.   Fashion in the Islamic State—Black Is the New Black   “God loves women who are covered.”  A placard in a street in Raqqa               The Caliphate takes dress seriously. Men and women must appear the way the first generation of Muslims were believed to have looked. Men who can’t grow a beard need to improvise. “Nadhim,” a thirty-year-old taxi driver, despaired because skin rashes prevented him from growing a beard or moustache. Nadhim pleaded his case to the religious police, but, he moaned, “they didn’t care. . . . One of them told me I’d better stay at home if I shaved.” Men may not cut their hair, apply gel to it, or wear it in any style that resembles Western fashion.               Still, men have more fashion freedom than women, who must always be covered in public. The tent-like niqab covers everything but the eyes, which must be covered with a veil. Schoolgirls must wear them, too. Most women find this suffocating. Only women may sell clothing to women. Women must not wear high heels. The few hair salons that remain open are required to black out images of women from the packaging of hair dye products.               If women do not dress in accordance with the State’s morality codes, they are beaten and, sometimes, severely tortured. Morality police are unforgiving. A nineteen-year-old-woman was placed in a cage “with some skulls” to teach her a lesson about inappropriate dress. Women face particularly challenging obstacles should they require hospitalization, as even there they must remain completely clothed. An elderly woman suffering cardiac arrest was forbidden from removing any of her clothing, despite the pleas of attending nurses. She died.               Those girls and women who escape the Caliphate cast aside their raven-colored coverings as soon as they can. This is what happened in the summer of 2016, when the State was driven from some Syrian towns and villages. For the first time in years, they could show their faces in the street and wear whatever colors and styles of clothing they pleased. A nineteen-year-old northern woman freed from State-controlled Syria ripped off the khimar (a long hijab) she had been forced to wear for two years, proclaiming, “I felt liberated. . . . They made us wear it against our will, so I removed it that way to spite them.”