The Brooklyn Rail

Before she made Rojek, the director, Zaynê Akyol, covered the other side of the conflict: a look at the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) fighting for their homeland against the Islamic State. A noteworthy number of the soldiers in her previous film, Gulîstan, Land of Roses (2016), are young Kurdish women, who, in striking contrast to the full-body coverings demanded by Sharia, walk around in military fatigues, their long hair hanging down from their helmets in braids. In a director’s statement, Akyol, herself Kurdish-Canadian, writes that in the process of making Gulîstan, she witnessed many of such soldier subjects die at IS’s hands. Rojek is the product of an audacious mission to continue bearing witness in the face of such loss. As Akyol puts it, “I decided to meet with the people who were responsible, directly or indirectly, for the death of my friends. Cinema has become part of my grieving process, a way to reach a kind of catharsis. Hoping for restorative justice, I decided to face the jihadists.” Perhaps this explains why Rojek is more interested in showing us contradictions than explaining them away.

A documentary of primarily interviews, Rojek begins innocuously enough. Its subjects, who are never introduced by name, take turns in front of the camera, their faces framed tightly and head-on. Staring out as if to make eye contact with us, the men speak in Arabic and English about their hobbies, childhoods, interests, and beliefs. One describes catching songbirds to sell at a market in Beirut: “Since I was young, I’ve been passionate about hunting.” Another, who at first reminds me of a laid-back camp counselor, admits to idolizing the Canadian singer Shawn Desman when he was little, even exchanging messages with the pop star on Myspace. Unprompted, he offers to sing one of Desman’s songs that “has an effect on [him].” We cut in yet tighter on his bright eyes as he recalls the lyrics tunelessly. It’s a song about flying away from a hopeless situation, leaving no trace or explanation behind.

Like everyone else who sits for an interview in this film, this singer cannot leave. He is a prisoner of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and a former member of the Islamic State (IS). That Rojek does not make this immediately apparent is one of the clever ways director Zaynê Akyol has of unsettling us, a disorientation that turns out to be essential to our ability to remain receptive to this film. Of course, IS (also called ISIS, ISIL, and Da’esh throughout the course of the movie) is already familiar to us—it was for a time the most universally feared military group on the planet. But we get to know these former jihadists in other ways first, through their disparate backgrounds, dispositions, and motivations, until gradually the brutal monolith of IS’s black flag has unraveled to reveal a motley assembly of lost souls. Before they are blindfolded, handcuffed, and taken back to their cells, we are offered the chance to look into their eyes and get to know them, on some level, as human beings.

The basic facts of IS’s rise and fall will not be found here. The group, which ravaged northern Iraq and eastern Syria between 2013 and 2019, ruled over ten-million people and commanded an army of thirty thousand at its peak, according to reports in The Guardian and the BBC. Their downfall came only thanks to a combination of US tactical airstrikes, the SDF, and the Kurdish Peshmerga. We are expected to know all of this before Rojek begins or have our faith in facts tested, since the only account of these years comes directly from the prisoners themselves. In its framing and pacing, Rojek expects us to get quite comfortable with these jihadis, offering them extensive airtime to share their beliefs and perspectives. That may be the reason why the film, despite a lauded festival run, never opened theatrically in the US (it’s currently available only on OVID and Icarus Films).

In some ways, their role as primary sources confirms common conceptions of events more bluntly than even Fox News could. Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein are both invoked as direct forebears to the rise of IS, and Turkey is mentioned several times as an illicit collaborator—or, at least, a neutral waystation for arms, oil, and recruits. One man describes how IS smuggled Palmyra’s antiquities to European museums as a means of fundraising. Those who watch to reaffirm their preconceived notions will likely be both vindicated and, at times, utterly dumbstruck by the seemingly expansive range of viewpoints on display here.

The perspective I think about most from this film is that of one of the few women interviewed. Before she was imprisoned, she ran several guest houses for IS fighters in Raqqa—the first woman to ever hold such a high position without the aid of a spouse. In smooth Parisian French, she tells us, “I spent the best time of my life in Raqqa. Why? To put it simply, I lived as a free woman. I felt free to wear my niqab while driving my car. … I felt respected. I really felt I was in a world where women were sacred and free. I’d like to go back and live this life.” Quite aware of her audience, and in rebuttal to decades of (often Islamophobic) debates in the West over women’s autonomy and liberation under Islam, she asserts her love for IS with what feels like a kind of feminist pride. It’s hard not to recall that, today in western Europe, many women would not feel as comfortable traveling in a niqab.

But her case appears exceptional. Forced marriage and sexual slavery were common under IS—though, as another former fighter explains, it all depended on what religion one was when they surrendered to the black flag. “If they were Yazidis, women were enslaved and men were killed. … Christians had the same obligations as Muslims, like the hijab, and they were harassed in the street. … Shias had to be killed, except those who surrendered before being arrested.” Interspersing these testimonies, aerial footage of the ravaged landscapes and SDF training exercises flit by. The scenes are often contextless, making it difficult to pull out a narrative that ties in with the interviews beyond a theme of wholesale destruction. Fires rage on the horizon without context; in urban areas, many of the buildings are shelled. In shattered Mosul, once the seat of the caliphate, two boys play soccer amongst the wreckage.

If our oblique introduction to these prisoners seems sympathetic at first, it later serves to instigate questions of sincerity. The camp counselor type we hear singing early on is soon shown preparing a beheading in an archival, IS-sponsored video. Cutting back to his interview just before he swings the knife, he’s asked by Akyol if he’d ever harmed anyone. “When I was in ISIL, I harmed one guy, but to be honest I don’t want to talk about it. I was forced to do it. It was a very bad experience which I made.” His repentance seems genuine enough—many of these men were captured in the process of defection, trying to cross the Turkish border as the caliphate collapsed. But it’s an important reminder that there is no neutral space in which to examine these lives and ascertain values. If this man was performing his duties for IS, he’s just as likely performing this repentance for us.

“No, I don’t have the view now to force them to be your slave. Everybody is free to—ah, how will I answer you without getting into problem?” Another man begins, on the subject of Kurdish Yazidis. He stops himself, then laughs nervously; “I don’t mind what the governments are thinking of me, I’m thinking about ISIS sleeper cells. That’s my biggest problem.” Renunciation from IS, like allegiance to it, is not taken lightly.

Rojek is, to a fault, free of outside commentary and context—the only narrative we hear is that of the prisoners, and the intercutting between them and the interspersed images of the Syrian landscape and SDF training maneuvers often feels arbitrary. At times, the very existence of the movie seems overly generous to dangerous minds. But ignoring or reducing IS to a single entity, an abstracted evil, is also a privilege that comes with the distance of living continents away. In Syria, where their imprisonment requires constant surveillance and the rise of sleeper cells remains a low-simmering threat, such motivations, beliefs, habits, and hobbies cannot afford to remain mysterious. The SDF must know their enemy in order to prevent its resurgence.