Raqqa

There was a city here in antiquity: the Seleucids founded Nikephorion on the north bank of the Euphrates, and it was later known as Kallinikos, a Byzantine frontier town on the road between Syria and Mesopotamia. The Arab conquest brought the name Raqqa, and the settlement kept its position at the point where the Balikh river joins the Euphrates and where routes from Aleppo and the Jazira met the river road to Iraq.

Its great period began in 772, when the Abbasid caliph al-Mansur laid out a new garrison city, al-Rafiqa, beside the old town on a horseshoe plan with brick walls and a monumental gate. Harun al-Rashid made Raqqa his residence for roughly a decade around the turn of the ninth century, building palaces north of the walls, and for those years the city functioned as a capital of the Islamic world. It remained a centre of glass and glazed-pottery making and of Euphrates trade, declining after Mongol raids in the thirteenth century to little more than a village among ruins.

Modern Raqqa grew from the late Ottoman and mandate periods, when tribes were settled along the river and cotton and wheat farming expanded. The Tabqa dam upstream, finished in the 1970s, brought irrigation, electricity and rapid growth, and the city became a provincial capital of some size. In 2013 it passed out of government hands, in 2014 ISIS made it the centre of the territory it held, and the battle that ended that control in 2017 left most of the city destroyed. Rebuilding has gone on since, much of it by residents themselves, and the northeast was brought under the Damascus government during 2026.

Raqqa is a city of the Euphrates tribes rather than an old merchant capital, and much of its population moved in from the surrounding villages within living memory. Tribal confederations remain the framework of social life: disputes are often settled by mediation between families, marriages are arranged within known networks, and a guest is the responsibility of his host. The local dialect belongs to the Bedouin-influenced speech of the east and is distinct from that of Damascus or Aleppo.

Hospitality is elaborate and unhurried. Visitors are shown into a reception room, bitter coffee scented with cardamom is poured from a long-spouted pot into small cups, and refusing food is difficult. Weddings fill the streets with drumming, line dancing and convoys of cars, and condolence gatherings after a death draw the whole neighbourhood. Sung poetry in the Bedouin manner is still an admired skill.

Religious life is mainstream Sunni Islam, and the years of ISIS rule, with their imposed restrictions, are remembered with hostility by most residents rather than as part of the city's own tradition. Since 2017 a striking feature of public life has been how much reconstruction, schooling and local organisation has been carried out by residents, civil-society groups and returning families. The river is the other thread of identity: swimming, fishing and picnicking on the banks are what people describe when they talk about ordinary life returning.

Raqqa is the sixth largest city in Syria, with 531,952 residents recorded in the 2021 official census. The city was emptied during the fighting of 2017 and much of the population has since returned to damaged houses or to rebuilt rooms; any current figure is provisional. Almost everyone is Arab, with close ties between city families and villages up and down the river.

The economy is agricultural at its base. The irrigated land along the Euphrates grows wheat, cotton, vegetables and melons, sheep are raised on the steppe, and the city lives on trading and processing that produce, on transport, shops and workshops, and on aid and reconstruction work. Electricity from the Tabqa dam has been intermittent for years, so generators and solar panels are common, and water supply and sanitation have been rebuilt piecemeal.

Days begin early, with markets busiest in the first hours and again at dusk, and slow through the heat of the afternoon. Families gather in courtyards and on roofs after dark. Rubble clearance and the removal of unexploded ordnance, housing and property disputes, schooling for a very young population, the state of the water and power networks, and the fate of people missing or detained are the concerns that dominate conversation.

Cooking here follows the plain, generous pattern of the Syrian east, closer to Iraq and to Bedouin practice than to the kitchens of Aleppo. A feast means mutton or lamb simmered in a large pot and served on rice, or laid over flatbread soaked in broth, eaten with the right hand from a tray set on the floor or a low table, with the guest given the best of the meat. Grilled kebab, kofta and chicken are the everyday restaurant food, with salads of tomato, cucumber and onion and plenty of bread.

Bread is baked on the inner wall of a clay tannour and appears at every meal. Wheat from the surrounding plains becomes burghul and freekeh, green wheat roasted and cracked, cooked with meat or in soup. Dairy comes from sheep and goats: laban, strained labneh, salty cheeses and kishk, dried yoghurt and grain reconstituted as a winter soup. The Euphrates supplies carp and other river fish, grilled slowly over wood by the water.

In spring, after good winter rains, the steppe produces kama, desert truffles that are gathered and sold by the sack and cooked with meat or rice. Melons, tomatoes and cucumbers from the river gardens fill the summer markets, and dates, figs and pistachios are sold alongside simple semolina sweets and pastries. Tea is drunk strong and very sweet throughout the day, while the bitter cardamom coffee of the tribes belongs to formal hospitality.