The Black Widow

There was once an Arab village in the Western Galilee called al-Sumayriyya, and its current condition is accurately rendered in the pages of The Black Widow. Longtime readers of the Gabriel Allon series know that it first appeared in Prince of Fire in 2005, as the family home of a female terrorist named Fellah al-Tamari. Deir Yassin was in fact the site of a notorious massacre that occurred during the darkest days of the sectarian conflict in 1948 that gave birth to both the modern State of Israel and the Palestinian refugee crisis. The old village is now the home of the Kfar Shaul Mental Health Center, a psychiatric hospital that utilizes some of the old buildings and homes vacated by Deir Yassin’s original Arab residents. Kfar Shaul is affiliated with the Hadassah Medical Center and specializes in the treatment of Jerusalem syndrome, a disorder of religious obsession and delusion that begins with a visit to God’s fractured city upon a hill. Leah Allon’s condition is far more serious, as are her physical wounds. I have always been slightly vague about the exact address of the hospital where she is a permanent patient. Now we know its approximate location.

There is no Gallerie Mansour in downtown Beirut, but the Islamic State’s links to the trade in looted antiquities have been well documented. I first explored the concept of terrorists raising money by selling stolen or illicitly excavated antiquities in The Fallen Angel in 2012. At that time there was no proof, at least not in the public realm, that terrorists were actually lining their pockets by selling treasures from the past; it was merely something that I suspected was occurring. I take no satisfaction in being proven correct, especially by the likes of ISIS.

But ISIS has not been content merely to sell antiquities; it destroys them, too, especially if they conflict with the group’s interpretation of Islam. After sweeping into Palmyra in May 2015, ISIS holy warriors promptly destroyed many of the city’s glorious Roman temples. Forces loyal to the Assad regime recaptured Palmyra as I was finishing the first draft of The Black Widow. Having sworn at the outset that I would not chase the shifting sands of the conflict, I chose to leave chapter 39 as originally written. Such are the hazards of attempting to catch history in the act. I regret to say I am confident the civil war in Syria will continue for years, if not decades, much like the war that almost destroyed its neighbor, Lebanon. Territory will be won and lost, captured and abandoned. Thousands more will become refugees. Many more will die.

I did my utmost to explain the roots and explosive growth of ISIS accurately and dispassionately, though I am confident that, given America’s divided and increasingly dysfunctional politics, some will quibble with my portrayal. There is no doubt that the American invasion of Iraq in March 2003 created the seedbed from which ISIS sprang. And there is also no doubt that the failure to leave a residual American force in Iraq in 2011, combined with the outbreak of civil war in Syria, allowed the group to flourish and spread on two sides of an increasingly meaningless border. To dismiss the group as “un-Islamic” or “not a state” is wishful thinking and, ultimately, counterproductive and dangerous. As the journalist and scholar Graeme Wood pointed out in a groundbreaking study of ISIS published in the Atlantic: “The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic.” And it is rapidly taking on many functions of a modern state, issuing its citizenry everything from driver’s permits to fishing licenses.

At least four thousand Westerners have heeded the clarion call to come to the caliphate, including more than five hundred women. A database maintained by London’s Institute for Strategic Dialogue finds that most of the women are teenagers or in their early twenties, and are likely to be widowed at a young age. Others face the very real prospect of losing their own lives in the violent world of the caliphate. In February 2015, three radicalized teenage girls from the Bethnal Green section of East London slipped out of the United Kingdom on an Istanbul-bound flight and made their way to the Syrian city of Raqqa, the caliphate’s unofficial capital. In December 2015, as the city came under both Russian and American air assault, all contact with the girls was lost. Their families now fear the three teenagers are dead.