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Ruqia Hassan knew death was coming. She had all but courted it in her work as a free journalist inside the ISIS-occupied Syrian city of Raqqa, where she used the Internet to post bits of truth to the world.
Thus it was no surprise when, in July, her Facebook postings stopped. ISIS arrested her in August and accused her of working with the Free Syrian Army. This past week, ISIS reportedly informed her family she had been executed in September.
Abu Mohammed, who founded an activist group called Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently, tweeted Hassan’s last communications.
“I’m in Raqqa and I received death threats, and when ISIS (arrests) me and kills me it’s ok because they will cut my head and I have dignity it’s better than I live in humiliation with ISIS,” she had written.
Hassan, 30, who wrote under the pseudonym Nissan Ibrahim, wrote about life and war in Raqqa.
“Okay if we don’t want Daesh, and we don’t want the coalition bombing Daesh, and we don’t want the Free Syria[n] Army to fight Daesh…Then what do we want exactly?” she wrote in one post.
As aircraft circled the city on July 15, she offered a prayer: “God protect the civilians and take the rest.”
Hassan captured life in Raqqa amid war. “People at the souq (market) are like waves crashing into each other… not because of the numbers… but because people’s eyes are glued to the sky… their eyes move above in fear while their bodies move unconsciously below,” she wrote.
Hassan mocked ISIS in its attempts to ban Wi-Fi hotspots.
“Go ahead and cut off the internet, our messenger pigeons won’t complain,” she wrote.
On July 21, among her last posts, she reflected on life.
“Sometimes we think of something and it happens… or thinking of someone and the next day we run into them by chance or get a call from them,” Hassan posted. “These days I’m thinking about rest… about peace… about safety… about feeling reassured…”
“Our biggest mistake was to swim in a sea of dreams… and we dreamt of the next phase and ignored the current phase… we look at the future and forgot the past… #a mistake we regret,” she wrote.
Hassan studied philosophy at Aleppo University and joined the 2011 uprising against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. She also opposed ISIS after the terrorist group took Raqqa in 2013.
Hassan is the fifth journalist to be killed by ISIS since October of 2014.