Leila Mustafa

Rebuilding a City ISIS Left in Ruins

Leila Mustafa inherited Raqqa after it had been ISIS's capital and then bombed to rubble in the battle to retake it. The challenge of post-ISIS Raqqa — de-mining, restoring services, integrating a traumatised population, all under international sanctions with no reconstruction funding — was the test case for whether the SDF's governance model could deliver where military victory alone could not.