Beirut, Lebanon,It's a pretty normal bus -- windows slightly cracked, dust, the occasional button missing on the dashboard. But when its passengers say they take it knowing they could be on a one-way ticket to death, they aren't exaggerating.
From the dark and dank underpass that is Charles Helou bus station in central Beirut, leaves the bus to Raqqa. It has done so for years, but now that Raqqa is the capital of ISIS' self-declared caliphate, the bus crosses the most dangerous border in the world. And people do pay to get on it.
In a 24-hour journey, it travels from Beirut, across the border to regime-held Damascus. Then it head
The nine passengers we met were adamant about two things. First that ISIS would most likely let them in to Raqqa. That suggests they know someone there, and they didn't want to go into details. Second, nobody wanted to have their face filmed or name used.
The fear was overpowering and that permeates exactly how you get ready for the trip.
Last cigarettes are smoked. Not as people worry they may not survive the trip, but because ISIS has banned smoking. They've also banned music, and much else that's part of normal lifestyles in the modern world. If you break their atavistic, moral code, you can be flogged, even beheaded.
ISIS checks
So there is a strange cleansing process on the ride. Smokers douse their fingers in perfume and jettison their cigarettes. Music, racy pictures, numbers of friends close to the Syrian regime -- all are deleted from mobile phones. ISIS check these things thoroughly.
The manager of the bus explains the rules for the trip, though it's a journey he never makes.
"A woman that's not dressed right will be sent to Islamic training," he said. "She, of course, needs a male relative to escort her. Men need to leave their beards grown long in their natural state, with mustaches trimmed. Trousers should not be tight and a certain height over shoes. But ISIS realizes when people travel, they can't always look like that, so it's OK."
The bus always comes back empty. ISIS rarely lets people out. Which begs the question, why are they surrendering themselves to life under ISIS? Surely they know what they are getting in to?
One group of passengers has a specific reason to travel. They are accompanying the body of their relative back to be buried in his hometown.
Some shed tears. He died of a heart attack. The process of repatriation is a nightmare. The bus's eventual departure will be delayed, we learn later, by 24 hours, because they have to wait for the appropriate paperwork to be able to take the body out of Lebanon.
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