RAQQA, Syria — Behind a thickly walled compound on the edge of the Euphrates River, young women in tight-fitting dresses with plunging necklines strut awkwardly in pairs around an elevated platform. The lights are blue, the music loud, and the air smoky as men suck on their water pipes and size them up. A more mature diva takes the stage belting out Arabic tunes while the women approach mesmerized patrons to dance. The men shower them with fistfuls of Syrian pound notes and join in the gyrations. Young boys scurry on the floor like spider crabs gathering the bills and putting them into a cardboard box under the watchful eye of the establishment’s owner, Faysal Al Rashid. 

The nightclub reopened its doors earlier this month after a 14-year-long hiatus that saw the Islamic State (ISIS) establish the capital of its so-called caliphate, rendering Raqqa — formerly hailed as the “Pearl of the Euphrates” — an inferno of unfettered savagery. Since 2017, when the United States and its allies in the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) drove ISIS out of Raqqa, the area has been governed by the determinedly pro-secular and Western-friendly Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, which is also Kurdish-led. But it took Rashid more than seven years to rouse the courage to reopen this club and one other in Raqqa, amid fears that ISIS cells would target them. Then, on Dec. 8, something entirely unpredictable happened. Jihadi factions led by Ahmad al-Sharaa, a former al-Qaeda operative who briefly brushed shoulders with ISIS, overthrew Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad. 

“I heard that [Sharaa] is shutting down some places in Damascus,” Rashid, whose family operated numerous nightclubs in Raqqa, drawing customers from across the country and Gulf sheikhdoms prior to the civil conflict, told Al-Monitor. “It’s difficult to predict what will happen in the future, but for now the [Kurdish-led] administration here is not giving us an operating license, but nor is it interfering with us,” he said. 

The question of how Syria’s new Islamist-led government will deal with bars and alcohol has become something of a litmus test of just how moderate Sharaa and his men have grown since breaking with al-Qaeda and its global jihad agenda in 2013 to focus on unseating Assad. When he and his group, Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS), which is designated as a terrorist organization by the United States, ruled over the northern province of Idlib, Sharaa reached out to members of the Christian community, allowing Christmas and Easter celebrations, in line with a broader effort to garner legitimacy with Western governments.