Black Wave

by Kim Ghattas

  In early July 2014, while doing some research for an article, he had unearthed an old copy of an Egyptian magazine, Al Lata’if al-Musawwara, which had published the report of the Indian delegation returning from the Arabian Peninsula in 1926, the one that had demanded that the Al-Sauds hand over control of the two holy cities, after the warriors of Abdulaziz had conquered the Hejaz province. There were black-and-white pictures from Mecca and Medina, of wrecked shrines and cratered walls, of ancient sites in a heap of rubble at the Jannat al-Baqi cemetery—all this destruction the calling card of ibn Abdelwahhab’s descendants and the foundation on which the Saudi kingdom was built. Back then, the Ottoman Empire was crumbling, borders were disappearing, and the British were looking for a strong man to control these desert lands. According to Naji, it was just like now, in 2014, in Iraq but also Syria, where the popular revolution had splintered beyond recognition and any common vision for a democratic, pluralistic future had been bombed into deep retreat. A new mutation of an old demon was making headlines as hordes of men in black, waving black flags, erased modern borders and conquered land, not on horses or camels as in 1926, but in pickup trucks and armored personnel carriers. They leveled shrines, smashed statues, and blew up Shia mosques.

  They were not establishing a kingdom but reverting to the times of the prophet and claiming they were establishing a caliphate. The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria was born, with Raqqa in Syria as its capital. The group would often be referred to by its Arabic acronym, Daesh, and Ahmed’s article about the founding of Saudi Arabia was headlined THE DAESH OF 1926. He was one of the first to draw the parallel between Saudi Wahhabism and Daesh, better known in the West as ISIS. Ahmed’s travel ban would last longer than Daesh’s hold on territory, and though there were many differences between the kingdom and the caliphate, the parallels would be drawn by many, and they would stick, much to the frustration of Saudi Arabia.

  17

  BETWEEN ISIS AND IRGC

  IRAQ AND SYRIA

  2011–18

  Where they burn books, in the end they will also burn people.

  —Heinrich Heine (1797–1856)

  Yassin al-Haj Saleh had never given up on his hopes for a country free of tyranny. At heart, he was still the idealistic young leftist student thrown in jail in the middle of the night in 1980. Sixteen years in a cell, some of them in Syria’s notorious Tadmur prison, had not bent him. On the contrary, after his release in 1996, he moved to Damascus and picked up his pen to document life in prison, his own intellectual evolution, and Syria’s transformation under the dictatorship. He wrote article after article, many published in An-Nahar, Lebanon’s liberal newspaper. He was among a small group of intellectuals who continued to resist and speak out in Assad’s Syria. That was how his country was branded by the dictator: Souriyya al-Assad, the Syria of Assad, as though it were private property. Drilled into children’s heads at school, written on the walls and on banners hanging from bridges, the phrase made clear there was no escaping the Assads, father and son. Then came 2011 and the Arab uprisings. Timid yearnings for freedom became a flood of people on the streets of Syria demanding the fall of the dictator. Millions took to the street. Yassin glimpsed the contours of a more hopeful future.

  So how could it be that when he returned to his hometown of Raqqa, in the summer of 2013, he found himself at the epicenter of a conflict not his own, looking over the ruins of his life, having been robbed of his soul, his love, his family. Yassin and millions of Syrians were rebelling against tyranny, but their country found itself caught between the spiritual heirs of Ibn Abdelwahhab and the upholders of Khomeini’s legacy; between the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

  In the first few months of 2011, when there was still hope, Syrians had discovered each other and their own power as they broke out of the internal prison that had confined them throughout decades of dictatorship. They had even discovered careless joy and laughter, rare commodities in such conditions. Yassin was sharing this experience with the love of his life: Samira al-Khalil, also a former prisoner. They had met in 2000, and the vivacious woman, with wavy brown hair and deep-set dark green eyes, was his intellectual partner, his sounding board, his everything. Yassin and Samira dreamed of a life lived beyond the steel and psychological barriers of the Assad regime. On the streets, Syrians locked arms as they marched, waving flags and chanting, “There is no [president for] eternity, long live Syria, down with Assad.” They believed they were succeeding, even when Assad’s forces started shooting and sent tanks into cities. Abdul-Baset al-Sarout, Syria’s beloved national soccer team goalkeeper, found a new calling: singing for the revolution.

  Paradise, paradise, O our homeland,

  O beloved homeland, and your noble soil

  Even your fire is paradise.

  Hunted down within Syria, imprisoned by the thousands, the revolutionaries worked to build the critical mass necessary to bring down Assad. An opposition in exile, inept and divided, was in charge of dialogue with the world, calling for support to help the protesters on the ground grab territory from which they could then set up an opposition government and challenge Assad. In March 2011, President Obama had agreed to US military participation in an air mission, along with NATO and Gulf allies, to protect Libyan protesters from their dictator. So why not Syria?

  Yassin was not an organizer. He was an intellectual, an activist, most of all he was a writer, and he documented the revolution relentlessly with his articles. He now wrote regularly for the pan-Arab daily Al-Hayat. He wrote an article every week, sometimes twice a week, holding up the torch of hope and bearing witness to the unraveling. He could not have foreseen that some of his articles would one day become a book under the title The Impossible Revolution: Making Sense of the Syrian Tragedy. Though he knew the genocidal streak that ran in the Assad family, he never thought tragedy was inevitable. Throughout 2011 and 2012, Assad steadily lost his grip on large parts of the country. In Washington and European capitals, presidents and prime ministers believed his days were numbered. But they had underestimated the dictator with no conscience. He was the true heir of his father. He would make no concessions; his approach was “Assad, or we burn the country.” And he would do just that.

  The Syrian uprising and the subsequent brutal war have been characterized from many perspectives. Most cite big geopolitical events for saving Assad, like President Obama’s reluctance to intervene as he had done in Libya, or his backing down from a promise to punish Assad for using chemical weapons against his people in 2013. But the longer the outside world allowed Assad to kill, torture, and imprison with impunity, the more the revolution fractured. The Syrian battle for freedom was in a race against the inexorable radicalization and militarization of any revolution that drags on too long. As rage and despair built up, the revolutionaries picked up arms, rebel factions formed and splintered. The revolution was also in a race against those who saw an opportunity in the chaos—two very different groups of men in black, bearing different flags, enemies in fact, had been scouting the terrain. They weren’t even Syrians.

  In August 2011, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Iraqi from Samarra, sent a scouting mission of seven or eight men from Iraq into Syria to assess how ripe the country was for his ambitions. Baghdadi was taking Zarqawi’s dream of establishing an Islamic state to another level. His men found a country much like Iraq in the years after the US invasion: outside the large cities, men with guns roamed freely, state institutions were weak, and—most conveniently—Assad had released scores of Islamists from his jails, just as Saddam Hussein had done before the US invasion of 2003. This was a classic move: the dictator appears to show magnanimity at a time of unrest and declares an amnesty for prisoners, but alongside the intellectuals and activists, he releases into the wild those who will inflict chaos, so he can be called upon as the best option to bring peace. In Syria, some of the men released had fought in Iraq, groomed by Assad himself to make life miserable for the Americ
ans in Iraq. Assad would jail the fighters as soon as they returned, letting them rot in prison until he next needed them. As he set them loose in 2011, he deviously warned the international community that the protesters were religious extremists, making him the architect of his own self-fulfilling prophecy. Baghdadi’s men traveled west from Iraq into Syria, on desert highways and along rivers, a well-traveled road used by fighters who had gone in the opposite direction to join the insurgency in Iraq. In Syria, courtesy of Assad, they found a ready network of Salafist jihadists they could tap into to serve Baghdadi’s grand designs of a borderless Islamic state. But without a revolution for freedom, there would have been no such opportunity.

  At almost the same time, in Lebanon, hundreds of Lebanese and Syrian men were undergoing rigorous training under the leadership of Hezbollah in a remote part of the Beqaa Valley. The power of the organization had only grown since the 2005 assassination of Rafiq Hariri, Mr. Lebanon. It had survived the UN inquiry into the killing, although several of its operatives had been tried in The Hague in absentia for their involvement. They included Mustafa Badreddine, brother-in-law of Imad Mughniyeh, the man who had started the wave of suicide bombings in the 1980s. The group had also emerged intact from a devastating war with Israel in 2006. In the years that followed, it incited more political crises that brought down governments and pushed for cabinets more amenable to their needs. Their ambition and arsenal grew in tandem with Iran’s work to solidify its stranglehold on Iraq. In the summer of 2011, Hezbollah was training its men to be prepared for everything: self-defense, municipal governance, religion, and how to run the infrastructure of a state. Even before the Syrian revolution had dissolved into an all-out war, Iran and Hezbollah had seen an opportunity to sink their claws into Syria and expand their power across yet more territory. Syria was convenient terrain, with a ruthless yet paradoxically weak president, a member of the “axis of resistance” who would soon need help to maintain power. Iran and Hezbollah were poised to step in.

  * * *

  Within a year of the uprising, Saudi Arabia had begun exploring how to arm the opposition: the Saudis wanted Assad gone so they could contain Iran’s ambitions in Syria. In private, Saudi officials began to describe Assad as an occupier, a man with no legitimacy who was oppressing the majority with help from outside forces.

  Few who watched the Syrian revolution rise and unfold thought back to 1979, but the echoes would be obvious in hindsight—except everything was worse, as though all the players picked up where they had left off after the jihad in Afghanistan, or the Iran-Iraq War, or the 2003 Iraq War. The son of Sa’id Hawwa, the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood ideologue, was involved; Surur, author of the Magi book, was playing a key role rallying the Islamists; even the son of Arif Hussaini, the assassinated Pakistani allama, would show up in Damascus to meet Shia fighters. With appetites sharpened, everyone returned to the battle with renewed vengeance. There would be rivers of blood, millions displaced, millions of refugees. The war in Syria would break the Middle East. It would break the world.

  But first, it would destroy the lives of men like Yassin. In the fluid chaos of the revolution, he couldn’t know all the details about the forces lurking in the background. He focused on the possibilities, on the Syrianness of the revolution and the goodness in Syrians’ hearts; on the belief in the righteousness of their cause and their call for basic freedoms. He had always believed that the country’s Islamists had to be included in a future, democratic country. Their exclusion for decades under Assad had solved nothing—in fact, the exclusion of Islamists was a blanket exclusion of all diverse forces, from left to right. He knew it wouldn’t be easy to forge a common vision with Islamist parties, but he believed it possible. For two years, he had lived in hiding in Damascus, moving from neighborhood to neighborhood to escape capture. Hundreds of activists were being rounded up and thrown in jails, only to disappear. Evidence of torture and mass exterminations would emerge. At least Samira was not on any wanted list, so she could still move freely.

  In the spring of 2013, Yassin was smuggled to areas outside the regime’s control, fifteen miles northeast of Damascus, in Douma and Eastern Ghouta. Soon after the regime found out he had escaped, they began searching for Samira. She fled the capital and joined him. Still, they were not cowed. They got to work, helping local civilian committees that were setting up a semblance of self-rule, the template they hoped would prove that a local alternative to Assad was possible. With friends, they documented the regime’s abuses, hoping for justice. When Raqqa fell into the hands of the Free Syrian Army and other rebel groups in March 2013, the first provincial capital to be captured by the opposition, there was much rejoicing. Statues of the dictator were pulled down. Yassin began to plan a trip to find out what freedom tasted like in his hometown. He was wary, but hopeful.

  One of the rebel groups was an Islamist outfit, Jabhat al-Nusra, the Front of Support for the People of the Levant. In battle, they were one of the most successful. The United States had designated al-Nusra as a terrorist organization with links to al-Qaeda. Its leader was a Syrian who had fought the Americans in Iraq after 2003. But for the sake of bringing down Assad, the much weaker FSA was willing to accept anyone’s help. In Raqqa, the fighters of Jabhat al-Nusra were greeted as liberators; people overlooked their apparent extremism. In the growing chaos of the war, few Syrians believed that such groups would survive peacetime and play a role in Syria’s future. But al-Nusra was a Trojan horse. The group’s leader was a friend of Zarqawi and Baghdadi, and al-Nusra was acting as a front for Baghdadi’s grand project: a foothold in Syria. That spring, Baghdadi himself reportedly moved from Iraq to Syria. He wanted to speed up his project of an Islamic state, a caliphate where borders did not exist and where he would be the leader of all Muslims.

  At around the same time, May 2013, Hezbollah sent hundreds of its top fighters into Syria to help Assad’s forces recapture the small border town of Qusayr. Hezbollah was already assisting Assad’s regime in Syria but had not yet acknowledged its role publicly. The battle lasted seventeen days. Hezbollah lost at least a hundred fighters, with dozens more wounded. But they recaptured the town and, with it, control over a strategic corridor that rebels had been using to bring weapons into Syria. The battle of Qusayr was a watershed moment: Hezbollah tipped the balance back in the regime’s favor. It would pour more and more men into the war, becoming a party to the conflict. The head of the IRGC’s al-Quds force, Qassem Suleimani, attended some of their funerals, as early as February 2013, when one of his comrades from the war against Saddam was among the first Iranians killed there. “Syria is the front line of the resistance. We will support Syria till the end,” Suleimani declared. For him, the Assad regime and Syria were part of his grand ambition to build his own borderless empire, just like Baghdadi, except this one would be loyal to the wilayat al-faqih. Iran was again pursuing “war, war until victory”—even if victory looked like devastation on someone else’s land.

  From Egypt to Saudi Arabia, clerics were incensed by Iran’s daring. So incensed that, for the first time, clerics preaching in the Holy Mosque in Mecca called on Sunni Muslims to help their Syrian brothers, by all means, including arms.

  As elite members of the Quds force and Hezbollah fighters fanned out across Syria, al-Nusra set up a shari’a court in Raqqa. They attacked other rebel groups. They assassinated FSA commanders. They berated women who didn’t veil. On the outskirts of Raqqa, men with black flags gathered, then streamed into the city in convoys of white pickup trucks. Throughout the summer, more men arrived, most of them Iraqis. They eliminated rivals from the FSA and other rebel groups. Slowly but ruthlessly, Baghdadi’s men seized control of Raqqa, even taking over most of al-Nusra. In April 2013, Baghdadi announced that a new organization was formed: the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

  By the time Yassin made it to Raqqa that summer—an arduous, nineteen-day journey through empty desert land and under the scorching sun to evade the authorities—he found a black flag planted
at the entrance of the city, signaling conquered territory. Most of the men in black with guns and long beards were foreigners: Iraqis but also Tunisians, Saudis, Egyptians, even Europeans. They walked around like they owned the city. Yassin wanted to go for a stroll, smell the gardens, hear the nearby river. Instead, he had to hide indoors, coming out only briefly at night. He had become a stranger in his hometown, a potential target on the very streets where he had roamed freely as a teenager. Worse, he had arrived to devastating news: his two brothers had been kidnapped by ISIS. One was a local council member, and as ISIS took control, it detained men who resisted its agenda, men like Yassin’s brothers. By the summer of 2013, ISIS had taken up a large building in Raqqa as headquarters. Yassin stayed in touch with Samira, who had remained in Douma. They had initially planned for her to join him once he established a safe route, but the situation Yassin found in Raqqa did not permit that. They spoke often over Skype video calls as she updated him about how life was getting harder in areas that were free of government forces but now under siege—Assad was starving them into capitulation.

  On August 21, 2013, Yassin almost lost Samira forever. The Syrian regime forces had launched an attack with chemical weapons against Eastern Ghouta, the opposition-held area outside Damascus that included Douma. Up to fourteen hundred people died. The sight of children gasping, foaming at the mouth, and whole families killed in their sleep galvanized world opinion again—two years into the rebellion. But only briefly. President Obama had previously warned Assad that the use of chemical attacks was a redline. Missile strikes against Damascus seemed imminent for days, until Washington and Moscow made a deal under which Assad would give up his chemical weapons. America did not want to go to war and Assad survived. The message seemed to be that he could kill his people with any weapon he wanted, except chemical weapons. Samira and her friends had witnessed everything and they had survived. That episode was an inflexion point for Syria and the world. Assad had broken international law with no consequences; left to die by the world, sensing that Assad would feel emboldened, thousands more Syrians fled the country, on foot and by sea. Trying to get as far away as they could, they headed to Europe. Assad’s allies, Russia and Iran, would now pour even more effort into shoring him up, and by 2015 Russia would intervene militarily with air strikes and special operations forces on the ground to help Assad further. And so the ranks of jihadist groups swelled with rage and recruits: more foreigners arrived, more Syrians joined, even men who had never been religious and preferred a drink to prayer. In their despair there was nothing left to hold on to but guns and religion. Early on in the revolution, Sarout, the Syrian goalkeeper, had joined the ranks of the Free Syrian Army. But the FSA was disintegrating. There were no good options for good men. So Sarout joined an Islamist rebel group. He grew a beard. He stopped singing.