by Joby Warrick
The most terrifying scrape came on a day when Ford paid a call on the leader of one of Syria’s few officially recognized opposition parties in Damascus. When the U.S. diplomat arrived at the man’s office, a crowd of about seventy-five Assad sympathizers was waiting for him on the walkway outside. Ford and his aides ran through a hail of eggs and tomatoes and managed to slip inside the entrance, just seconds ahead of the mob. The Americans pushed a desk in front of the door to brace it, and Ford turned to his hosts with a sardonic smile. “We’re from the American embassy,” he said. When the meeting ended, there was a second mad dash to the embassy’s cars, which by then had been trashed so thoroughly they could never be repaired. As he ran for his car, Ford convinced himself that he would not survive the day with all his bones and teeth intact. “I didn’t think they were going to kill me,” he recalled later, “but I thought for sure they were going to beat me up.” Somehow all got away unharmed, but Ford’s next major outing was to the airport for a flight home. He would not return, and the embassy itself was shuttered three months later.
Clinton knew all about Ford’s ordeals, so during their meeting on that May afternoon, the two officials proceeded to talk about the larger power struggles under way in Syria: the Iranians and their growing support for Assad, the latest battlefield trends, the multitude of rebel factions and their allegiances. Ford was going over some of the particulars when Clinton stopped him.
“You know where this is going? This could be a regional disaster,” she said. She ticked down a list of possible consequences: spillover violence infecting Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq; refugee outflows in gigantic numbers; a sectarian war that “stretches from Lebanon all the way to Iraq.”
Ford hardly disagreed, though he tried to sound hopeful. Maybe such a crisis could still be avoided, he offered, if the new peace initiative recently launched by the UN’s special envoy to Syria, Kofi Annan, gained traction.
“If we can get through the negotiations to get a transitional government stood up—if we can reinforce the opposition enough so they get through a negotiation—maybe we can avoid that,” Ford said.
The secretary of state was quiet, pensive. Of the possible scenarios for Syria, they both knew, the least likely was one in which Assad willingly negotiated an end to his own presidency.
“She just didn’t think it would ever work with Assad,” Ford said afterward.
Ford would play a key role in the UN-brokered negotiations that summer, and for nearly two years after that. Of the myriad obstacles to a solution, one indeed remained constant throughout: Syria’s steadfast refusal to consider any settlement in which Assad would lose the presidency.
Yet, already, a new problem was beginning to crowd out the many others facing the White House’s Syria team. The tiny bands of jihadists spotted earlier by intelligence agencies had grown into a small army. At National Security Council meetings, the maps displaying the shifting lines now showed pockets of territory under the control of jihadists, including the al-Nusra Front, a group with a clear al-Qaeda pedigree.
Intelligence briefings were soon expanded to include updates on the scores of Islamist groups that were now part of the ever-shifting rebel network. Some groups were thoroughly homegrown and worked cooperatively with the Free Syrian Army’s secular command. Others, like the al-Nusra Front, did not. More disturbingly, young Muslim men from around the world were beginning to stream across the Syria-Turkey border to join the fight, evoking the great migrations of volunteer fighters into Afghanistan and Iraq in decades past. To encourage them, al-Nusra’s leaders set up Twitter and Facebook accounts offering everything from theological pep talks to practical advice on what to wear and bring.
A few of the arriving foreigners were well known to the spy agencies, having arrived directly from other battlegrounds or having extensive records from incarceration in U.S. detention centers.
“At some briefings,” the senior security adviser recalled, “we’d hear, ‘Wait till you see who just showed up [in Syria].’ And then, the next time, it was ‘So—you think that last group was bad…?’ ”
Still other new arrivals were worrisome precisely because they had no record of previous militancy or crime. From Western Europe came hundreds, then thousands of young men, most of them Muslims, and all of them bearing passports allowing them to travel freely throughout the European Union and North America. Suddenly the talk in the West Wing wasn’t just about the risk of a destabilizing civil war in the Middle East. It was about a destabilizing civil war with a potential for dispersing thousands of radicalized youths across the continents, more embers carried on the wind. This was enough to keep even the more seasoned national security hands awake at night, the senior adviser said.
“We weren’t convinced that al-Nusra was coming for us next week, but we were worried about all these trained jihadis coming back to Europe and having a passport,” the senior adviser said. “This is when the mood music in the Situation Room started to change.”
From the CIA to the Pentagon, the concerns were given voice in official reports. The State Department’s Syria team, which included Ford and other refugees from the now closed U.S. Embassy in Damascus, put together a document for Undersecretary of State William J. Burns that sought to put the latest events and trends in context. The classified report was never made public, but the point, as Ford recalled afterward, was that Syria had drifted into a kind of lawlessness that dangerous groups were beginning to exploit.
“The regime was losing control of eastern Syria—the border points—and some of the border points along the Turkish border, too,” Ford later said, summarizing the report’s essence. “These are large spaces that extremists will be looking to control, just as they did in Afghanistan and Somalia. And it’s important to build a moderate Syrian opposition that can confront those people, as well as Assad.”
In the State Department’s analysis, the “extremists” consisted mainly of the al-Nusra Front, which was looking increasingly dangerous as the year 2012 neared its end. Not only was the group indisputably linked to al-Qaeda terrorists, but it also was emerging among the rebels as one of their most effective military organizations, as well as a preferred destination for many of the incoming foreign fighters. Even al-Nusra’s relatively moderate—by al-Qaeda’s standards—behavior was cause for alarm. Though its leaders insisted on imposing strict Sharia law in villages they “liberated,” they largely avoided violence against Muslim civilians. Some al-Nusra units actually made a show of picking up trash and delivering food and water to battered neighborhoods, acts that won them respect and even admiration.
What would happen, analysts wondered, if this new brand of “jihadist lite” truly caught hold? What if Syria—a neighbor to Israel, and a true linchpin of the Middle East—were to become the first of the Arab Spring dominoes to fall to a government that was al-Qaeda in all but name?
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Since the beginning of the uprising, the White House’s entire national security team had been unanimous in opposing direct U.S. interference in Syria’s internal conflicts. By the late summer of 2012, the prevailing view had shifted in one significant respect: Key members of President Obama’s inner circle now regarded the notion of arming Syria’s moderate rebels as undesirable yet necessary—the least objectionable out of a list of exceedingly bad options.
Among the cabinet members urging a more aggressive response was Obama’s popular and widely respected secretary of defense. Leon E. Panetta, a former CIA director, brought rare experience to the debate: He helped lead the fight against ISIS’s predecessors in Iraq, and he had helped coordinate aid to the Arab insurgency in Libya. At seventy-four, Panetta, the gregarious son of Italian immigrants and former chief of staff for the Clinton White House, was no one’s definition of a hawk. But at Langley and the Pentagon he had frequently approved the use of lethal tactics—from the CIA’s stealthy drones to missile strikes and commando raids—to kill suspected terrorists in their hideouts overseas. Just a year earlier, Panetta ha
d helped direct the successful mission to kill the world’s most famous terrorist, Osama bin Laden.
Now he watched with growing unease as terrorists moved into new sanctuaries created by the chaos that followed the Arab Spring uprisings. With Syria, his initial concern had been regional stability: Sectarian fighting in Syria could spread beyond the country’s borders to Turkey, Lebanon, and beyond. But the arrival of hardened jihadists in Syria made the conflict infinitely more dangerous, he believed.
“The intelligence, frankly, was very worrisome,” Panetta later recalled. “We were seeing a lot of extremist elements going in, and they were organizing and becoming pretty effective. The last thing we wanted was for them to gain a foothold and use Syria as a base of operations.”
At the time, the White House stuck to its policy of providing nonlethal support to the opposition while using diplomatic pressure to bring about Assad’s resignation and a new interim government. But the results had been frustrating at best. Kofi Annan, the former UN secretary-general in charge of peace negotiations, resigned in disgust over the summer after repeated setbacks, including Russia’s insistent blocking of any measure before the world body that might pressure Assad into stepping down. On the ground, the fighting intensified, and yet neither side could gain a decisive advantage. The Syrian president replenished his weary forces with Hezbollah fighters from Lebanon and used his air force to bomb and strafe rebel positions. Turkey and the Persian Gulf countries sent fresh torrents of cash and weapons to back a rebel force increasingly dominated by Islamists. For the Americans, as Hillary Clinton would later acknowledge, “every option appears worse than the next.”
Clinton began privately pushing for what she would call a “carefully vetted and trained force of moderate rebels who could be trusted” with American weapons. As she described the events in her book Hard Choices, she invited then CIA director David Petraeus to her house for lunch in July 2012 to brainstorm about ways to recruit and build such a force. If America “was willing finally to get in the game, we could be much more effective in isolating the extremists and empowering the moderates inside Syria,” she wrote.
By late summer, following extensive meetings with NATO counterparts and rebel leaders, Clinton was “reasonably confident” that an effective strategy could be put in place, she said. Petraeus’s CIA put together a plan for building, training, and arming a moderate rebel army that could eventually overthrow the regime and establish authority in provinces now effectively controlled by Islamists. The plan was presented to President Obama at a White House meeting in late August, and Panetta was among the core group of senior advisers to argue for its acceptance.
“We’re outside the game,” Panetta would argue. “We don’t have any credibility with [Syrian moderates]. We’re giving them nonlethal assistance and they’re dying.”
Panetta was not naïve about the risks. Even the most carefully vetted rebel group might decide to switch sides, or commit a massacre using American-supplied guns. Arms given to friendly fighters could easily end up in the wrong hands.
“There’s always a risk,” he said. Yet, he told the president, echoing the views of Clinton and Petraeus, “I think we could do this.” The alternative—allowing the conflict to run its course—also carried risks, opening the door to even more chaos and an expanded breeding ground for extremists, he argued.
Obama listened thoughtfully and then proceeded to pick at the holes in the CIA’s plan, according to officials present at the meeting. There had been many instances in U.S. history where a well-intentioned decision to arm a guerrilla movement had horribly backfired, the president noted, according to Clinton’s account. Why would this time be different?
Benjamin Rhodes attributed the president’s reluctance to commit to military intervention to his fear that it could mire the country in another Middle East war.
“He was willing to consider options, but the question always was: ‘What happens next? What happens the day after you take out a series of runways in Syria?’ ” Rhodes remembered. “He did not see where a more interventionist military option led us, other than being deeper and deeper in a conflict that is extraordinary complex and shows no signs of having a military solution.”
Rhodes also suggested that disagreement between the president and his advisers over Syria was less dramatic than contemporaneous news accounts portrayed it to be.
“I think, candidly, that a lot of people have used this debate to position themselves for posterity as being for doing something in Syria when in fact it wouldn’t have made much difference,” Rhodes said. The plan presented to Obama that fall “didn’t feel fully baked,” he said, and the president was unconvinced that arming rebel militias—assuming trustworthy allies could be found—would tip the balance. “This is a very hard problem, rooted in a decade of war in Iraq and decades of sectarian tensions in that part of the world,” Rhodes said. “Sometimes we would like to think we have more agency than we do.”
In the end, Obama, who had been elected on a promise to end America’s involvement in Middle East wars, rejected the CIA plan. The situation could change in the future, the president allowed, particularly if Assad crossed the administration’s “red line” of using or transferring his stocks of chemical weapons. But for the moment, there would be no shipments of U.S. military hardware to Syria’s rebels.
The debate would erupt again, but an opportunity had passed. Clinton, disappointed, plunged back into the task of seeking the elusive diplomatic accord that would end the conflict. She also secured an agreement for increasing humanitarian aid—more blankets, food, computers, phones—for Syria’s opposition.
“But all of these steps were Band-Aids,” she wrote. “The conflict would rage on.”
Panetta resigned as defense secretary five months after the August meeting. Looking back more than two years later, he regarded the administration’s decision as a costly failure.
“We learned a lot about how to confront al-Qaeda and its affiliates as a result of operations in Pakistan and Afghanistan,” he said. “We know how to do this. But we have to be willing to do it.”
21
“There was no more hope after that”
The black flags came from the east, as the Hadith’s prophecies foretold, carried by men with long hair and beards and surnames taken from their hometowns. They came not on horseback but in small pickup trucks, sometimes dozens at a time, kicking up dust as they headed west across the Iraqi desert. A year after the start of the Islamic State’s Syrian venture, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was finally moving to assert control over a project that, in his mind, was hopelessly adrift. Now Baghdadi would show his wayward Syrian apostles and the rest of the world how a caliphate was meant to be run.
To ensure unhindered access to the Syrian border and beyond, Baghdadi placed one of his most colorful lieutenants in charge of securing the main Iraqi highway, from western Anbar Province to the Syrian frontier. His pick for the job, the Islamic State’s flamboyant Anbar commander Shaker Wahib al-Dulaimi, had already gained local notoriety as Abu Wahib, one of the terrorist group’s rising stars, and a man utterly obsessed with his own public image. The twenty-seven-year-old former computer programmer deliberately styled himself after his hero, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, for whom he briefly served before being arrested and thrown in the Camp Bucca prison in 2006. Now he sought to replicate his mentor’s look, from the shaggy black hair, cap, and beard to his penchant for posing unmasked for cameras while affecting the look of a jihadi superhero. Some of his video outtakes are unintentionally hilarious, as Abu Wahib tries karate moves or attempts to leap through the air while firing his gun. Others are simply cold-blooded.
In the spring of 2013, Abu Wahib’s men set up a video camera as their leader stood with his rifle in the middle of a desert highway to flag down a convoy of tractor-trailers heading from Syria into Iraq. After the trucks pulled over, Abu Wahib rounded up three of the drivers and asked each for an ID card to see if he was a Shiite. The video recorder captured
the entire exchange.
The men, all Syrians who appear to range from their late twenties to early forties, clearly understand the consequences of a wrong answer, for all three adamantly denied having anything to do with the Shiite faith or the Syrian regime.
“You’re Shiites, right?” Abu Wahib asked.
“We’re Sunni, from Homs,” said the youngest one, a tall, good-looking youth wearing white jeans and a short-sleeved dress shirt.
“Are you sure?”
“We just want to live,” said the older one. “We’re here to earn a living.”
Abu Wahib toyed with them. “What proves to me that you’re Sunni?” he asked. “How many kneelings do you make at dawn prayer?”
The men were nervous. “Four,” answered one. “Three,” said another. “Five,” said the third.
Abu Wahib scoffed. “From your talk, you’re a polytheist”—a Shiite—he declared. He made the men kneel in the sandy median between the lanes. Then, firing his rifle in short bursts from the hip, he shot each in the back. As they attempted to crawl away, he fired a shot at close range into each man’s head.
“So here is the international highway in the hands of the Islamic State!” one of Abu Wahib’s masked accomplices yelled. The fighters set fire to the trucks, leaving the drivers’ bodies facedown as rivulets of blood seeped into the orange dust. The videotape ended with a recording of Zarqawi’s voice.
“Lo and behold, the spark has been ignited in Iraq,” the dead leader was heard to say, “and its fires shall only get bigger until it burns the Armies of the Cross in Dabiq.”
These were the men with whom Baghdadi now sought to build his Islamic caliphate. The first batch he had sent into Syria had disappointed him. They were too mild, certainly in comparison with their Iraqi counterparts. They were also too Syria-focused and, very possibly, too popular for Baghdadi’s liking. Now Baghdadi was ready to start again, with men like Abu Wahib in the vanguard, and with Baghdadi himself setting the tone.
