And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East

by Engel, Richard

  We sat in the back pretending we were invisible. The smuggler who’d brought us across yelled at the Syrians, calling them drunks and morons. I asked the Syrians to turn the radio down, and they turned it all the way up.

  Finally we reached a “safe house.” I described it on the air as a brothel, but it was more like a low-life flophouse, a disgusting, dirty basement apartment where men would bring prostitutes and drink and smoke dope. There was a mirror over one of the beds. The bathroom was so foul that I got the dry heaves. The first thing the Syrians asked us was whether we wanted beer and girls. I went nuclear: “We don’t want any beer, we don’t want any girls. We want you to stop acting like assholes. We’re here as journalists.”

  Our smuggler gave them hell too, which seemed to get their attention. Over the next several days, we contacted a bunch of activists and persuaded them to come over for interviews. One of them took us to a small protest. We were with the flash mob when the Syrian police arrived and managed to disappear without getting arrested. If we had been caught, we would have been a propaganda prize for the Assad regime. I assumed we would end up on Syrian state TV with black eyes confessing to all sorts of things.

  To leave Syria, we went through the same fields, only this time we ran into a farmer who was burning weeds and crop residue with a blowtorch. He asked us what we were doing, and our smuggler said, “Oh, nothing. We’re just hanging out”—as if lots of Americans in ninja suits loitered around Syria in the middle of the afternoon. We asked him if he had a cell phone. He didn’t, which meant we had twenty or thirty minutes to get back across the Turkish border. Our smuggler then told him we had gone to Syria for girls because they were cheaper there. The farmer smiled and nodded, either because he bought the story or because he was glad to be rid of us.

  On November 16, 2011, I reported on the Nightly News that the death toll in Syria had reached thirty-five hundred, and that “hundreds if not thousands” of men had defected from the army. “This week something changed,” I said. “The uprising in Syria became a revolution.” The defectors formed the Free Syrian Army and attacked Syrian troops and destroyed tanks with rocket-propelled grenades.

  I was on the Turkish border in February 2012 when the government mounted an attack on Homs, Syria’s third-largest city, a hundred miles north of Damascus. “Witnesses described neighborhoods on fire, people living on shrubs and onions, bodies unreachable under the debris,” I recounted on the Nightly News. The rebels were in desperate need of weapons, but US officials worried that the arms would end up falling into the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood or even more radical Islamic factions.

  On May 25, 2012, government forces committed a horrific massacre in Houla, a cluster of three villages twenty miles northwest of Homs. A mass grave was found containing 108 bodies, 34 of them women and 49 of them children. We showed a video of the moment when Syrian forces had first started shelling the villages. “After that, witnesses say, government-backed militiamen called shabiha swept in and started stabbing and shooting children at close range.” (The shabiha were organized as criminal gangs in the 1980s and were closely tied to the Assad family. They got out of control in the 1990s and were disbanded by Assad’s father, only to make a comeback in the civil war.)

  After the Houla massacre, the UN’s peace envoy, former secretary-general Kofi Annan, said, “We are at a tipping point.” But the Syrian government, I said on the air, was “pressing the same old line,” and blaming the rebels for the violence. On June 12, 2012, with as many as fourteen thousand already dead in the war, I reported that Assad’s regime was “trying to kill its way out of this crisis and stay in power at all costs.”

  I went back into Syria at the end of June 2012. It was entirely different from during my hair-raising expedition with the smugglers. I went in with Ali Bakran, an air-conditioner repairman turned rebel. We crossed the border at night, and I was shocked when we finally made our way to Jebel al-Zawiya, a region in Syria’s northwest (think of Oregon), about forty miles southwest of Aleppo. Instead of Syrian soldiers, all I saw were rebels dressed in military garb. The government forces had lost control of the countryside and pulled back into the big cities.

  It was like the Che Guevara period in Libya. The rebels bent over backward to be nice to us. They too had watched the Arab Spring unfold on television, and they believed the news media could help them topple Assad. We felt safe. There were no kidnappings at this stage. We operated completely in the open. If you were a white American riding on the back of a motorcycle without a helmet—well, you were hardly hiding.

  We could feel a community spirit. Everyone picked up hitchhikers. You could stop at any house and spend the night. We ate like kings: chicken, fresh eggs, yogurt, olive oil, baby cucumbers, and slices of tomatoes that you’d dip in salt. I think one reason so many people died later is that they were seduced by this period. They couldn’t see that it was fleeting.

  But already signs were ominous. Ali Bakran had only 150 rifles for the 635 men he claimed to have under his command. He and his brigade were simple people, with no military experience beyond the two years of mandatory service all Syrian men were conscripted into. They were completely out of their league in a war against a professional army backed by Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah. They were just average Joes who had taken up arms with the dream of bringing down a despotic regime.

  On July 18, I was at NBC’s studios in New York when four top Syrian officials were killed in a bomb blast. I tried to capture how shocking the attack must have been to Assad: “Picture this inside job. A meeting in Damascus earlier this morning of the top officials there to discuss how to continue the crackdown, how to keep the rebels from advancing on Damascus, when, suddenly, the room explodes.” Killed were the defense minister and his deputy (who was also Assad’s feared brother-in-law), an assistant vice president, and the director of the national security bureau. A dozen others in the meeting were reportedly injured. “Bashar al-Assad doesn’t know who he can trust,” I said on the air. “He doesn’t know who has infiltrated his inner circle. It . . . could be a turning point.” I kept seeing turning points. First the uprising. Then the creation of the Free Syrian Army, the FSA. Now a big assassination bombing in the heart of Assad’s government. But the turn never came. It just got worse and worse.

  With the fighting entering its seventeenth month and the death toll at nineteen thousand, I went back to Syria, to the village of al-Atarib, fifteen miles from Aleppo. The government had been mounting an offensive around Aleppo, and I was shocked at the destruction I found. This village of ten thousand was deserted, save for a handful of rebel fighters. “Syria is being destroyed one town at a time,” I reported.

  But the big show was the government’s effort to recapture Aleppo. Damascus, Syria’s political capital, and Aleppo, its commercial capital, had a Washington–New York style rivalry (and, coincidentally, were almost precisely the same distance apart), with both claiming to be the oldest continuously occupied city in the world. For a time I monitored the battle for Aleppo from its outskirts because the city center was too dangerous for civilians, especially American TV crews. Witnesses said the government was mounting a ferocious, all-out assault with tanks, helicopters, and artillery. Rebels counted one hundred armored personnel carriers joining the attack.

  On August 3, 2012, the fifteenth day of the government offensive, rebels in the city said they were desperately low on ammunition and expressed dismay that the international community had not reacted when a huge massacre could be coming. Again, Libya was the example. Gadhafi threatened to overrun Benghazi and when he tried to do it, NATO started bombing. Now in Syria, Assad was threatening to crush the opposition in Aleppo and had already started doing it, but Washington’s reaction was only hand-wringing. In my conversations with rebels it was clear they were becoming increasingly disheartened and desperate. (The rebels would usually communicate with each other on Skype, blending in with the billions of people using the Internet instead of going through cell-phone tow
ers.) The United States was apparently still skittish about sending in arms because it feared they would end up in the hands of Islamic extremists, but that, like so many unintended consequences of US foreign policy in the Middle East, was a self-fulfilling prophecy. At this stage the rebels were numerous, strong, motivated, and moderate and I made that clear in my reports on the air.

  “We’ve been on the ground here in Syria for nearly two weeks now,” I countered, “and from what we’ve seen the rebels are not al-Qaeda. They are not extremists.”

  I do not think, however, that the United States could have saved Syria by intervening militarily at this stage. Based on what I witnessed during my years in Iraq, I think the United States would have entered another quagmire. Overturning Assad, an Alawite Shia, and replacing him with the Sunni rebels would have been Iraq in reverse. It would have been yet another historic reversal in the Shia-Sunni war that Washington had already proved itself unable to manage. But if the United States never intended to help, it shouldn’t have built up the expectation. The false promise of help was cruel and inexcusable and it would only get worse over time. If a man is drowning and a boat drives past in the distance, the man accepts his death and goes down quietly. If a man is drowning and a boat pulls up beside him, dangles a life jacket, tells the world he wants to help, but then doesn’t throw the life jacket, the drowning man dies crying and his family might take a blood oath to take revenge on the boat’s crew. This type of anger was already starting to build in Syria and al-Qaeda would capitalize on it. That anger would, in particular, give al-Qaeda in Iraq, Zarqawi’s monstrous group, a second lease on life, allowing it to become ISIS.

  During our trip into Syria Ali Bakran, the brigade commander who had taken us in, told me that al-Qaeda had offered him money and weapons and that he was considering accepting them. His brother, the deputy commander of this little band of rebels, was arguing strongly for it. Without the help of Europe and the United States, Ali said he was a dying man willing to reach for any help he could get. I saw it as a pivotal moment, yet another potential turning point. This time I was right. On August 7, I reported that 262 al-Qaeda militants were operating along the Turkish-Syrian border, while others were living in a tent city outside Aleppo. Many rebel leaders—especially the ones outside Syria, holding conferences in luxury hotels—were worried that al-Qaeda was piggybacking off the Syrian uprising to advance its own agenda, which turned out to be depressingly true. But no one listened to what I was saying, or to the complaints of the well-fed, air-conditioned rebel leaders in Istanbul, Paris, and London. The change was coming from men such as Ali, field commanders with nothing left to fight with, and demoralized that the world, especially Washington, had apparently chosen to let them die. Clearly, Syria would not be Libya. The cavalry from the West wasn’t coming. Instead, al-Qaeda was offering a helping hand.

  Through the summer and fall, I reported that the rebels were worried that Assad was preparing to use chemical weapons. On July 13, US officials told me that Syria had moved its chemical arsenal, perhaps to more secure locations, and ten days later the government acknowledged for the first time that it had chemical weapons, threatening to use them against foreign aggressors but not against its own people.

  In response to a question from NBC’s White House reporter Chuck Todd, President Obama warned on August 20, 2012, “that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized.” The Syrians didn’t seem impressed. On December 7, I reported that US defense officials had told NBC News that the government had loaded precursor elements of sarin nerve gas into bombs but had not put the bombs on planes or other delivery systems. The president’s red line looked like it was going to be tested.

  For months I had been nibbling around the edges of Aleppo, going in and out of Syria, most often with Ali Bakran or his associates, and I finally got into the city itself in December 2012. The place was in dire straits, with widespread destruction and food shortages. Residents wrote numbers in red on their hands to indicate their place in bread lines; sometimes the numbers would reach into the five hundreds. It was sad to see a city so historic and beautiful getting ravaged.

  Rebels and government troops fought at close quarters with automatic weapons and grenades. They also yelled at each other, hurling insults back and forth. It was too dangerous to stay long, and we’d go back to farming villages that were close enough to the Turkish border for us to get phone signals.

  It was becoming harder to get Syrian stories on the air. The war had lost its novelty, and its growing complexity made it difficult to explain in a two-minute news segment. At first, it seemed new and clear: rebels were rising up just as they had in Egypt and Libya. By now the rebels were increasingly a mix of hard-core Islamists, criminals, and moderate fighters who were opposed to Assad and his allied Iranian and Lebanese militias. It was a mess. There were no good guys or bad guys anymore. These days, I no longer believe there ever are truly good guys or bad guys in war, at least in the Middle East. They’re generally shades of gray. But that doesn’t translate well on television. It was too complicated. Too remote. Too Middle Eastern. But on the ground, I was desperately interested. I was hooked by the most complex fight I’d ever seen, far more nuanced and complicated than Iraq or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The outcome seemed to be hanging in the balance, and I wanted to be close to the action. I think that’s what made me greedy. I kept going into a conflict zone I knew had changed and where actors could no longer be trusted, at a time when my news organization was less and less interested. I got caught. My team and I all got caught.

  On December 13, 2012, one of the local fixers—the guys who help journalists contact rebel leaders inside Syria—told us he had a story we might be interested in filming. I’ll call him Mustafa. He mainly worked for CNN and had a good reputation. CNN couldn’t make the trip for one reason or another, so he was offering it to me. He said the Sunni rebels were shopping around a trip to see six captured fighters—four Iranians and two Lebanese. All were Shiites, and their presence in Syria would allegedly show that the Assad regime was getting material support from coreligionists in the region. It would be proof of one of the rebels’ biggest claims.

  The rebel commander leading the expedition called himself Abdelrazaq. He had a bodyguard, whose name I never got, armed with an AK-47. We hired a driver named Taher, chosen by us at random, at Bab al-Hawa, one of the main crossing points between Turkey and Syria. I had never met any of them before.

  I was bringing along a team of five: Aziz Akyavas, the well-connected Turkish journalist and close friend, who wanted to see the prisoners for himself; producer Ghazi Balkiz; cameraman John Kooistra; the fixer Mustafa; and a security consultant. I knew and trusted the first three; I had no experience with the security guy or Mustafa.

  Ten minutes after we crossed into Syria, the road was blocked by about fifteen men who fanned out around our cars. They were dressed in black, wore black ski masks, and carried AK-47s. As they herded us into a nearby container truck, Abdelrazaq protested that he was from the Sunni-led Free Syrian Army. We assumed we were being captured by pro-Assad shabiha. They were dressed in all-black like shabiha. They spoke with the appropriate accent generally used by shabiha. They were praising the Assad regime. The kidnappers kicked Abdelrazaq in the face, then smashed a rifle butt into his back.

  The kidnappers wrapped duct tape around our mouths, eyes, and wrists and stripped off our belts and shoes. Abdelrazaq’s bodyguard was taken off the truck, and the leader of the kidnappers—who called himself Abu Jaffar—said, “Finish him.” We heard bursts from an AK-47 and the thud of what sounded like a body hitting the ground.

  Our captors took us to a farmhouse, where we stayed for several hours. Pro-Assad graffiti was sprayed on the walls in green paint. The kidnappers made a video of us saying more or less what they wanted us to say. All the while, Abu Jaffar bragged about how many Sunnis he planned to kill. He threatened to shoot Ghazi in the leg, but when he pulled t
he trigger, Ghazi didn’t scream. Abu Jaffar had fired into the ceiling just to scare us. Then they took us to a house nearby and served us coffee in cups and saucers that had Shia logos on them.

  For the next five days, we were moved from house to house, almost always blindfolded, tapping each other on the leg to make sure everyone was accounted for. On the second night we were given food and cigarettes. Then a new group of captors arrived. They seemed to rank higher than Abu Jaffar, who called them sir. They showed little concern for our well-being. One day we were given only an apple to eat, and during one stretch I wasn’t allowed to use the bathroom for thirty hours. They seemed to know what they were doing and have experience at moving prisoners. I was convinced they’d kidnapped people before.

  I found that, at least for me, an effective way to cope with the stress of being a hostage is to think about something that takes a lot of concentration and drives out the dark thoughts. The dark thoughts come often. They bombard you. It’s hard to keep the noise out of your head. Thoughts of torture, of relatives you’ll never see again. I love to cook, so in my mind I invented a pasta meal I wanted to have when I got out. I followed it step-by-step, painstakingly chopping onions into a perfect mince, peeling garlic, and dicing mushrooms and plum tomatoes. I stirred the sauce with my favorite wooden spoon and took a sip of red wine. I could taste the red wine go down my throat. I could hear the clank of the bowls when I set the table. I could smell the truffle oil as I drizzled it over the pasta and let it cool before I sat down to eat. My then girlfriend (and now wife), Mary, set the knives, forks, and spoons on napkins on the table. I made ice cream for dessert. I concentrated on every detail, each fall of the knife, every stir of the pot, every sound and smell and smile from Mary. It took me away.