by Theo Padnos
“I just don’t want you to be a damn fool,” she would say.
“Okay, Mom,” I would say. “I got it.”
“And keep in touch, for heaven’s sake.”
“Of course, Mom,” I would reply.
And that would be that. Such were our Sunday conversations. Probably they did us both a bit of good.
In the morning, shortly after I woke, a fourth kidnapper appeared. Abu Dujanna came dressed as if for an athletic competition, in running shoes and a dark blue tracksuit. He wanted to leave the house right away. I asked for a cup of coffee.
He returned with the coffee in less than a minute. “Can you hurry, please?” he asked.
So rushing was the order of the day. Okay, I would rush. Before we left the house, however, I had a favor to ask of my hosts. I wished to climb up to the house’s rooftop. From up there, I hoped to inspect such damage as the regime had inflicted to date. I wanted to guess at the weather to come and to gather in a sense of the topography of the place. I had yet to see the landscape by the light of day. So I asked Abu Dujanna if it would be dangerous for me to stand on the rooftop.
“Of course not!” he exclaimed. He loved the idea. He was a gracious host. He left the room, then returned a moment later with a troupe of villagers, two of whom were carrying Kalashnikovs, and the three kidnappers from the night before. We were a minor expeditionary force. We trooped up a narrow staircase, opened a trapdoor, then stepped into misty morning sunshine. The house in which I had slept, I discovered, was a tiny raft in a sea of rolling, almost entirely uninhabited scrub-covered green hills. A tendril of smoke arose from our raft. Far away, on the horizon to the north, a line of twenty or so smoke tendrils rose into low-hanging clouds.
By what road had we driven in the night before? There were goat paths between the hills but nothing modern or engineered enough to be called a road. Perhaps we had floated in?
Such busyness as there was in Mohammed’s neighborhood, I discovered, existed entirely in the animal kingdom. A rooster strode along the crest of a stone wall. Hens pecked at the ground beneath him. A family of sheep browsed at the edge of a stone cistern in Mohammed’s yard. Mohammed’s village, I decided, lived approximately in the time of the Prophet.
From the rooftop, a Kalashnikov-bearing villager pointed to a pile of boulders in a field about a hundred meters away. “Over there, last week,” he said, “the regime sent a jet. Twelve child martyrs. May God not forgive the killer, Bashar al-Assad.”
I squinted at his pile. I couldn’t make out the damaged building itself, but I could tell from the flatness in his voice and from the stone-like faces of Abu Osama and Mohammed that the mention of Bashar al-Assad’s name had ruined the morning. His jets came at random. They killed the children. They zoomed away. In my mind’s eye, I saw them roaring low overhead. The sound of their engines would have distributed terror across the landscape. The planes would have streaked through the sky, caused the children to freeze in their tracks and the mothers to weep—and then the jets would have been gone. In their wake would have come bitter curses.
In that morning haze, among those stone-faced villagers, it seemed to me that if the power of hatred could somehow guide the bullets, the villagers’ Kalashnikovs would have taken down entire squadrons of the government’s fighter jets.
I wished the villagers Godspeed. What business did a MiG fighter jet have with these subsistence herders? Their children would have walked to their schools in bare feet. These people would have lived their lives according to the rhythms of the Koran: prayers; eids; Ramadan; sheep slaughtering, then a feast. I had a vague sense that foreign countries might be sending high-tech missile systems to certain rebels in Syria. But the recipients of this kind of aid were professional military men, I felt. They were defectors from the Syrian Arab Army, for the most part, and members of Kurdish militias. They dressed in camo fatigues, gazed at enemy positions from inside sandbag-reinforced bunkers, and carried 3G-enabled encrypted tablets wherever they went, the better to stay in touch with drone pilots on duty in military bases in Florida. In the fields I was looking at, there were no such military men. It seemed to me that if the Syrian government was to bomb here, the most it could hope for would be to bomb the sheep out of existence.
Once, before the war, a snafu at the nearby Bab al Hawa border crossing left me stranded, late at night, on the Syrian side of the border. A passing soldier offered to call me a taxi.
During our drive through the countryside, when we were safely distant from the customs officers, the taxi driver had asked me if I had anything special to do that evening in Aleppo. I had not. Because if not, he said, and if it was all the same to me, I could sleep on his bedroom floor, and in the morning, after a glass of tea, he would drive me to whatever address in Aleppo I had in mind.
He brought a mountain of quilts to his bedroom floor for me. He brought me a nighttime tea. His toddlers came padding in to say good night. Now this man, his toddlers, and their neighbors were the targets of the government MiGs. Why such punishment for such innocent people? I wanted to know. To what conceivable end?
On the rooftop, I whispered to Mohammed: “May God destroy the houses of those who bomb here.” I turned to a Kalashnikov-bearing villager. “May he send you victory.”
“Ameen,” he murmured.
Ten minutes later, inside our taxi, hurrying across the countryside to I knew not where, Mohammed, who was again behind the wheel, told me that Abu Dujanna was the extremist among the four friends. Indeed, as a member of the most extreme among the rebel formations, Jebhat al-Nusra, he had already killed many people.
I happened to be sitting in the back seat this time. Mohammed grinned into the rearview mirror. “He is very extreme,” he said of the off-duty soccer player—or track coach or whatever he was—who sat to my right. “From the most extreme of the extremists, masha’Allah.” Such is the will of God.
I turned to look at Abu Dujanna. He beamed at me. “Go ahead,” said Mohammed. “We have brought him just for you. Interview him.”
Abu Dujanna cast a radiant glance into my eyes. He looked at me as if he were falling in love, as if I were his bride. “Yes, ask,” he said. “I answer. Please! Whatever you like.”
“Okay,” I said. “Abu Dujanna, my friend.” I nudged him in the ribs. “You are a terrorist?”
“Yes,” he said. He smiled.
“Good for you,” I said.
“Yes,” he agreed. “Excellent.”
I shrugged. “Jebhat al-Nusra?” Jebhhat al-Nusra had become famous, at least inside of Syria, for the explosive-laden suicide trucks it had been sending into branch after branch of the state security apparatus. Allegedly, Jebhat al-Nusra—the Victory Front, in English—was the Syrian al Qaeda franchise.
“Yes, Jebhat al-Nusra,” Abu Dujanna said. He shrugged then turned to inspect the passing scenery.
I shrugged back. “Very good for you.”
The actual members of Jebhat al-Nusra, an ultra-secretive, ultra-extreme gang of jihadists, lived, I knew, deep inside the Syrian forest. Or they dwelled in desert tents. They ate bark, did pull-ups on jungle gyms, were bin Laden’s disciples, and appeared in public only in videos, and only after having rammed their suicide trucks into the Syrian Defense Ministry in downtown Damascus. Al Qaeda, I thought then, was a Yemeni-Saudi thing, to which a handful of Iraqi fanatics were trying to cling. In Syria, a milder form of Islam prevailed. If there were genuine Syrian al Qaeda members, I assumed at the time, they were dour old graybeards who had radicalized themselves in Afghanistan, at bin Laden’s side. The likelihood of my happening across such a personage, or anyone linked to such a personage, was, I assumed, just about zero.
I was, however, willing to play along. Perhaps, I thought, Abu Dujanna dreamed about joining Jebhat al-Nusra. Perhaps he had an uncle who knew a cousin who had a friend who was in the group. I was certainly willing to be intimidated if that’s what my friends had in mind. If Abu Dujanna had wanted to threaten and rail, as the al Qaeda
exponents did on YouTube, I would have shrunk in my seat. But Abu Dujanna rather seemed to be in a mood to gaze into the middle distance. When he turned to me, his smile was so pregnant and twinkled so merrily that he seemed to want to plant a kiss on my cheek. The smiles in the eyes of the other passengers made me think a terrific joke was being told. They watched me looking at Abu Dujanna, watched him grinning, then turned their eyes back to me. In those moments, there was too much happiness in the taxi for me to carry on with a serious interview. Anyway, I knew they were having a game.
Through the rearview mirror, I made eye contact with Mohammed. “Jebhat al-Nusra?” I said. “Lovely. I’d rather interview you.”
Mohammed’s expression told me that he didn’t think me much of a journalist. Would a true journalist turn down an interview with a true al Qaeda member? Mohammed insisted on the interview. I bridled. He insisted. Eventually, I gave in.
“How many people have you killed to date?” I asked Abu Dujanna.
“Many,” he said.
“Masha’Allah,” I said.
“Yes, masha’Allah.”
“Why, out of all the possible battalions and katibas in the Syrian war,” I asked Abu Dujanna, “did you join Jebhat al-Nusra?”
“Who else will defend the Syrian people?” he said. “Who will stand for Islam?”
He said that President Assad’s dream was to drive Islam from Syria and that the purpose of the current military campaign was to accomplish by bombs what it had not managed to accomplish with its brainwashing elementary schools, its fake imams, and its program of automatic imprisonment for all those who loved the Prophet more than the regime said he ought to be loved. “Islam in Syria?” he asked, idly, of the air, as if referring to a mythical bird. “It doesn’t exist.” He had joined Jebhat al-Nusra in order to bring the religion of the people back to the people.
He required several minutes of speechifying to tell me this. When his speech was done, I asked him if his having joined Jebhat al-Nusra meant that he cared for Islam more than the others in the car cared for it. It did not, he said. “Then why hasn’t everyone joined Jebhat al-Nusra?” I asked. Abu Dujanna shrugged. The other passengers looked at him but did not reply.
I was interested in this question because terrorists of some variety, I knew not which, had lately struck a prominent building next to the iconic central park in Aleppo. I had seen the carnage on television from the Antakya hotel lounge: Employees from the cell phone company whose offices happened to be across the street from the terrorists’ target ambled through the rubble, their shirts spattered in blood. Dozens of civilians had been killed.
A year earlier, the employees in that building had sold me a SIM card, in that downtown office. The women in the office had struck me as faintly flirtatious. They wore lipstick. The men made courteous smiles at me. All the employees wore smart yellow company sport coats. That office had suggested industriousness to me, young people enjoying life in the city center, a high-tech sector for Syria—and so, the future.
“Abu Dujanna, my brother,” I said. “You don’t support blowing up office buildings. The people who work there are your brothers and sisters.”
He thought about my suggestion for a moment. He looked out the window. “It depends,” he said. “If you kill two hundred now, those two hundred will not join the army. You may save four hundred later. It might be necessary.”
“Killing civilians is necessary?” I asked. I stared at him. His mind, however, was made up. He nodded. I made eye contact with Mohammed in the mirror, then with Abu Osama, who was sitting to my left. Everyone in our car, it seemed, agreed with Abu Dujanna’s terrorist math. It was good to blow up small numbers of people now because dozens dead now would prevent thousands dead later.
I thought about this obtuseness for a moment, withdrew from the conversation, sat in a funk for several kilometers, and then understood the game my fellow travelers were playing. They believed I had come to this rebel-controlled part of Syria, as a journalist from the state TV might come, in order to draw up a report that would prove the people’s rebellion in the provinces to be a vast conspiracy in which crazed jihadis, paid by “interests” and “lobbies” and “agents,” sought to tear Syria apart.
Such was the line the regime-supporting TV channels followed. “They do it because nothing satisfies them, because they love nothing and no one, because they have nothing to cling to, no identity, no home.” Thus did the former president Hafez al-Assad explain the rebellions he had put down, in Idlib Province in 1980, and in the mutinous city of Hama in 1982. Now, the Syrian state TV had begun to replay clips of the former president’s most stirring denunciations of the “conspirators” and “enemies of the state” that had risen against him in his day. These clips played late at night, over a soundtrack of mournful French horns. There were shots of Syrian wildflowers swaying in the breeze. There were flashes of fratricidal killing in the streets. “We Syrians, however, have a place we call home,” Hafez intoned. On came the swelling strings.
Evidently, my traveling companions had decided, on the basis of what evidence I did not know, that I was out to find the homeless marauders the state TV was forever twittering about. They had agreed, among themselves, out of the range of my hearing, to play along with the jihadi-under-every-rock fantasy they thought was dancing in my head.
So they meant to string me along, to allow me to believe that I had stumbled on a veritable nest of little bin Ladens, to watch my unease deepen, to let it drop that Abu Dujanna planned to blow himself up in a crowded Damascus marketplace—and just as my fantasy of journalistic fame and fortune was a true fact before my eyes, all four of them would burst into laughter. “We are not terrorists. We are not homeless. We are the people of this nation,” Mohammed would lecture me. If I insisted on finding al Qaeda behind every bush, as the Syrian government journalists did, he would say, I could piss off back to Turkey. If, however, I wished to report the truth—that they were not paid, were not foreigners, and were not terrorists—I was welcome to it. The four of them would help me however they could, and for as long as I liked.
When I withdrew from my Abu Dujanna interview, he had been, I thought, befuddled. Yes? his face had said. Carry on, please. I am ready.
After several minutes of silence, I decided to begin the conversation anew. “Excuse me, brother Abu Dujanna,” I said. “What I think, in case you’re curious, is that al Qaeda’s presence in Syria, if it is present, is no business of mine. Let them do what they like.” It wasn’t my affair, and I wasn’t interested. I said that in any case, everyone in the world knew everything there was to know about al Qaeda. There were movies and TV shows and professors at all the universities who studied al Qaeda. “I am here to understand the Syrian people’s war against the government in Damascus,” I said. I looked for Mohammed’s eyes in the rearview mirror.
“You are a Syrian citizen?” I asked. “Yes?” I asked him if his feelings about the government were typical of all citizens’ feelings and if he had made his commitment to overthrowing Bashar al-Assad for private gain.
His feelings were indeed typical, he said. No, he was not interested in cash.
“So you are not paid, and you have dedicated your life to the revolution in Syria?”
“Not paid,” he said. “Yes, dedicated.”
“The reading audience in the West would therefore like to better understand some of the details of your life,” I said. I held his gaze in the mirror. “Is that okay with you?”
“Yes, fine,” he replied, but quietly, without smirking.
I told him that the reason I wasn’t interested in interviewing terrorists was because I didn’t feel they represented anything beyond themselves. I wanted to interview him, since I thought he could plausibly speak on behalf of millions just like him. “Do you understand?” I said.
“Yes,” he said. He lowered his eyes.
We drove through misty, green hunchbacked hills for a half hour in silence. I didn’t have the faintest notion of w
here we were going. I didn’t care.
During my time in Damascus, I, for one, had lacked the courage to look crosswise at the lowest civil servant in an official building. When I saw government soldiers in the street, I hurried away. I had been much too afraid of them to go anywhere near an antigovernment demonstration. Had I been born a Syrian, would I have been any more courageous? I doubted it. Now, somehow, I had found young men in whom the impulse to give their lives away so that Syrians of the future could live in a more just society was as instinctive as the impulse to dream. Probably they couldn’t have squelched it if they had tried. Though I didn’t much like my traveling companions in a personal sense, I admired them for a quality neither I nor anyone else I knew in the West had: the instinct for self-sacrifice. The sincerity of their commitment, I decided, was a beautiful, inimitable thing, particular to Syrians, which so outshone their other qualities that it was a mark of my selfishness to have allowed them to put me out.
I wanted Mohammed and his friends to understand the sincerity of my admiration. I respected their cause, their commitment to it, and their willingness to be killed so that Syrians of the future could live in a more just society. I wished them to understand this. Apparently, I was having difficulty persuading my traveling companions of the sincerity of my feelings. As we rolled though the mist, I decided that I wasn’t going to allow this failure to ruin my trip.
