The Shattered Lens

by Jonathan Alpeyrie

  That said, war photographers are an admittedly surly breed. We’re super-competitive, addicted to risk, and often become jaded after chasing death and destruction for so many years. If pacifists hold us in contempt, then soldiers tolerate us as long as we don’t get into situations that force them to risk their lives for the sake of some hack who might otherwise make them look bad.

  In the end, we conflict photographers and journalists are obliged to help each other out. I’ve made some very special friendships with colleagues over the years. As often happens with soldiers, coming under fire shoulder to shoulder with another person and surviving tends to solder a relationship that might otherwise come apart.

  So, shortly after I was released, when asked by the French and US governments to help track down remaining hostages, I couldn’t say no. It also gave me a concrete objective to work for and helped me process the experience I’d just come through.

  * * *

  I WAS APPROACHED by Fredrik Holm, a Swedish photographer trying to locate a couple of his countrymen, reporter Magnus Falkehed and photographer Niclas Hammarström, who had been captured in late November 2013. We communicated via Skype and he asked if I could help him. I agreed.

  Falkehed and Hammarström had been kidnapped in the same area as me, around Yabroud, most likely by the same unit. I got through to a Christian Syrian woman who took care of Mohammed Aboud’s businesses in Canada, and put them in touch. The whole process was complicated by the fact that in Sweden it’s the police who deal with hostage situations, which doesn’t make much sense if the abduction takes place beyond their jurisdiction. (Similarly, neither I nor my father ever fully understood why the Americans used the FBI to follow my case rather than the State Department—although one can at least assume that the US federal police has a global reach.)

  The woman agreed to get Aboud involved and act as go-between. I hadn’t spoken directly to Aboud since he said goodbye to me at the Lebanese side of the border. Aboud said he was happy that I’d gotten back safely and he seemed willing to help. But after a week or so of back-and-forth through his representative, he eventually said no. Apparently, the reward he’d been expecting from the French and/or US governments—namely, to get himself and his businesses removed from the sanctions list on which he appeared in 2011, shortly after the Bashar regime had begun its crackdown—hadn’t materialized yet, and he was bitter about the lack of gratitude. (This was in the late fall of 2013, but a year later, in November 2014, Aboud had been removed from the European Union’s blacklist, only to be placed back on it in January 2015.)

  For more than a month I was on Skype every morning, trying to connect with various people. I got in touch with Fares and other contacts on the ground who would be able to help the Swedes and French communicate with Essad (the French were involved because Falkehed was a resident of France and had family there). They wound up contacting him and sent people in from Lebanon. I don’t know exactly how it came about logistically, but when Essad met these people he said, “I don’t have any hostages. It’s another group that has them. I can’t help you.” Of course, he was lying about everything. Everybody knew it. When they asked him, “What about Jonathan?” he said, “Oh, I didn’t kidnap him. All we did was help him. We just kept him safe. And then we got him out.” It was obvious he was full of shit, and the questioners just laughed at him.

  Shortly after they were abducted, the Swedes tried to escape. Hammarström was shot in the leg as he ran away and they were caught again very quickly, brought back, and then beaten.

  I went to Paris to meet Falkehed’s wife and two daughters, who lived there. They were worried to the point of tears and I tried to reassure them.

  In early January 2014 the two Swedes were released along with a rather opaque explanation of how they crossed the border—similar to mine. The people involved were no doubt concerned about drawing too much attention to just how fluid alliances in that part of Syria are.

  Although I was very happy to help anyone, the experience left me with a slightly bitter aftertaste because I didn’t get a single call from the journalists, even though I helped a lot. I’d just been released myself, and was already very raw emotionally. I took it upon myself to help them out and was harboring some hope for solidarity. In the end it only confirmed to me that, though there are those of us who feel connected by a sense of duty and respect to one another, all too many combat photographers and journalists tend to behave like mercenaries and have little sense of honor and loyalty.

  * * *

  I HAD A SOMEWHAT more edifying experience helping two Spanish journalists, photographer Ricardo Vilanova and Javier Espinoza, a correspondent for El Mundo, both of whom had been in Homs with Marie Colvin when she died. Ricardo was a friend of mine, a stand-up guy who was known for taking crazy risks, even by the standards of the profession. I met him on the Syrian border with Turkey in March 2012, the second time I went to Syria. The two of them were kidnapped in Raqqa in December 2013 and wound up hostages of ISIS, among the same group of twenty-three hostages that included the American James Foley and John Cantlie, the Brit who wound up making propaganda videos for ISIS. They were held there for about six months, under horrible conditions: tortured by Jihadi John and the other Beatles, as the four notoriously sadistic British-born jihadis were known.

  The French secret service called me and asked if I could help. There wasn’t much I could do, but I did know a man in France, a refugee living in Orléans who was from Raqqa. So I flew to Paris and I met with him. I also arranged for the secret service to meet with him. He didn’t want to get paid and had very little money, but still he took his car all the way to Paris. They organized a meeting at a café, where he told them he had good contacts on the ground who would be able to locate what prison they were in. Eventually, through his contacts in Raqqa, he found out where they were. In return he wanted a French passport, but the French said they couldn’t do it.

  Since then Espinoza has said he doesn’t want to cover any more wars. He’s older, has kids, and he’s seen his fair share of wars. But Vilanova got right back to work. Me and a few other colleagues put several thousand dollars together when he was released so he could buy some new equipment. Since then he’s been to Libya, Yemen, and most recently to Iraq.

  I understood both their positions. A part of me was finished with this thankless work. The romanticism and glory of a combat photographer has diminished significantly in the age of smartphones and digital photography. In addition, the type of wars going on today—with asymmetrical battles in which jihadis rely as much on propaganda as on military prowess—encourage visual terror, with beheadings of innocents broadcast over the Internet. Journalists make for tempting targets, especially since by definition they know people in the media, which amplifies the effect.

  An ancillary issue is whether governments should pay ransoms for their citizens taken hostage. The United States and Great Britain are adamant about not paying ransoms or even negotiating with hostage takers. The United States went so far as to make it illegal for families of hostages to pay ransoms to terrorists, though they have since recognized the cruelty of such a law and now make allowances.

  On the other hand, the French, Italian, Japanese, and other governments—although they refuse to admit it—are well known for paying out substantial sums of money for the return of their citizens. Of course, the hostage takers know this, and as a result they prefer to target citizens of spendthrift countries with deep pockets.

  * * *

  THIS BRINGS UP ANOTHER very relevant dilemma with respect to all the hostages still being held captive: should the family and friends go public or not?

  From the beginning, my family felt it best to keep my situation out of the press. My father was advised by Robert Doueihy to keep a low profile and let him negotiate in the shark-infested waters of the Levantine hostage souk. French and US government officials concurred. At one point, when all hope seemed to be fading, my friend Aaron in New York suggested contacting a friend who w
orked for a broadcasting network, but my father forbade him. In another instance J. P. Pappis, the founder and president of Polaris Images, my photo agency, wanted to go public and my mother effectively threatened him. In fact, as soon as she got word of my abduction, my mother had the foresight to have Aaron, who was very tech savvy, erase as much as he could of my online profile.

  Her concerns were justified later when James Foley’s family went public and the news that his brother was an officer in the US Air Force became known to his ISIS captors.

  As I’ve explained, as soon as I was released, I was asked to appear on TV shows and do interviews for magazines. On the one hand, this offered me a vehicle for telling my story and, let’s face it, raised my quota professionally. (It’s absurd how surviving capture and torture adds to your credibility, but that’s how it works.) On the other hand, I had very strange people coming out of the woodwork to get a hold of me.

  One particularly unpleasant experience involved an American photojournalist who had also been held captive in Syria. He lived on the east coast of the United States and contacted me. He seemed like a decent enough guy, but there was something unhinged about him—which was no surprise. He had found out that the US government had given me about ten thousand dollars to help me buy the equipment I’d lost. This had happened mostly thanks to the good graces of the FBI officers who were handling my case.

  This photojournalist, however, was very outspoken and had begun to do the speaker circuit, often criticizing the US government for its policies. He was also hounding me to help him get money from the feds. I politely tried to keep him at a safe distance, but the more aloof I was the more belligerent he became, calling me names like “the Four-Hundred-Fifty-Thousand-Dollar Man,” sending me pictures of terrorist beheadings, and eventually threatening me with “I’m gonna kick your ass” or “I’m gonna kill you.”

  Rather than deal with this whacko one-on-one, which would have been a lose-lose situation, I just referred it to the FBI officers, and they said he’d been threatening them, too, accusing them of having stolen money from him. Finally the district attorney called me in for questions so they could build a case against him.

  For a while, though, I was looking over my shoulder. Then somehow the wind was taken out of his sails and it all seemed to die down.

  * * *

  ANOTHER AFTEREFFECT of my captivity was that I was suddenly considered a Syria expert and my opinion was requested by other journalists. I appeared on CNN with Anderson Cooper and Christiane Amanpour. I also appeared on Fox News’s Hannity, though Sean Hannity was sick or on vacation that day. It was late August, shortly after the Syrian government was accused of launching sarin gas missiles into the Ghouta district of Damascus. In order to punish the Syrian government, Obama was preparing to bomb the Bashar regime—but was hoping to avoid it by first asking for congressional approval, and then cutting a deal with Russian president Vladimir Putin to pressure Bashar to eliminate his chemical weapons.

  On that episode of Hannity I said flat-out that I suspected the opposition rebels of using chemical weapons, that the Ghouta episode may have been a false flag operation. I’d heard such rumors even before I was captured; United Nations representative Carla Del Ponte had already raised such suspicions in March of that year.

  In various other interviews I basically said what I’d always thought: that the Bashar regime, despite its brutality, was the only thing keeping Syria from disintegrating into chaos that both fed and was fed by radical Islam. No matter how much aid the rebels got from the West, they would only become further radicalized, and this would spell disaster for a heterogeneous society like Syria, especially for the Alawite and Christian minorities. Essentially it was a choice between two evils, and Bashar’s secular Baathists were the lesser evil. The alternative was either a long, drawn-out civil war if Bashar’s troops managed to hold out, or widespread massacres of Alawites and Christians at the hands of Sunni radicals if Bashar was defeated.

  After these public appearances a number of my colleagues reproached me, calling me a traitor (though what cause I was betraying, they couldn’t say). The progressives and lefties who constituted the majority in the US and French media still believed that a neoliberal democracy with respect for human rights was a viable alternative for areas of the world that not only had no democratic tradition, but were advocating a return to a tradition that was antithetical to democracy as we knew it in the West.

  I had nothing against the opposition rebels, even though they were my captors. I always respected their struggle and understood it. But I also always knew that the fall of the Bashar regime would inevitably lead to the rise of ISIS or something similar, and to the persecution of Shiites and Christians. It was basic realism I was expressing.

  But realism isn’t always the goal of journalists covering wars. The agenda of many combat photographers is either ideological (an attempt to save the world by bringing to light the suffering of war’s victims) or aesthetic (getting that perfect combination of composition and content so that a specific moment in history is captured in iconic form). I admit to being guilty of both to some degree. Ideologically I have no pretensions about saving the world or making it a better place, but I would definitely like to see European and Western culture survive, if not prevail. And aesthetically, I’d like those who encounter my work to see history unfold at least partially through my eyes.

  So the more I thought about it after my release, the more I was itching to hone my vision again.

  LOSERS

  HISTORY IS WRITTEN BY THE WINNERS: it’s a tired and easily forgotten truism. But what about the losers? How does a nation or civilization that has been either swept away, devastated, or simply marginalized by the waves of history come to terms with a narrative that presents an existential threat to its identity? How does a nation come to terms with the evil it has perpetrated?

  There’s no easy answer to these questions because historical events are rarely so black-and-white as to even remotely allow for a good-guy/bad-guy dichotomy. That only happens in Hollywood, crap novels, and high school history books. The deeper you go into the minutiae of trying to figure out the infinitely complex fabric of what exactly happened in the past, the more you get tangled in a universe of loose threads.

  A few months after I’d returned from Syria I was invited to Minneapolis by the city’s Oromo diaspora community to take part in a conference. As one of the few photojournalists who had ever bothered to chronicle their plight I was held in high regard. They opened themselves up to me, invited me into their homes, and thanked me for helping their identity become known beyond their little community.

  The Oromo were a perfect example of a group that had been marginalized by history. When I first set out to follow them through the savanna of southern Ethiopia, only a handful of my colleagues (in theory people who should be well acquainted with history, politics and geography) had even heard of them. Since the Oromo Liberation Front is outlawed and considered a terrorist organization by the Ethiopian government, and the Ethiopian government is friendly with the United States government, there is little sympathy for the OLF in Washington.

  But like so many small nations struggling against oblivion in the age of globalization, the Oromo do everything they can to keep their narrative alive. My photos of the Oromo Liberation Army were very important to them, and they went out of their way to show their gratitude. Despite their graciousness, or perhaps because of it, I felt a tinge of sadness for these people because I sensed how much they feared having their identity erased from the “book of life” that history is supposed to offer us. This is almost impossible to imagine for an American or Frenchman, whose historical narrative is still in flower. But the Oromo seriously risk becoming like the Dacians or Vandals or Sarmatians or any number of now-nameless nations who mingle inseparably with the rubble and dust of history.

  In our age of nuclear superpowers, massive campaigns to conquer territory or subjugate other nations are rare (the US-led invasion o
f Iraq being a notable exception). Usually the nations who take up arms are already, in a sense, losers. That’s why they fight to begin with. They’ve already been either subjugated or oppressed or forced to assimilate, and they’ve taken up arms to forestall what is perceived as imminent annihilation.

  These are the fighters that fascinate me most. And over the years I’ve come to appreciate the notion of loss and sacrifice that such soldiers embody. Progressive liberal culture in the United States and Europe often tends to disparage as foolish the ideas of honor, duty and national pride that drive men and women to fight, but that’s only because they can afford to be dismissive: other fools in the not-too-distant past have fought and died so they can be comfortably smug in their positions of power.

  * * *

  MY ATTRACTION TO LOSERS grew in the course of a project I started in 2003: photographing World War II veterans. I was based in Santa Barbara, California, where I’d moved after graduating from the University of Chicago. I’d just started working professionally as a photojournalist two years earlier. I had an old Rollei Rolleicord 1956 medium format camera—a real antique. While in Santa Barbara I got to know some World War II vets and took very classic portraits of them. By then, of course, they were old men and it wasn’t always easy to imagine them storming a beachhead or jumping out of a plane. But I had them pose in their rooms, or wherever they felt comfortable. Some of them brought out memorabilia from their war years: medals, photos, uniforms, flags.