By late January, shells were tearing through the air every few seconds in the neighborhood. The regime’s gunners were on a schedule: 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., with an hour lull for lunch. Aid agencies were denied access. Foreign journalists died, others were wounded and trapped with the people sheltering them. The living cowered underground in the neighborhood’s few basement shelters, while the dead rotted above them. Corpses were dragged into homes until it was less dangerous to bury them. Rubble and shell casings rendered streets impassable to cars. Those who escaped did so on foot. Food was scarce. The taps ran dry after rooftop water tanks were targeted. There was no electricity.
On January 28, the day the Arab League suspended its mission to study a peace proposal, Abu Azzam and Bassem were fighting kilometers apart. The Farouq intended to advance on four regime checkpoints in a coordinated dawn offensive. Abu Azzam remembered a light snow falling as he and his men charged and uprooted the first post. By midmorning, Bassem’s unit fought its way to Abu Azzam, but Bassem wasn’t with them. “The guys were crying. I asked them where Bassem was. They cried harder. Then, they took me to him.”
Abu Azzam didn’t have time to bury his relative. He and the men around him were called to the defense of a pocket near the orchards. When they returned, Bassem was deep in the earth. “For a long time, every time I remembered him, I’d cry for him, but then I envied him,” Abu Azzam said. “He had died a martyr. It had ended for him.”
The Farouq Battalions’ Kalashnikovs, hunting rifles, and rocket-propelled grenades were no match for the Syrian military’s awesome firepower. On March 1, the Farouq’s Abdel-Razzak Tlass announced a “tactical retreat” from Baba Amr. Abu Azzam withdrew to Al-Qusayr, in western Homs. A symbol of the armed rebellion had fallen.
BASSEM’S BROTHER BANDAR had fled Homs for his village in the east, and later moved to Raqqa City. He learned of his brother’s death on Facebook. He read and reread the post. It was wrong, it had to be. The page was administered by a Syrian in Saudi Arabia—what did he know? Bandar dialed Abu Azzam and other Farouq men. Their phones were dead.
Days later, he heard from Abu Azzam. “God have mercy on his soul, he’s gone,” he told Bandar. Bandar didn’t believe him. He wanted proof, so Abu Azzam sent him a photo. The bullet wound above Bassem’s left eyebrow was evident in the image. It dyed his face red. His arms were folded across his chest, his wrists tied in preparation for burial. “He was wearing my green woolen sweater,” Bandar said, “that was how I first recognized him.” He blamed himself. He should have tried harder to convince Bassem to leave. Why didn’t his older brother listen? Why did he have to die? Then, slowly, Bandar accepted it. “Bassem had a good life, but he died for a cause, and in that I found peace,” Bandar said. “He went to help people who were being killed. Is there a cause more beautiful?” After Bassem’s death, Bandar stood in his brother’s stead and joined the protests.
Bassem had left a will, bequeathing his two most valuable possessions—a jacket and a pistol—to friends in his unit. Abu Azzam didn’t write a will. He had nothing to offer except his words, an ode he penned to Homs. In one verse, he wrote:
She stood proudly before death, trying to stem the bleeding of her children
In the country of fear, in the uncertainty of a refugee tent in a freezing December
They have woken from their slumber and in caravans they are pounding toward life
Summer is the heat of bombs and limbs buried under ruins
Doves in the shadow of Baba Amr’s doors, their wounds mocking their killer
TWO FRENCH JOURNALISTS, reporter Edith Bouvier and photographer William Daniels, were trapped in Baba Amr. Two of their colleagues, the Spaniard Javier Espinosa and British photographer Paul Conroy, had escaped. Two others, Marie Colvin and Rémi Ochlik, were dead, killed days earlier on February 22, when four rockets slammed into the makeshift media center where they were all hiding. The four survivors had attempted to escape the same way they’d entered—through a 2.5-mile underground water pipeline, just 1.6 meters high, which ran under Syrian army positions. It was the only route into and out of Baba Amr. Bouvier, wounded in the leg and unable to walk, was strapped to a stretcher carried by Syrians. As all four journalists scurried through the tunnel, explosions rocked one end of it. The army had discovered it. Espinosa and Conroy, quick-footed and well ahead of the two French journalists, made it out and were smuggled across the border to Lebanon. Bouvier and Daniels were forced back into Baba Amr. Thirteen Syrians died trying to get the foreign journalists to safety, in a rescue effort overseen by the Farouq Battalions in coordination with civilian activists. By March 2, Bouvier and Daniels were safely in France. Shortly after that, the Farouq’s Abu Hashem, the former realtor, and several of his men, were invited to the French Embassy in Beirut. “They offered us three million dollars. It was a check, a thank-you check,” Abu Hashem said. “We returned it.”
The Farouq needed money, “a lot of it,” as Abu Hashem put it, but its image was more important. “We were people with serious demands and not a gang saving journalists for money, and not the terrorists Bashar said we were. We weren’t like those Bashar had let out of Sednaya,” Abu Hashem said. The gesture earned the Farouq political capital with anti-Assad Western and Arab diplomats that it would later cash. “It was a huge boost to our reputation,” Abu Hashem said. “They realized what we were.”
The Farouq had custody of another group of foreigners whose release later in 2012 would also serve it well. In late December 2011, the Farouq captured seven Iranians. Abu Sayyeh remembered looking up from his sweet tea at around 6 a.m. one day in Baba Amr to see five Iranians trailing in with his men. The Farouq claimed they were soldiers; Iran said they were engineers working at a Syrian power plant in Homs. Two more Iranians, who both sides agreed were civilians, were captured after they went looking for the other five. They all remained with the Farouq until June, when Abu Hashem released them into the custody of Turkish authorities—except for two who died when the regime shelled a Homs school that the Farouq had turned into a barracks. Iran, the Lebanese group Hizballah, freelance negotiators, and Turkey offered the Farouq up to five million dollars to release the Iranians. “If we had taken that amount, we would have been considered a kidnapping gang, but when we handed them over, we won international relations that enabled us to get weapons later,” Abu Hashem said. “It opened doors for us.”
THE DEFECTORS who claimed to lead the Free Syrian Army were sequestered in an isolated refugee camp in southern Turkey’s Hatay Province, living in white canvas tents surrounded by flat green fields. Hours-long power cuts were common at the site, preventing officers from following the news of a Syrian uprising they purported to lead. Egos ballooned in the defectors’ bubble as rivalries deepened. The colonel at the helm of the FSA, Riad al-Asaad, who defected in July 2011, refused to cede his position to a major general, Mustafa al-Sheikh, who defected in November 2011. The major general outranked the colonel in the old system, but defection dates determined the new hierarchy. Military men counted the weeks and months since they had switched sides like children stating their exact age.
Fighting men inside Syria learned to rely on themselves (and God). They learned to film their exploits—realizing that YouTube clips served as advertisements, that a good explosion caught on camera could fetch a million Syrian pounds if it impressed the right private sponsor. They learned that they needed to test bullets before buying them, that some were blanks, that rocket-propelled grenades smuggled from Iraq were unreliable. They learned that they could buy weapons and ammunition from some of the same corrupt men who were trying to kill them on the other side. They learned that they should give their battalions and brigades Islamist names if they wanted to impress sheikhs in the Gulf with huge fundraising capabilities. Adnan Arour was the sheikh most rebels wanted to attract—a gray-bearded Salafi from Hama who had fled to Saudi Arabia in the 1980s and had his own show on Saudi satellite television. Not because they agreed with Arour’s hate-filled speech aga
inst Alawites and minorities (some did), but because the sheikh could rattle a tin and fill it. The appearance of piety helped attract Salafi donors. Salafi beards—with shaved mustaches—became fashionable. But while Syrians took Salafi money and pledged loyalty, the cash hadn’t necessarily bought their support or belief, just temporary gratitude.
Rebels met and planned and organized in small groups under the banner of a Free Syrian Army that offered them little beyond a name and an affiliation. Southern Turkish border towns such as Antakya, Gaziantep, and Şanlıurfa became logistical hubs for the revolution. Places where donors met fighters, where refugees arrived, nonlethal supplies were purchased, the wounded were treated, where men placed their families before returning to the Syrian battlefield, where foreign fighters made their way, smugglers fished for clients, and later kidnappers hunted for foreign prey such as aid workers and journalists. Stores proliferated, selling all manner of combat uniforms, including the Afghan-style shalwar kameez not worn in the Levant but preferred by jihadis.
There were safe houses here and there, closer to the border, where weapons deals were negotiated and campaigns planned, and other safe houses where weapons were manufactured. One workshop, an old two-room stone house in an olive grove in Syria’s Idlib Province, manufactured IEDs that rebels called the jineyee (Arabic for genie, or crazy female). It was operational in February 2012. The bomb-maker, a short bearded man in civilian clothes and latex gloves who looked to be in his early forties, puffed on a cigarette as he prepared what he called his special recipe in a safe house he referred to as his kitchen. He didn’t give his name or even a pseudonym. He’d learned his trade in the military, he said, where he’d been an explosives engineer, “another lifetime” ago. His creation, a rust-colored metal tube, stood at about 60 centimeters and contained two kilograms of yellow granular explosive material, hooked up to a trigger device (using nine-volt batteries and phones), remotely detonated. “We haven’t been doing this for very long,” said a defector, a young captain in the kitchen. “It took a few tries to get it right, the mix of materials. It was trial and error, and looking some things up on the Internet.” The bomb-maker scooped up explosive material and poured it into a cylinder, shooing the captain and others out of the room. “Excuse me,” he said, “I’ve got a lot of work to do.”
IN MARCH, far from the public eye, the Saudis and the Qataris started choosing their teams within the Syrian armed opposition. The Qataris wanted to deal with defectors but not the Free Syrian Army’s purported leaders—the squabbling major general and the colonel. They chose other interlocutors. Major Abdulrahman Suwais was one of three defectors present at the first meeting between the Qataris and defectors, in Ankara’s Marriott Hotel. The Qataris asked for a list of Syrian factions to support. “They made it clear that meem tah [antiaircraft missiles] and meem dal [antitank missiles] were out of the question,” Suwais said. The defectors were to take whatever weapons they were given. Suwais extracted from the Qataris a promise of 100,000 euros, money he used to set up a brigade in his hometown of Homs.
Unlike the Qataris, the Saudis sidelined all of the defectors. They relied on Okab Sakr. Okab Sakr in turn relied on four men who formed the core of what would come to be known as the Istanbul Room, a secret clearinghouse for distributing arms and ammunition. The Farouq’s Abu Hashem, who was now the Farouq’s foreign liaison, was one of the four. He joined the two SNN cofounders, Bilal Attar and Abulhassan Abazeed, who were now also part of the Farouq Battalions. The fourth man was known as Abu Fadel, a defector’s son from Haffeh in Latakia Province. The quartet met Sakr in mid-March at a hotel in Istanbul. Sakr asked them for names—of people who represented armed factions inside Syria. In early April, more than two dozen of those names were flown into Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport from southern Turkey and chauffeur-driven to a seaside resort, the Renaissance Polat, for a three-day meeting to organize a unified rebellion. The men represented each of Syria’s fourteen provinces except Tartous and Sweida. Almost half were from Latakia, because Abu Fadel couldn’t decide on a two-man team from his province.
Okab Sakr walked into the hotel conference room flanked by an Arabic-speaking Turk in his thirties from the National Intelligence Agency (MIT), the only man in the room to keep his phone. Everyone else had to hand over his communication devices at the door. “I am Okab Sakr, a Lebanese Shiite, but don’t be shocked. Not every Sunni is with the revolution and not every Shiite or Druze or Christian is with the regime,” Sakr said. His words were like a cluster bomb. The room exploded in conversation so disruptive that Sakr allowed a thirty-minute recess. “We wanted to know who was this Shiite who said he was going to support us?” one of the eleven Latakia representatives said. “I’d never heard of him.”
When the session reconvened, every man was asked to introduce himself and to specify who he represented inside Syria and how many fighters he had. “Naturally, all of the numbers were fake,” the same Latakian recalled. “The problems started from the beginning. It was a game, but we had to play it to get something to liberate our lands. Everybody was sizing up everybody else, asking, Who are you? Why are you here? What have you done? It was chaotic.”
Sakr promised guns. He said they were from private sources, not states, and the Syrians were to take what they were given. No requests. “He told us there are lots of weapons in Libya. We’ll buy them through various ways, and you’ll receive them in Syria. Don’t ask me about the details,” another participant said. “We didn’t care about the details. I didn’t care where it came from. I just wanted guns.”
In late April, the first batch of weapons slipped into Syria, under cover of darkness, from three points along what was still a regime-controlled border with Turkey—one place led into Latakia, the other two into Idlib. Abu Fadel, one of the four core members of the Istanbul Room, was responsible for the route into his home province of Latakia. Turkey’s “red light” on the border, Abu Fadel said, had turned green. Boxes were carried across the frontier at a place known to locals as “the intersection of the two rivers,” not far from the first refugee camp in Turkey, Yayladağı One. It was an all-night operation. Once inside Syria, the goods were transported in cars with armed escorts who checked in with spotters hidden along the route to avoid regime ambushes. The boxes contained bullets, what the rebels called NATO rifles (Belgian FALs), and rocket-propelled-grenade launchers, each launcher equipped with no more than ten rockets—not enough for even a short day’s fight. “It was all brand new, straight from the factory,” a rebel who was there said. “But it wasn’t large quantities. They provided just enough to hook us with the promise of more.”
The Farouq’s Bilal Attar and Abu Hashem scouted the two other locations that led into Idlib Province: One was opposite the Syrian town of Atmeh, the other near the Turkish village of Hacıpaşa. They cut the barbed wire at Atmeh and sneaked through it, ferrying boxes on foot. At one point, Bilal Attar snagged his head on razor-sharp metal that left a 13-centimeter scar. Atmeh was nothing more than an olive grove at the time, a place where, Attar said, “dogs feared to tread.” The weapons and ammunition were emptied into small trucks and covered with cinderblocks, sand, and other construction materials and then smuggled to Homs along back roads at night. They were stockpiled in rebel neighborhoods in “the capital of the revolution” for a few weeks until May, when the Farouq Battalions set up clandestine transportation routes to Hama, Idlib, Daraa, Deir Ezzor, and the Damascene countryside. Bilal Attar’s SNN partner, Abulhassan Abazeed, was intercepted and detained by the regime while delivering one of the first shipments in May. His fate remains unknown.
Abu Azzam was enlisted to help. The Farouq Battalions assigned him to Uqayribat, a flat dustbowl of ochre earth in Hama’s eastern countryside. It was tribal territory, and Abu Azzam, as a tribal man from the east, was tasked with recruiting a battalion of locals to secure and transport weapons and ammunition through his patch of the distribution network. The guns traveled in a small truck sandwiched between cars of discreetly
armed escorts. The speck of a town sat along a knot of well-worn smuggling routes through the desert to Iraq. “My responsibility,” said Abu Azzam, “was to secure the weapons and transport them to Yabroud and Qarah,” towns in the Damascene countryside. He turned an old, disused school into a warehouse. “There were still schoolbooks, exam papers, a few broken desks. We cleaned it out. The dust was so thick. We used it when we needed to, and sometimes the weapons weren’t unloaded—they continued directly on their path.”
Okab Sakr tasked the Farouq with the Syria-wide distribution of the weapons and ammunition that came through the clearinghouse operation known as the Istanbul Room. The Farouq’s cut was a third. The Turks trusted them (because of the Iranian hostage negotiations), as did the Europeans, thanks to the French (courtesy of the journalists’ rescue). It was all done in secret. The Farouq began to look the part of an organized battalion, dressing in uniforms emblazoned with their logo—a black shield bearing their name, bordered by crossed swords and a three-starred Syrian revolutionary flag fluttering from the barrel of a Kalashnikov. They even developed an anthem. The Istanbul Room operation expanded. The Saudis and the Emiratis provided weapons and ammunition, including cluster bombs made in the United Arab Emirates. The Qataris, despite their separate deal with the army’s defectors in the officers’ camp, also doled out cash in the Istanbul Room. It was supposed to be a command-and-control center. It would prove to be neither.
SULEIMAN
Suleiman felt guilty. He was alive. He had escaped Rastan and that raid on the farmhouse near the dam. He should have been with his friends that day, he was one of them, a member of the tansiqiya, but they were dead and he was alive. Alone, afraid, angry. He couldn’t stop now. To stop meant betraying his friends’ blood. His work was more urgent. He quit his job in Hama. The city was besieged by the military. So, too, was Rastan. Its eighteen checkpoints had become thirty. But his parents refused to leave. The family had scattered. His only brother was in Hama, his two sisters in a Homs that was under attack. He was a fugitive. Syria suddenly felt claustrophobic. His parents begged him to escape, but he could not forsake the revolution.
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