ISIS, ad-Dawla, was quick to pronounce other Muslims infidels. It filled its jails with anyone who opposed or questioned it or was perceived to be engaging in anti-Islamic activities. Abu Loqman jailed Abu Saad al-Hadrame, the Nusra emir he had appointed. Civilian activists, including some of those in the basement of the sports stadium, were detained. Others fled or went underground. The stadium became an ISIS detention facility known as Point 11. Abdullah Khalil, the lawyer-turned-politician who registered complaints in a closet of a room, was arrested by ISIS. His fate is unknown. The Nusra fighter who had argued with Bandar and his friends over the raising of the black flag laid low for months and then fled to Aleppo, where he remained until the fall of rebel-held parts of the city in 2016. The two gray-haired men who challenged him escaped with their families to their hometowns on the outskirts of Raqqa City. The two younger men, Abu Noor and Bandar, stayed in Raqqa. Bandar spoke to me as often as he could during that period, addressing me in the masculine so that, should anyone overhear him, they would not know he was speaking to a woman who was not a relative. Communications were generally limited to ISIS-approved Internet cafés or private satellite devices the group allowed some residents to use. Bandar called me one day, turned on the camera to reveal ISIS’s black flag on a wall behind him so I’d know where he was, then leaned into the screen and whispered, “Don’t come back here, anywhere near here. They’ll kill you.”
“Bandar!” somebody shouted. He turned abruptly. The line went dead.
ABU AZZAM
General Doctor Engineer Salim Idris was frustrated. He sat in the lobby of the plush Ottoman Palace hotel in Antakya one spring day, dressed in a gray suit, sky-blue shirt, and navy tie, black shoes polished to a shine. He looked like a businessman, not the head of the Free Syrian Army’s Supreme Military Council trying to arm an uprising. For twenty-seven days after he was elected in December at the Antalya Conference that had proven so disastrous for the Farouq, Idris didn’t receive so much as a bullet from the revolution’s Arab and Western backers, undermining his credibility with Syria’s fighting men before he’d even begun. “I have no influence over the suppliers,” he said a month later. “I must beg.”
He’d moved the FSA’s military command to the Bab al-Hawa border crossing, but he was often in southern Turkey meeting with donors and diplomats. He was expecting an American shipment of nonlethal aid later that afternoon—helmets, flak jackets, ready-to-eat meals. That’s not what he wanted. “They can keep them,” General Idris said. “We need between 500 to 600 tons of ammunition a week. We get between 30 to 40 tons. So you do the calculations.”
He wanted to organize the armed uprising but wondered how he could succeed where the Joint Command and Istanbul Room had failed. If he could only bring half of the men under his command, he said, he’d consider it a success. The problem was that, by his count, some 70 to 80 percent were armed civilians, not defectors used to taking orders. “Bashar is not better than us at organizing his men, but he has the power of a state. He can bring that to bear and punish a man who won’t follow orders,” the general said. “It’s not easy.”
The general had become a lightning rod for the rebels’ anger, his phone a millstone with constant calls and visits from rebel commanders complaining about the lack of supplies. “Sometimes, they come to me, they are very angry, they want to eat me,” Idris said. “There are officers and revolutionaries who ask me why they personally are not getting ammunition. I can’t work on supplying individuals! I must work via operations rooms to supply fronts.”
He had set up an operations command center that sent senior defectors to monitor battlefields and report who fought where and how, who abandoned their posts, who responded to advice, who worked well with others, and who sat back, watched, and waited to move in and snatch the war booty. He intended to withhold support from ineffectual groups. Take Commander X, Idris said, who in the past, to impress his overseas or local patrons, “goes and fires a few rockets, creates a bit of dust, films it, and puts it on YouTube so that he can say, ‘See, I worked.’ Now, it’s no longer like that.” Commander X won’t be supplied by the Supreme Military Council or included in future battles, Idris said. He’d inform the commander’s patrons, too. The problem was that Commander X, like most fighting men in Syria, knew not to rely on one source for anything.
Idris was under pressure to prove himself worthy of his title. “People rose against oppression, to talk, to speak up, and now they won’t stop,” he said. “Everybody is an analyst, from a fighter to a commander to the refugee.”
ABU AZZAM WAS frustrated. Stuck in Turkey. He had survived the assassination attempt, his wounds healing, but fear of another attack had made him a refugee. He was a member of the FSA’s thirty-man Supreme Military Council headed by General Idris. Abu Azzam represented Raqqa, but it wasn’t the frontline. For the first time since 2011, Abu Azzam was in a safe place, and he hated it. It was May 22. He was in Istanbul at the seaside Ataköy Marina Hotel for a two-day meeting between the FSA command and Saudi representatives. It was the first gathering between the two parties since Saudi Arabia had nudged Qatar aside earlier in the month to take over “the military file” and become the main funnel of arms to the FSA. The Saudi delegation was led by Prince Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, then defense minister and future king, and attended by the Lebanese politician Okab Sakr. The Qataris (and their representatives) were not invited.
The commanders expected a working plan to come out of the meeting, and tangible support, but by the end of it, only one front—Al-Qusayr, near the Lebanese border—was earmarked for 300,000 bullets and an undisclosed number of rocket-propelled grenades and tank shells. The Saudis distributed envelopes containing $5,000 cash to each participant to cover personal expenses.
Abu Azzam returned to his ground-floor room with an envelope. He sat on the balcony, stared trancelike at the manicured lawn, then closed his eyes and turned his face up to a bright, cloudless sky. He was in dark jeans, the same navy-blue boat shoes he was wearing when he was shot in Tal Abyad, and a gray polo shirt. “I’m in shock. I’m embarrassed to go back to my men empty-handed,” he said. “I need ammunition. What am I going to tell my men? It’s always promises, promises, but this time I was hoping for something more from the Saudis. Sometimes the Qataris offer you support immediately.”
The Farouq had splintered after losing its foreign donors, leaving its leaders bickering. The Supreme Military Council had shut off its taps to them, but Abu Azzam still had men on the fronts fighting in the Farouq’s name. Some Farouq commanders headed to the eastern oil fields of the city of Shaddadi, hoping Syria’s black gold would make them self-sustainable. Assad had lost the city in February 2013. Jabhat al-Nusra sat on Shaddadi’s refineries, while the Farouq had the oil wells in the countryside. One was little use without the other, but the two groups would not cooperate. Nusra snatched the wells from the Farouq, and Shaddadi’s oil (as well as that of other towns) became a major source of income for the group. Nusra sold the valuable liquid to local traders, who set up makeshift refineries in rebel-held areas. Nusra also transported it to Turkey and even traded with the regime. “We have to sell it to the regime because we need money,” a Nusra emir in Shaddadi once told me. “What are we going to do with it if nobody buys it? Drink it? A sea of oil is worth nothing if you can’t sell it.”
Abu Azzam’s phone rang five times in fifteen minutes. He put it inside his hotel room within earshot and returned to the balcony. A smile, sad and regretful, spread across his face. “My phone used to ring before,” he said. “Sometimes it was a girl asking me to go for a walk. Now it’s all requests for ammunition, to help the wounded, or news about a battle.” He reminisced about his university days in Homs. He did that often now. He remembered his friends like Bandar sitting in the cafeteria, talking and laughing, while he wrote poetry. “Sometimes I was so broke I didn’t have money for a cup of coffee, but I was happy. I’d tell my friends, ‘Let’s go for a walk.’ I didn’t like being by myself
back then, but now I just want to be alone.” He was quiet for a moment. “Now, I’ve aged. I feel like an old man.” He was thirty. Burdened with responsibilities he hadn’t asked for. Tormented by the fear of not meeting them. “Our revolution was beautiful, but political money entered and dirtied it,” he said. “Now I must wear a fake smile, grit my teeth, and kiss the feet of donors and tell them they are the crowns on my head, because men rely on me. I am tired.”
He began reciting his poetry but stumbled—he couldn’t remember the words. “My head is full of so many things.” His phone kept ringing. He would not ignore the calls. Agitated, he sank into his chair. His polo shirt lifted slightly, revealing an abdomen disfigured by traumas old and new—angry red wounds from the assassination attempt near paler lines, dozens of them, cuts from his regime interrogations. His thoughts were as random as the scars on his abdomen. There was a girl he liked at university, he said. He smiled at the memory. “I’d scoop her up in front of the whole cafeteria, I didn’t care. I’d shock my friends. They used to call me ‘The Sheikh,’ because I was religious, and there I was, publicly showing my love for this girl. I don’t know where she is now. I hope she’s still alive.”
By the summer of 2013, the once-mighty Farouq Battalions simply withered away.
RUHA
Ruha’s Uncle Mohammad and his wife, Noora, weren’t home when the artillery crashed into their upper floor on April 25, the rocket wounding walls and raining rubble into their courtyard fountain. No one was hurt, but days later, elsewhere in Saraqeb, much nastier projectiles claimed more than concrete.
It was a cloudless day, the sky a bright blue, when the chemical weapons tumbled from a helicopter gunship, white smoke trails mapping their paths to three locations. It happened shortly after the noon call to prayer on April 29. A fifty-two-year-old mother, Mariam Khatib, died after one of the tear-gas–type canisters landed in her garden. An autopsy performed in Turkey under UN observation “indicated signatures of previous Sarin exposure” in her organs. Seven more victims, all foaming at the mouth, with constricted pupils, nausea, and vomiting, were treated in Saraqeb with atropine and recovered.
One of the canisters did not explode. It fell intact in a shallow, muddy pond near several homes. Local activists photographed, measured, and weighed it and then informed senior members of the opposition, who connected them to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). It was the third chemical attack in Syria since August 2012, when US President Barack Obama had warned that the use of such weapons was a red line that could prompt retaliatory US military action. The Saraqeb attack would not be the last.
The OPCW didn’t conduct an investigation in Saraqeb or take custody of the unexploded weapon. “They said they couldn’t if they didn’t pick it up themselves,” an activist from the town said. “What are we supposed to do with it? After months, they told us to hide it in a cave underground and don’t tell anybody that you have a chemical weapon.”
The activist, an economics graduate in his twenties, was left to dispose of weaponized Sarin. He had no idea whether or not it was still live or how to deal with it. He feared its being discovered by rebel groups and used against other Syrians as much as its leaking its contents. On July 18, in the golden hue of dusk, the young man walked up a hill on the outskirts of his hometown, a desolate place populated with little more than rocky outcrops and scattered olive trees. He put down his smartphone but continued recording as he rummaged through his backpack, and pulled out a large plastic jar—the type used for homemade pickles—and a ziplocked bag containing the rusted canister. He put the ziplocked device in the jar and then cushioned it with household sponges—yellow, green, and pink. He placed the jar deep inside a tight crevice at the foot of a rock formation, as deep as his arm allowed him, then he piled stone upon stone to conceal its opening. “We thought that if we reveal the existence of the canister, that would end the regime because of Obama’s red line and international laws against chemical weapons use,” he said. “I had hope that the time will come and the proof will be ready, here in the cave, but nobody cared.” To the activist and many like him, Obama’s red line meant nothing. “I was very, very, very shocked—I can’t tell you how much,” he said. “Nobody cared about us or about international laws and forbidden weapons. It made me want to just wait for a barrel [bomb] to fall on me.”
SARAQEB EMPTIED after the chemical attack, but Ruha’s relatives stayed in their home. Aunt Mariam sat in her mother’s living room one day with a younger sister, exchanging the town’s news. It was early May, less than two weeks after the chemical assault, and the air strikes were ferocious. One had recently killed people and charred their bodies. A man had to be identified by a piece of his shirt. A father lost his wife and four children. “They say that every night he puts out his children’s pajamas, expecting them to come back,” Aunt Mariam said, “because the corpses were unidentifiable.” Some of Saraqeb’s families fled into the fields around their town. An NGO distributed tents to them from a bakery still under construction. Ruha’s Uncle Chady, her mother’s twin, was volunteering to help build the bakery. He said the bereaved father turned up there one day, asking for a tent to house a family he no longer had. Nobody had the heart to deny his request.
The shelling, once unpredictable, was now as regimented as a television viewing guide. Syrians called it “the nightly schedule.” It began a little after 11:30 p.m. one night with the screech of incoming artillery crashing near Ruha’s home. A second, then a third strike, each louder and closer, amplified in a night black because of the lack of electricity and otherwise nearly silent in a neighborhood emptied of families.
Hiss, whoosh, boom! 11:40 p.m. Another shell. Ruha’s Aunt Noora shrieked and, flashlight in hand, led her fourteen-year-old niece Lama (whose house had been next door to the sniper at the Iza’a) out of a darkened living room toward the basement. Ruha’s Uncle Mohammad cracked open the front door in case neighbors still present sought refuge with them, and then he joined his family downstairs. Grandmother Zahida stayed in her bed—as usual.
Another three rockets just minutes apart. What was the target? Like Uncle Mohammad’s house, most of the washed-out, low-slung, flat-roofed concrete homes were already disfigured by earlier attacks. There were no rebel bases among them. Saraqeb’s rebels had been firing Grad rockets at regime forces all afternoon from outside the town’s limits, along a stretch of highway they’d won months earlier. Were the regime’s strikes retaliatory, the family wondered, the word—retaliatory—denoting a reaction, implying a starting point. What was the starting point for that night’s barrage? The Grads? The regime’s air and artillery strikes before them? The formation of rebel groups? The decades of corruption and dictatorship that pushed protesters out into the streets?
11:53 p.m. Manmade thunder so close it sounded just above the room. The blast dislodged gray snowflakes from the basement’s unpainted ceiling that floated down onto Uncle Mohammad and Noora, Aunt Mariam, Lama, and me. “Dear God!” screamed Noora, covering her ears with her hands. A television news report about a faraway battle could send her into a panic and her relatives into a fit of amusement at her expense. They’d sweetly chide her and remind her that even children had adapted to the sounds of war. Noora never did. She leaned against a vertical concrete support beam. The glow of several flashlights illuminated particles of dust suspended in the stuffy airlessness of the room. Insects scurried across its untiled floor. The ceiling was about thirteen feet high, the room some four yards underground, a single doorway for an exit, two narrow slits of sturdy glass just below street level—too small to crawl out of.
Mariam silently mouthed prayers. Mohammad held a black walkie-talkie up to his ear, trying to hear screechy rebel messages, but the words were muffled, drowned in static and noise. Noora wailed at every crash and thud. “It’s not that bad,” Lama repeated, her voice sturdy but her hands shaking. “Remember that night when we stopped counting at a hundred and fifty? It’s not that bad.�
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11:55 p.m. Another artillery strike, then mortars and rockets in each of the next two minutes. “Whose homes are they landing on?” Noora asked.
There was no outgoing fire, only incoming—a sound heard with the entire body, not just ears. Limbs and muscles and heart and mind tense as the enraged projectile rushes along its arc. Breaths held. Where will it fall? Passive prey in a basement with only one exit. Luck the only difference between a direct hit and a near miss. The projectile lands. Exhale. Breath shallower, faster. It exploded somewhere else, perhaps on somebody else. Limbs and muscles and heart and mind relax, then tense again. The room echoing and shaking to booms reverberating in chests. The time between shells measured in heartbeats—getting quicker, stronger, melding into a single, terrified throb. Hiss, whoosh, boom!
“Maybe we should leave tomorrow,” said Noora. “I can’t take much more of this! What time should we leave? 5 a.m., 6 a.m.?”
“Don’t worry,” Mohammad said, gently patting her knee. “Bashar’s pilots sleep in. We’ll have plenty of time.”
“Who is counting?” Lama asked. “How many is that now? It’s not that bad. It’s not that bad.”
Mariam tried to lighten the mood. “One of my friends has a new washing machine,” she said, laughing so hard she could barely get the words out. “She calls it ‘auto eed, auto ijir’ [a hand-and-foot automatic]”—that is, she was washing by hand. Even Noora laughed.
12:05 a.m. A few moments of quiet, then the sound of a car outside. The family listened for the wail of ambulances. There were none. “Thanks be to God,” Noora said.
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