He gestured to a man seated near him and told him to prepare prisoners to be interviewed in a well-lit room downstairs. Five blindfolded men were paraded individually, their hands and feet shackled, their heads bowed. The prisoners, a mix of Iraqis and Syrians, all said they were Jabhat al-Nusra. They played their roles, meekly offered their confessions. Some glanced at the intelligence agent in the room as they answered. I’d asked the agent to leave me alone with the prisoners, a request the agent denied. One prisoner claimed to have assassinated Sheikh Mohammad Ramadan Said al-Bouti, the pro-regime cleric whose death Suleiman learned of while he was blindfolded on a bus out of here. Another cried when I asked about his family. Broken, passive men who had been “fucked for months,” as the intelligence agent bluntly put it.
Lunch was served in the brigadier general’s office. The intelligence agent recounted parts of the prisoners’ confessions as the general and his colleagues ate store-bought chicken strips and fried potato slices from aluminum packages. “You can’t believe them, they’re here,” the brigadier general said without irony. “Many people, after being detained for less than an hour, express regret, they cry like a baby.” He pointed to the chicken strips. “A prisoner here eats the same as a Syrian soldier, unfortunately. We offer them food, drink, medical treatment.” Several Alawite detainees, shabiha, were brought into his office during lunch, to prove, the general said, that the regime also detains Alawites from the security forces if they have done wrong. The men were handcuffed, but their feet were unshackled.
After lunch, I was permitted to see a cell. I walked down a well-lit corridor with domed security cameras embedded in its ceiling. A heavy metal door. The eye-level slit opened like fingernails on a chalkboard. Silence. I put my hand through the opening, into a space dark and quiet, thinking the cell was empty. “Hey, come here!” a guard yelled. The faces of men emerged, more than half a dozen of them, blinking in the harsh light streaming in from the corridor.
2014/2015
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MOHAMMAD
The brutal February chill penetrated the concrete walls of an abandoned two-story home in northern Syria. Mohammad lit the wood-fired sobya in the center of the living room, unaware that the heater’s chimney was blocked, before sinking back onto a thin mattress on a tiled floor so cold it felt wet. The room was nearly bare, save for a faded pistachio-green couch, a walnut-colored wood-and-glass display cabinet, and a firing squad of Kalashnikovs lined against a wall. An electricity generator purred outside, keeping the lights on.
Mohammad was now an emir, one of Jabhat al-Nusra’s nine senior leaders in Idlib. The province was divided into three sectors: northeastern, southern, and western. Mohammad was based in the western sector, an area of operations that extended into adjacent parts of Latakia Province. Every sector had three emirs—military, administrative, and religious (a Shari’iy). Mohammad was an administrative emir, responsible for evaluating membership requests and, as he put it, “ensuring all the needs of the mujahideen,” including food, ammunition, and money. It had been months since he’d doled out a stipend to his five to six hundred men. The payments were now irregular and diminished after Nusra lost the eastern oil fields around Raqqa to ISIS the previous year. Instead of $100, single men received 6,000 Syrian pounds—about $40 at the time—married men an extra 6,000 pounds, and those with children, another 2,000 pounds per child. Mohammad counted on “donations from Muslims around the world”—either cash physically collected and then transported via couriers through Turkey into Syria, or Western Union payments picked up in Turkey and sent across the border. He also relied on war booty—not the military spoils like weapons and ammunition used in battle, “but cars, jewelry, cash.” He didn’t like that part of the job. He was a fighter, not an accountant. The money shortages hampered his ability to recruit. He’d just lost a skilled defector, a colonel specialized in logistics and military planning. “He had seven children,” Mohammad said of the defector. “I couldn’t offer him enough to feed his children, so he went elsewhere. Before we lost the east, we were something; after we lost the east, it is a different story,” he said. “People think we are Al-Qaeda so we have money, but we don’t have states supporting us.” He had lost the defector to Ahrar al-Sham, a Turkish- and Qatari-backed Salafi faction.
Tear-inducing smoke filled the living room, but it was too cold to turn off the sobya. One of Mohammad’s two younger brothers slid open a window. His sister Sara and her husband also lived in the house, which was just a short walk from Mohammad’s Jabhat al-Nusra base. The men of the family were all Nusra. Sara, a twenty-nine-year-old with impeccable cheekbones, perfect teeth, and a cascade of waist-length brown hair twirled into a bun, carried a large round aluminum tray from the kitchen and placed it in the middle of the floor. The family huddled around it, digging spoons into communal bowls of lentils, and red beans and rice. A message crackled over Mohammad’s walkie-talkie. A suspicious vehicle was approaching a Nusra checkpoint near Mohammad’s base. “Don’t let it pass,” a voice relayed. “Order them out. Whoever they are, they can’t pass without being searched.”
Mohammad pulled away from his dinner and stared at the walkie-talkie as though it were a television screen. He was expecting ISIS suicide car bombers. He’d received a tip days earlier, he told his family, “a message on WhatsApp from a Salafi Jihadi from Latakia I know from way back. He was in an ISIS meeting and he told me what they said. The ISIS emir is planning to take us on.”
Sara’s face betrayed her fears. Mohammad looked at her calmly: “We are ready for them,” he said.
THE DEATH OF ONE MAN in the first days of January had put rebel Syria on high alert. The man, Abu Rayyan, an Ahrar al-Sham commander and doctor, was detained by ISIS in December after he approached the group, offering to mediate a dispute. Twenty days later, he was returned a corpse. He’d been shot almost two dozen times, was missing an ear, had several broken bones, smashed teeth, and a face that looked flattened. Graphic images of Abu Rayyan’s body quickly spread on Syrian social media, igniting an anger that united rebels in northern Syria against ISIS.
The fearsome group crumbled under the sustained rebel onslaught. “They were just cardboard cutouts,” an FSA commander in Idlib said. Within weeks, ISIS was driven out of most of Aleppo, Idlib, and Latakia Provinces. ISIS members fled to Turkey, or eastward toward their stronghold of Raqqa, where rebels hoped to expel them across the border into Iraq. Jabhat al-Nusra leader Abu Mohammad al-Jolani warned against the special targeting of muhajireen, who often bore the brunt of the rebel wrath. He offered his bases as sanctuaries for the foreign fighters, even as some Nusra units fought to avenge a Nusra emir, Abu Saad al-Hadrame, killed by ISIS fighters in Raqqa. Jolani and other jihadi leaders, both inside Syria and farther afield, tried to mediate an end to the conflict, but ISIS refused arbitration, including an independent Sharia court.
Tensions were high. In early February, ISIS was still present in Mohammad’s area of operations, a strip that included several smuggling routes across the Turkish border. A local unit of Ahrar al-Sham had just bungled an assassination attempt against the ISIS emir in Latakia. Revenge, indiscriminate and brutal, was expected.
Mohammad changed the locations of his eight Nusra bases. His fighters set up checkpoints and bulldozed dirt into earthen berms ahead of them. Passengers and drivers were made to walk from the artificial ridges through the checkpoints while their vehicles were examined. Mohammad waited now, his eyes fixed on the walkie-talkie while his family listened and ate in silence. A burst of static, a new message. The men in the car were identified as muhajireen, their noms de guerre broadcast. They were known ISIS fighters, but Mohammad’s hunched shoulders relaxed. “Those Chechens are with us now,” he said into the walkie-talkie. “Let them through.” He returned to his dinner as Sara went into the kitchen to boil water for tea.
Days earlier, on February 3, a month after rebels turned on ISIS, Al-Qaeda’s central command made it clear that it was “in no way connected” to
ISIS, a group it said had formed without its permission. “[ISIS] is not a branch of Al-Qaeda and there is no organizational link connecting them, and [Al-Qaeda] is not responsible for its actions,” the statement said. Mohammad felt unchained by the words. “It’s a green light from Al-Qaeda’s command in Afghanistan,” he said when he heard the news. “Now we can respond to ISIS’s provocations.” He had long despised the group. As far as he was concerned, its brutal haughtiness was “ruining the good name of Al-Qaeda.”
Both Al-Qaeda and ISIS shared the same transnational ideology, the same ultimate goal—an Islamic state that spread from Syria throughout the Middle East, reestablishing a caliphate that ended in 1924 after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. They differed over who should lead the effort, the tactics and timing to achieve it. Jabhat al-Nusra was playing a long game. It advocated indoctrinating Sunnis to its message through dawa, or proselytizing, and enmeshing itself in communities by providing social services, all with the aim of building a consensus for its future caliphate. It wanted to be wanted.
ISIS seemed to prefer being feared. Although it also provided social services and won some appreciation from Syrians in its territories for clearing out criminal gangs and rebel units engaged in banditry, it terrorized Syrians into following its rules. Disobedience was met with brute force. Nusra did not practice hudud (Sharia punishments, like cutting off the hands of thieves), but only because it followed the Islamic principle that such penalties were suspended during times of war and applied after the creation of an Islamic state. ISIS considered itself that state.
“All the previous jihadi experiences,” Mohammad said, “from Afghanistan, Chechnya, Somalia, to Iraq, make it clear that you will fail if you lack support from the people of those countries,” he said. “Jabhat al-Nusra is the best face of Al-Qaeda, and the newest. We have learned from those experiences and overcome every mistake committed in the past, by avoiding strictness with locals, not declaring new borders or a state prematurely before we can ensure its stability, and many other issues that turned locals against mujahideen.”
He was expecting more ISIS defections to Nusra, like the Chechens who were stopped earlier at the roadblock. Fifteen fighters had already switched sides from the dwindling ISIS force in Latakia. Mohammad sent a handful of the ISIS defectors to a Jabhat al-Nusra training camp and had the rest “reeducated” by Nusra clerics in their bases. There were more than a dozen Jabhat al-Nusra military training camps in Syria, divided into basic and advanced training, with one camp that only trained snipers.
Mohammad’s cell phone bleeped with a WhatsApp video message. He was close enough to the Turkish border to pick up its cell reception, which in any case extended deeper into Syria ever since the Turks erected additional towers along the frontier in late 2012 and 2013. The message was from his daughter, a primary schooler who lived in southern Turkey with her mother and younger brother. “Baba, when will you come home?” she asked. “Khalas, enough. I miss you.”
“I miss you, too,” Mohammad replied, “but you know I’m here because I have work to do.” The messages went back and forth. He asked his daughter about her grades, told her to focus on school and to obey her mother. He didn’t know when he’d be back, he said, “but your mother will tell me if you or your brother misbehave.”
Mohammad’s battlefield was larger than Syria. Borders meant nothing to him. “You forget all other affiliations—tribal, national, family, or geographic—you just have Islam,” Mohammad said, “so honestly, Syria doesn’t mean anything to me. My goal isn’t this country.” At the height of the Afghan jihad against the Soviets, he said, there was one Al-Qaeda training base in Afghanistan called the Farouq Camp. “There are now Farouq training camps, not a camp, in Syria,” he said proudly. “The one Farouq training camp in Afghanistan, it’s very famous. Its graduates include [9/11 hijacker] Mohammad Atta. If it did all of this to the world, then what do you think the many camps in Syria will do?”
Mohammad was doing his part to lay the foundations for exporting jihad, setting up a sleeper cell of Palestinians and Arab Israelis in Israel. The first node was in place, a twenty-five-year-old Arab Israeli from Jerusalem transplanted to Syria. The man had contacted Mohammad four months earlier via Facebook and then Skype, asking to undertake a suicide mission in Syria. After two months of talking, and extensive background checks—tazkiya—by Salafi Jihadis in Palestine and Jordan, Mohammad facilitated the Arab Israeli’s travel to Syria. “I placed the condition before he came here that, as soon as he arrived, he was going on a martyrdom mission, and he was keen to do that,” said Mohammad. It was a test. “If he was with [the Israeli intelligence agency] Mossad, he wouldn’t have done that. He might have said he didn’t want to die immediately.” The Arab Israeli was an expert in hand-to-hand combat. Mohammad made him a trainer in a Jabhat al-Nusra camp near Aleppo, while he mined the young man’s contacts in Israel until he had a cell of almost three dozen men. Six of the Arab Israeli’s friends followed him to Syria. “You’d be surprised if you saw him,” Mohammad said. “You won’t think that he is a Salafi Jihadi.” He scrolled through his Samsung phone, stopping at photos of a muscular, clean-shaven young man in tight, fashionable clothes—the same man whose passport and other identification papers were in a plastic pocket in the walnut-colored wood-and-glass display cabinet in the living room.
Mohammad’s phone rang, the tone a snippet of an Osama bin Laden speech. The local ISIS emir, a Tunisian, was at Mohammad’s Nusra base down the road and wanted to see him. Mohammad sipped his tea slowly. The Tunisian could wait. Mohammad wasn’t in the mood for another confrontation. He’d already had several with the Tunisian since rebels turned against ISIS. “You have betrayed us,” Mohammad remembered the Tunisian saying. “How can you call yourselves our brothers and we’re fighting these apostates and you’re sitting and watching us?”
“What are you talking about?” Mohammad recalled telling the Tunisian. “As far as we’re concerned, you’re Muslim and they’re Muslim and you’re fighting each other. You have forgotten about Bashar.” But that conversation was before Al-Qaeda’s disavowal of ISIS. “Perhaps in our history there have never been the kinds of disputes between Salafi Jihadis like the ones we are seeing in Syria,” Mohammad said.
He finished his tea and reached into his jacket for a white envelope, placing it on the lone glass-topped coffee table in the living room. “These are the passports for the Germans,” he told his sister, “in case they come for them while I’m not here.” The envelope contained forged Syrian passports, bought for $1,700 each, for a German ISIS fighter, his wife, several children, and two other German women whose husbands were killed in action. The foreign fighter had asked Mohammad for refuge and a way out of Syria. Although Mohammad disliked ISIS, he felt duty-bound to aid a Muslim who sought his help. He placed the Germans on the first floor of the two-story home where he was squatting. The Germans spent more than a week there, before moving onto another location. The women, Sara said, barely spoke any Arabic, although she was happy for the female company. She rose to put the envelope in the walnut-colored display cabinet, near the plastic pocket containing the Arab Israeli’s passport, as her brother drew his jacket tight around him and slipped into an icy night.
MOHAMMAD’S YOUNGER BROTHER was looking rather pleased with himself. He stood among the bulging black plastic bags covering the living-room floor like a general surveying a battlefield. It had taken him days of scrounging around local stores to secure enough nonperishable food items and cleaning products to fill the fifty bags around him. He’d even conducted a minisurvey: “I asked around what people wanted before I went shopping,” he said. “Detergent was the most important.”
He was shorter and smaller than Mohammad in every way—twenty-five years old, with plenty he felt he needed to prove. He was a defector—he had worn the stain of a Syrian army uniform during the revolution before Mohammad helped him defect. He lacked the status of being a graduate of Sednaya or Palestine Branch or any other of As
sad’s prisons. He was still just a teenager when his eldest brother, Hossam, the one who was presumed dead, fought with Al-Qaeda in Iraq in the epic battle for Fallujah against the Americans. What had he done? He couldn’t even defect without Mohammad’s help. A good death, he figured, would make up for his unremarkable life.
He was a young man impatient to die, willing forward a Judgment Day he believed was near. Like his missing brother, Hossam, he hoped that he too would have his epic battle, perhaps the one foretold in prophecy between a Muslim army and the infidel forces of Rome—the ancient empire referred to in the old scriptures represented by the modern Christian West. “This is nothing,” the young man said of the hundreds of thousands already killed in Syria. “What we’re seeing now is nothing.” The dead would soon litter the earth, he said, ahead of Judgment Day, leaving barely a handspan free of corpses: “Their stench will make the birds fall from the sky.” He spoke of it with relish. He wanted to be in Dabiq, a sleepy farming village in the Aleppan countryside about ten kilometers from the Turkish border, the site the scriptures said was the location for the apocalyptic clash. It was close, just a drive away, but there was one problem as Mohammad’s brother saw it: “Dabiq is now controlled by ISIS,” he said, “but we will win it back in time. We must.”
The fifty bags—each one packed with vegetable oil, rice, sugar, bulgur, tea, pasta, laundry detergent, dishwashing liquid, miswak sticks, and candies—were to be distributed to families living around his Nusra base. A Saudi colleague in Jabhat al-Nusra had donated $700 for the supplies. Mohammad’s brother readied Nusra pamphlets about appropriate female dress and the group’s message of dawa, to distribute alongside the small aid package.
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