With its four TOW launchers, Hazm was instrumental in helping repel both ISIS and the regime from parts of northern Syria in early 2014. “We had victories we couldn’t have dreamed of,” a senior Hazm official said. “The regime had two things that we previously couldn’t counter—armored vehicles and aircraft. The CIA wouldn’t give us antiaircraft weapons, but the TOWs forced regime tanks back once we hit a few of them. They started sending bulldozers ahead of their tanks, and we hit them, too. It helped us advance in many areas, enough to alter the balance during battles.”
The TOWs weren’t the first antitank weaponry on the Syrian battlefield. Rebels had captured and used regime stockpiles of the Russian-made Konkurs, Metis, and Kornet, and while Hazm’s TOWs (BGM-71 missiles about two decades old) weren’t the latest version, they signaled a shift in the US approach to the Syrian conflict. It was psychological assistance as much as practical. “It meant the Americans were serious,” the senior Hazm official said, “and the Americans are doers.”
BANDAR
The makeshift ISIS prison at the Tishreen Dam was a storage room two floors underground. Bandar knew several of the men in there, including an old university friend named Mohammad, an English major like Bandar who had studied at Aleppo University. Mohammad was detained on his wedding day, stopped at the same ISIS checkpoint near the dam before he reached his sister’s home on the other side of the reservoir. He had gone to pick her up to attend his wedding. The ceremony never occurred. The ISIS fighters said he was an apostate because he’d once worked as an administrator with the Farouq Battalions in Minbej, in the Aleppan countryside. That’s why he was there, with Bandar and all the other men, in a cell measuring four meters by four meters with no windows, no light. Dank and cold, empty except for thin mattresses on the floor and a few blankets. Bandar was sure he could fix his misunderstanding once he explained himself to an ISIS judge. His eyes adjusted to the dark. He kept them fixed on the green door that led upstairs to where the ISIS fighters congregated, overlooking the water.
That first night, Bandar was summoned upstairs alone, spat on by fighters—and, more distressing to him, also by children ISIS was training—as he was directed into a room to see the same ISIS commander. Bandar’s laptop, camera, and mobile phone were on the mattress near the ISIS emir. They’d been in his car.
“Do you know that the Free Army has killed our brothers?” the emir asked.
Bandar shook his head.
“Your family is Free Army. What is this equipment? You are a journalist.”
Bandar said he wasn’t.
“You’re a journalist,” the emir repeated, “and journalists leave behind electronic taggers for warplanes. You must deal with the West, too, given your English.”
Electronic taggers. Always the same excuse, Bandar thought. These Islamists were obsessed with the idea that people were tossing electronic taggers to guide warplanes to their locations. Why? It’s not as if their bases were secret. Everyone knew where they were, and besides, they were rarely hit. Most of the regime air strikes in Raqqa targeted civilians.
“What West?” Bandar asked. “Who in the West? I have nothing to do with anything you have just said except that I studied English at university.”
“You and people like you have dirtied our jihad,” the ISIS emir responded. “You are from a dirty Free Army family.”
“How did we dirty anything?” Bandar asked. “Were you in Homs like my brother?”
Anger shot the words from his mouth before he could swallow them. The emir’s face was covered, but his eyes smiled. He turned another laptop toward Bandar. “Look what we do to people like you,” he said. The image on the screen was of men kneeling in a row. The executioner’s knife was busy farther up the line. Islam prohibited the slaughter of an animal in front of another, let alone a man. Bandar’s jaw muscles tightened: I’m going to get out of here, he told himself, and I’ll somehow make these savages pay. I’ll find somebody, some armed group to hold them accountable. It was a thought as fanciful as the charge of apostasy against him.
He had witnessed public executions twice in Raqqa’s squares, walked past heads placed on the spikes of the roundabout near the bakery where he used to buy his morning pastries. “Life is black,” Bandar once told me after ISIS became a force in Raqqa. “Everything is black. They kill people in front of children. They raid homes looking for satellite Internet. Blackness. They have killed life.” He especially hated the group after it desecrated the Armenian church in the center of town. He watched them do it. He was walking home after having breakfast with a friend at a café when he saw the ISIS fighters approach the church. They yanked the crosses off the building and replaced them with black flags. To Bandar, that’s when ISIS killed what remained of the revolution. Later that night, under cover of darkness, a small group of Syrians returned to the church, hoisted a fallen cross over their shoulders, and chanted, “One, one, one! The Syrian people are one!” It was impossibly brave. Bandar would have joined them had he known about it earlier. In the weeks and months that followed, he turned day into night, sleeping until the evening and rarely venturing outdoors. He refused to see the blackness of Raqqa except in the dark.
He hated everything about the ISIS emir sitting opposite him near the Tishreen Dam. Hated his smug entitlement to an absolute power he’d stolen from a revolution he scorned, his bastardization of a movement through barbaric force, his ignorance. Bandar was returned to the darkness of the underground cell, walking past the fighters and children who laughed and spat on him as he descended the stairs. “You smell like an infidel!” a child said. “The FSA are infidels, apostates!”
THE PRISONERS could hear the bullets, even two floors below the earth. The dam was a training ground of sorts, a camp for child recruits as well as adults. The numbers swelled behind the green door. Fifteen became thirty, and soon approached fifty. One man had been detained for selling cigarettes. He was released after a few days, or at least he didn’t come back. Seven men from a Free Syrian Army unit in Deir Ezzor. A Nusra fighter from Aleppo. A civilian activist. A man caught with an illegal satellite device who developed appendicitis and was released on medical grounds. Bandar envied him. He wished he’d be stricken with some similar affliction, but then again, it was unlikely to get him out. His charge was far more serious than a satellite Internet connection. Bandar kept asking the guards for a trial, to explain himself to an ISIS Shari’iy. They ignored him.
The prisoners were marched up the stairs five times a day, spat on and insulted on their way to perform ablutions and obligatory prayers. Sometimes, in the evenings before the last prayers, when the ISIS recruits and trainers were done for the day, they’d fire bullets at the prisoners’ feet and watch them jump, just for fun. The same guards who fed their prisoners chicken, fish, and kebabs would randomly pull men out of the cell and beat them near the door, where the other inmates could hear them. One prisoner became hysterical. He’d laugh as he was pummeled, laugh and laugh until he was tossed back inside. Bandar worried about his younger cousins, tried to keep their spirits up even as his own sagged. He’d stopped believing they’d get out. He couldn’t eat. Could barely sleep. Nobody knew they were there. Why hadn’t he told anyone he was traveling that morning so somebody would expect him? Why hadn’t he called someone to find out about the road? Why had he taken that road when there was another? Why hadn’t he just blown past that one guard at the checkpoint instead of waiting while he called for backup? Why hadn’t he listened to the news the day before? So many whys. Too much time to contemplate them. Simple mistakes. Stupid decisions. Fear and regret consumed his hours. None of it helped. He was where he was.
The men in the cell learned to fear one person: Salaheddine al-Turki, a Turkish ISIS executioner based in Raqqa. “Salaheddine is here!” the child recruits would chirp upstairs. The beatings became beheadings when Salaheddine arrived. Two of Bandar’s cellmates were summoned, one after the other, and didn’t return. “They’ve been released,” he told his yo
ung cousins. “They’ll tell our family where we are.” One night, when the men were sleeping, an ISIS guard walked into the cell and stepped over Bandar to whisper into the ear of his friend Mohammad, the man detained on his wedding day, who was lying near Bandar: “Tomorrow we will cut you,” he said. “Salaheddine is coming.” Mohammad didn’t believe him. He hadn’t done anything, and besides, in addition to English he was also a Sharia graduate. He was sure he could use the Quran to convince Salaheddine and anyone else that he’d been wronged. The next night, before evening prayers, Mohammad was called to the door. He went quietly. Soon after, Bandar was summoned. He walked up the stairs to see an ISIS guard holding Mohammad’s severed head by his short hair. “This is your friend, isn’t it?” the guard asked.
Bandar stared at the floor.
“Look at him!” the guard yelled. He shoved Mohammad’s head in front of Bandar’s face. A thin piece of bloody flesh dangled from the neck. The cut was messy. Mohammad’s eyes were closed. He looked peaceful. “This is your friend,” the guard said, before walking away.
Bandar was back in the cell. He prayed his face would conceal what he’d seen. He didn’t want to scare his teenage cousins. Every day after that he was certain was his last. I will end here, he thought. He rewound his life, remembered it in fragments, paused at images of Homs that wouldn’t leave his mind, the earliest days of the revolution. His late brother Bassem. His poems. He silently recited the lines, couldn’t get past more than two without feeling that his heart would stop. Sometimes he’d forget Bassem was dead and wonder where he was, wonder whether his older brother would rescue him. He remembered how, some three months after Bassem’s death, several of his friends found Bandar and gave him the 700 Syrian pounds that remained of the 10,000 Bassem had taken with him into Baba Amr. “That’s how honorable those Farouq were, that’s how it started. How did we go from that to rebels who started kidnapping for ransom and in the name of the revolution?”
Bassem and his friends had been just a few guys with a few guns defending a neighborhood they believed they’d freed from a tyrant. Our revolution died soon after Bassem, Bandar thought. It died there in Baba Amr. His brother had a cause, one that Bandar continued after Bassem’s death. Bandar had turned to volunteer relief work. He wasn’t a fighter, and at least there was honor, pure and untainted, in pulling people from rubble. Pain, too, which came to him in flashes: the child’s hand, so soft and small and human, that he retrieved from the ruins of a home after an air strike. He couldn’t find the rest of the body. The woman in Raqqa eating out of a dumpster who was too proud to take his money. He followed her home and left a food basket on her door that night and many nights thereafter. The boy, no more than four or five, tugging at his dead mother’s leg, asking her why she was ignoring him. He dreamed of a dead aunt who had helped raise him, saw her in the few hours of sleep he stole in the ISIS cell and when he was awake, too. He was sure of it.
He remembered hiding from the regime when it still controlled Raqqa, moving among the homes of friends and family after learning that he was wanted because of his late brother. The seaside café in Latakia he loved. The nights he’d spent with friends there. The girls he’d known. He returned to the demonstrations, waving the revolutionary flag, his flag, and thought about the Islamists who took over and now wanted to kill him because of that flag. How the world changed, how we went backward, he thought. How did it happen? Where did these extremist ideas come from?
One Wednesday, an ISIS fighter, one of the less-nasty ones who took a liking to Bandar, called him out of the cell to tell him his turn had come: “They’re going to cut you on Friday after prayers,” he said. He was telling him as a favor: “For your sake, make peace with God.”
Numbness. Bandar couldn’t even cry. He looked at his two cousins. They’d die of fear if they knew. They asked him what the guard said. Bandar told them he might be transferred in a few days, maybe to Raqqa or Iraq, and that the guards would say they’d killed him. “Don’t believe them,” Bandar told his cousins. “They might even photoshop pictures of me, but don’t believe them.”
Mainly, Bandar thought of his mother. She still hadn’t accepted Bassem’s death. “Every time she saw a man with a gun, she’d ask him if he knew her son, if he’d heard of the Farouq.” She didn’t believe Bassem was dead. What would happen to her? Bandar told his mother he had photographic proof Bassem was dead. She didn’t want to see it but silently donned the black of mourning, vowing never to take it off. His father cried like a child when he saw the photo. Bandar remembered several instances when ISIS sent severed heads to the victims’ parents in Bandar’s hometown. He worried they would do that to his family. He begged that same sympathetic ISIS guard not to send his severed head home. “I’ll pass on your last requests,” the guard told Bandar on Thursday. Bandar made two: Don’t send my head to my mother, and kill me with a bullet, not a knife. The first was promised, the second denied. He thought about the knife. He hoped it would be sharp. He’d once seen a video of a man killed with a blunt knife. It took longer. Would he feel it all or would the nerves be cut, sparing him the pain?
Friday morning. Bandar heard his name. It was still hours before noon prayers. He reached the door, but his feet refused to further aid him toward his death. He was dragged up the stairs by his jailers. The ISIS emir was waiting for him. He handed Bandar a piece of paper. It was official ISIS stationery. “Your father brought this,” the emir said, “but I think it’s a forgery.” He wanted to know how Bandar’s father had learned that his son was at the Tishreen Dam. Several ISIS fighters ran their fingers through Bandar’s hair, told him to take off all his clothes, made him open his mouth, stick out his tongue. They suspected he might be wearing a tracking device or something similar, but they found nothing.
Bandar read the note. It said three ISIS fighters vouched for his good character. They testified that Bandar had found them bleeding on a battlefield months earlier, taken them to his home, and, at his own expense, paid a doctor to treat them. Bandar felt the air rush back into his lungs, the blood to his feet, his hands, his heart, his head. He remembered helping the fighters and telling his father about it, including their names. He didn’t know they were ISIS when he picked them up, they were just wounded men who needed help—a Syrian, a Jordanian, and a Saudi.
One of Bandar’s former cellmates, the man who developed appendicitis and was released, had found Bandar’s father and told him where his son was. It took Bandar’s father five days to track down the three ISIS fighters, then a further seven days to get the ISIS wali, or governor, of Al-Bab in the Aleppan countryside to write the note. Bandar’s father arrived at the Tishreen Dam at 10 a.m. on the Friday morning his son was due to be executed after noon prayers. Rebels had overrun a number of ISIS posts in the area. The ISIS emir suspected the stationery might be stolen, the note faked. He postponed Bandar’s execution until he could speak to the ISIS wali in Al-Bab via Skype.
Bandar was allowed to see his father. Twenty-three days after Bandar, his two cousins, and his friend were detained, the four walked out of the Tishreen Dam lockup. Bandar had lost thirteen kilograms. An armed convoy of cars escorted them home. There was celebratory gunfire at the entrance to his village. “It was like a wedding,” Bandar remembered. His mother took off the black of mourning and wore a white headscarf the day her son came home, but only for that one day. His father danced and cried.
Bandar was free, but at night in his dreams he was still in that underground ISIS cell. In his waking hours, local ISIS fighters harassed him. “Every time something happened, ISIS suspected somebody, they’d knock on my door thinking I was involved,” Bandar said. He felt trapped.
On September 1, 2014, at 10:14 a.m., I sent Bandar a WhatsApp message, asking where he was.
“Tomorrow I’m sneaking into Turkey,” he said. He promised to tell me when he was safely on the other side. It wouldn’t take more than a few hours, a day at most, if the routes were difficult, or a few days if he had to try several
times. September 10 came and went and still no word. My messages to him were unread. On September 22, at 7:38 p.m., Bandar contacted me from a new telephone number: “Hi, how are you?” he wrote. “I just arrived in Germany.”
HAZM
Rebel-held Syria had become like the Afghanistan of the 1980s: failed state territory, lawless, a magnet for foreign and local jihadis, for Al-Qaeda, ISIS, and other independent groups of muhajireen. Secular-leaning rebels like those in Hazm, and nationalist-inclined Islamists like Abu Azzam, watched the influx of jihadis with concern. They hadn’t started a revolution so that men like that could come to power, but what could they do to stop them?
At the very least, Hazm was determined to know who these foreign fighters were and what they were doing, information it gathered and passed on to its CIA backers in the hope that the United States would help Hazm eliminate a shared enemy. Some of the group’s members gathered intelligence. They were gutsy, tech-savvy, and war-hardened young men who learned on the job. They mined kinship ties, reached out to protest buddies, ideological brothers, and called in favors from those they helped with money, an RPG or two in a pinch, or cameras and communications devices. It was dangerous work, made more so by the American connection. It didn’t take much to be branded a spy; the mere suspicion was enough to get a person killed.
One Hazm operative, a university graduate who knew nothing about spying beyond a few books about espionage he bought from Amazon Turkey, told me he knew the extreme danger, but his motivation was simple: “Who the fuck are these people? What are they doing in my country, and trying to control it? They are my enemies before they are the enemies of the US or anyone else.”
No Turning Back Page 28
