The newlyweds couldn’t afford a place of their own. They shared an apartment with Abu Azzam’s former commander in the Farouq Battalions, the lawyer Abu Sayyeh, one of the Farouq’s original leaders. It was January 2015, and they lived in Reyhanlı, near the Bab al-Hawa border crossing Abu Azzam once controlled.
One night, Abu Azzam walked to the store in a light rain that intensified, refusing my outstretched umbrella. He turned his face toward a dark sky. “Rain cleanses the soul before the body,” he said. He let it soak him, stream down his face. “The revolution must go back to square one,” he said. “We need a second revolution, but this time it will be organized. We were simple, naive when we started. It was spontaneous. We were focused on the military side and forgot about the civilian one—services. If God grants me the chance to work again, I won’t make that mistake again. I will not expand into territory [for which] I cannot provide anything. I’ve realized that people turned away from the Free Army and looked at Nusra or Daesh as their salvation for one reason—because the Free Army was disorganized factions. In the liberated areas, there was no law. I’ve been thinking about it a lot. I will work again, if God grants me days to do so.”
He just needed to find a way back into rebel Syria. It was a time of tasfiyat, assassinations, across the border. Feuds old and new were settled with IEDs, ambushes, and silencers. It was difficult to tell friend from foe, even within the same faction, difficult to trust anyone. Like Abu Azzam, thousands of fighters escaped into exile—fearing men on their own side.
Abu Azzam walked home, took off his boots at the front door, grabbed a towel, and sat with his phone, watching cartoons. It relaxed him. “That’s how he spends his evenings,” his wife said. “He just wants to forget about other things.” Abu Azzam now smoked heavily. He hadn’t been able to write a poem since leaving Baba Amr, an activity that used to soothe him. “I can’t write anything because this life of garbage we’re living is uninspiring. It’s painful. There’s no peace of mind or physical rest. We can’t rest until we end it.”
What upset him most was seeing the regime’s narrative playing out—that its opponents were all extremists, terrorists, and Assad was the bulwark against them. “Our regime is focused on eliminating us, the moderate opposition, and it is in the regime’s interests to surrender areas like Raqqa and Tabqa to tell the whole world, ‘Look at who is ruling it.’ In the eyes of the West, a dictator is a lesser evil than an extremist.”
He still believed in a Syrianness that transcended frontlines and sect and geography. He didn’t demonize the entire regime, or every Syrian on the other side as a regime supporter. Assad and his political, military, and security leaders had to go, he said, “but I believe there are some in the regime who refuse to kill their own people. People who are with it ideologically but who refuse to kill. These are men I can respect and could meet. We may have to do this to fight these groups we both consider terrorists. We must remove this sectarianism. We will. Syria will be different. We will forgive each other.”
HAZM
On September 23, 2014, after years of watching the ascendancy of Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State, America’s military directly intervened in Syria’s war, striking Islamic State positions and lobbing missiles toward eight locations in Idlib and Aleppo held by the Nusra-affiliated Khorasan Group. The United States had launched its war on ISIS in Iraq on August 8, and expanded it into Syria the following month. Many Syrians wondered why the United States waited until Islamic State was at the height of its power to attack it.
Hazm’s leader, Abu Hashem, learned of the US air strikes from a television news report. The Hazm intelligence operative, like others in the group, was furious: “We told the MOM [the international operations room in Turkey] and the CIA, ‘How could you strike them from the air without at least telling us? You are hitting Nusra positions in our territories, and we are known as being American supported, so what are we supposed to do?’ ”
Hazm and other US-backed factions in the MOM feared the US strikes would backfire on them. Hazm promptly issued a statement denouncing the American action. “We weren’t collaborators,” the intelligence operative said. “We didn’t have problems with Nusra, but from that moment, we feared that the Americans may have brought Daesh and Nusra and all the Islamists closer together with these strikes.”
In early November, Nusra fighters easily routed Hazm from its main stronghold in Idlib Province, seizing Hazm’s cache of US-supplied weapons, including TOW antitank missiles. The base fell without a fight, and the hundreds of Hazm fighters either escaped to Aleppo, defected to Nusra, or were detained. “We were prepared to fight Islamic State because of its ideology, but not yet ready to fight Nusra,” said a Hazm commander in Idlib. “Honestly, most of Jabhat al-Nusra, with the exception of the foreign commanders, are of us. They are our people. They are our cousins, our friends.”
Hazm leader Abu Hashem consolidated his forces in and around Aleppo. His men held fire, he said, because Nusra “succeeded in presenting an image of itself as fighting the regime . . . that they were Islamists defending the people, and there was no conviction among our fighters to shed their blood.”
MOHAMMAD
Mohammad, the Nusra emir, eyed Hazm warily. He detested its CIA backers, its talk of a secular state. He suspected it of deeper dealings with foreign intelligence agencies beyond the Americans, including the French and the Germans. He didn’t like reports from Nusra colleagues in the Aleppan countryside that Hazm was detaining Nusra members at its checkpoints. The two groups had briefly clashed since Hazm lost its Idlib headquarters.
It wasn’t simply Hazm’s dealings with the Americans per se that concerned Mohammad, it was the nature of those interactions. “If a group meets with the Americans,” he said, “and tries to get help to fight Bashar al-Assad, so what? But if it’s meeting with the Americans to be its representative or one of its wings in Syria to fight Qaeda and Islamists and jihadis? That’s another story. There’s a huge difference.”
Mohammad was in a Nusra safe house, just inside the Turkish border, with an Egyptian colleague waiting to cross into Syria. The Egyptian muhajir had been in Syria since August 2013. Their wives were in the kitchen preparing dinner. The once-porous frontier had tightened since mid-2014, when Turkey, under international pressure to trap jihadists in Syria’s killing fields, began erecting a concrete barrier of blast walls topped with coiled razor wire, placing it well inside Syrian territory. Some stretches of the border were monitored with thermal cameras that Mohammad and his colleagues learned didn’t work so well at dusk and dawn, or when it was raining and foggy. The Turks were shooting dead anyone trying to get through—fighters and refugee families alike—although they sometimes held fire and instead detained and deported those they caught. It wasn’t as hard to get into Syria as it was to get out. Smugglers were arrested, intimidated, and killed, but the jihadists still had several dedicated smuggling routes.
Mohammad’s wife knocked on the door, indicating dinner was ready. The men ate separately from their wives. Mohammad carried in a tray of lentil soup, salad, and chicken in tomato salsa. They discussed spies among the muhajireen. Most Jordanian would-be recruits were rejected outright, immediately suspected of working for Jordan’s powerful intelligence agency. “I tell you, brother, I sent a Spaniard home last week,” Mohammad said. “He had tazkiya, but when we were talking about the jihad, it was clear he viewed ad-Dawla and Nusra as the same. I didn’t trust him—he might be a Dawla spy or an intelligence agent.”
“Brother,” the Egyptian said, “there was an Egyptian in my unit, a first-line fighter, at the front of the frontline, unafraid of death, always keen.” The man was caught with tracking equipment and executed.
Mohammad said there was a double agent working with the US-led coalition tasked with mapping Nusra targets using a device Mohammad described as “part GPS that also detects and locks cell-phone signals.” The agent informed Mohammad about his missions. “Recently, he was asked to walk past three
Nusra outposts. Our men all cleared out of the buildings, turned off their phones and other electronics, and the guy completed his task and sent along the information.”
Both men paused eating to laugh heartily at my question about whether the US-led strikes against Islamic State were significantly harming the group. “Please, if the West really wanted to hit Islamic State, they’d wipe them out,” the Egyptian said. “Their convoys move very comfortably between Iraq and Syria. And their bases are known, they’re painted black and fly their flag. They are not hiding.”
“These strikes are a good thing for us,” the Egyptian continued, “because our security is tighter now. We’re more aware of threats around us, but, based on my limited reading of history, wars aren’t won from the air. The Americans won’t fight on the ground, so they will do so through partners, men they support, like Hazm. That’s their only hope against us, but they will fail.”
ABU AZZAM
Abu Azzam was clashing with his wife, Alaa—not over the running of the household or other marital issues, but Islamic State. More and more, Alaa was coming to identify with IS. Her French Moroccan friend in Tabqa sent her messages on WhatsApp. Her brother was released from IS detention, but rather than resent the group, he joined it. Her brother then made friends with a French Moroccan engineer who asked to marry Alaa’s younger sister. The rest of the family was pleased. The muhajir treated his new wife and his in-laws well. “He isn’t in Syria for a $100 salary,” Alaa said, “he’s very wealthy.” It was February 2015. She was pregnant by an FSA “apostate,” while her sister was pregnant by an IS foreign fighter. The two husbands didn’t talk to each other. Alaa, under the influence of her family and IS friends, wanted to return to Syria. “If only people understood the Islamic State, they would want to live under it,” she said. It was the kind of talk that enraged Abu Azzam: “You’re a half-Daeshy!” he would tell his wife. But one short trip into Syria would change his mind.
Meanwhile, men from Hazm—Abu Azzam’s former Farouq colleagues—killed his relative Abu Issa al-Tabqa, a man Abu Azzam called “uncle.” Abu Issa had been a Nusra emir in Tabqa. Abu Azzam mourned his relative but held no grudge against his killers: “I loved my uncle and he loved me. He was one of the dearest people in my heart, but I don’t blame those who killed him,” he said. “This is the nature of our war. If my brother is in Nusra and I am fighting Nusra, I will fight him. He is an enemy.”
Hazm braced itself for reprisals. Abu Issa had been killed along with several other Nusra captives. “From the beginning, we insisted to the Americans that the bigger threat was Jabhat al-Nusra more than Daesh, because they were among us,” said Hazm leader Abu Hashem. “Daesh had been removed from the area.” He said that although Nusra was a wing of Al-Qaeda, that was no longer secret, “the Americans didn’t see any threat that wasn’t Daesh. I don’t know why.”
Nusra stormed Hazm’s bases in and around Aleppo, overrunning its last positions. No one came to Hazm’s aid—neither its American backers nor other Syrian groups in the MOM. On March 1, Hazm announced its dissolution. Nusra continued to hunt the group’s members, snatching them from their homes and hideouts and “reeducating” them in its prisons. Hazm didn’t even know how many of its men were detained. Its leadership, and those who could, fled to Turkey. Mohammad put the number at four hundred prisoners, but he said most were released. He advocated their “reeducation,” but not the way it was being done. “What is happening in Nusra’s prisons is beatings and torture, just like in the regime’s prisons,” he said. “If the American collaborators weren’t entirely convinced about fighting you, after you’ve tortured them, they will be. You’re creating a fiercer enemy, and it’s the same thing with a Daeshy. The aim isn’t to hit him and beat him and then release him, it’s to show him why he’s wrong.”
Hazm drew lessons from its defeat. “What we learned,” a Hazm official said, “was that you can’t count on America. I don’t trust them now, none of us do. We are not the children of America for them to care for us, but we had shared interests.”
Abu Hashem, Hazm’s leader, gambled on US support after his experience as the Farouq’s foreign liaison, dealing with Turkey and the Gulf states. “Did the US abandon us? Clearly,” he said. “Let Nusra say whatever it wants to say, it used our American support as a pretext to attack us, but . . . I don’t care what it says. . . . We were here first. They have no place in Syria.” Abu Hashem was speaking from exile in Turkey.
In Washington, rebel advocates in close contact with US policymakers were dismayed by the reaction to Hazm’s routing. “We got the sense the failure of the flagship moderate brigade was a relief to the administration, like they were happy Hazm was eliminated,” one advocate said. “Now they could say, ‘There’s nobody in Syria to support.’ ”
Hazm collapsed that spring as the Pentagon embarked on a new $500 million program to “train and equip” rebels to counter Islamic State (but not the regime). It intended to ready a force of some three thousand by year’s end and graduate another five thousand every year thereafter. But despite spending $384 million, it managed to recruit only 180 fighters before the program was suspended in October 2015. Rebels weren’t keen just to fight Islamic State and to forget the regime. The first fifty-four graduates of the Pentagon program were ambushed by Jabhat al-Nusra on July 31, within hours of crossing the Turkish border into Syria. The second group surrendered its weapons, ammunition, and trucks to Nusra in exchange for safe passage. In September, the Pentagon admitted that only “four or five” of its trainees were still fighting in Syria. By 2016, militias in northern Syria funded by the Pentagon would be fighting those armed by the CIA. In July 2017, the Trump administration ended the CIA program. It had reportedly cost more than $1 billion and was riddled with problems, not least the open secret that Nusra extracted a “tax” from some CIA-vetted groups—a cut of their supplies.
“The United States had people, it had partners in us,” said the Hazm intelligence operative, “but I don’t think the Americans are real allies. I’m not anti-American—on the contrary, I very much wanted the new Syria to view the West as real partners in everything—but today I am convinced that Russia is more honorable and trustworthy than the United States, because at least it is really standing alongside its ally. But America? It doesn’t even know who its friends are or what it is doing.”
2016
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RUHA
March 2016. Maysaara hadn’t seen his wife and children for more than seven months. He was in Syria and they were in southern Turkey—the days of moving easily between the two countries as distant as the idea of peace. Sneaking into Turkey was no longer simply a tough hike with the fear of a Turkish jail or deportation to Syria. Turkey’s concrete blast walls and its shoot-to-kill policy along the border meant risking death.
Maysaara wanted his family with him. His youngest, Ibrahim, had forgotten him. He called every male relative Baba. Manal feared returning to a Syria that was no better than the one she’d fled, but she didn’t want her children growing up without their father. They were going back that summer. Manal walked around her living room one day in March, wondering how to pack up her “half-life” and what dangers were awaiting her and her family. Two families she knew of, sixteen people, were recently obliterated in a farmhouse. “There is no safe place in Syria, even our farmhouse is not safe,” Manal said. “What can I do except try to calm the children and tell them not to be afraid? This is the Syrian woman’s burden—caught between worrying about our men and [worrying about] our children.”
Her eldest, Ruha, who had pined for Syria, was now a teenager who suddenly didn’t want to return. “We are children of now, not children of before,” she said one day. Friends and rap music and hairstyles and fashion were displacing thoughts of Saraqeb. She dearly missed her father, but beyond that, she was accustomed to freedoms in Turkey she didn’t think she could carry across the border. Her classes that year were during the school’s morning shift. Her afternoons, wh
en she didn’t have homework and it wasn’t raining, were spent in a park with an eclectic group of girls: the Chechen born in Turkey whose father was fighting in Syria, a Turk whose mother owned a stationery store across from the park, and a Syrian who always arrived after 4:30 p.m., the end of her day at a sewing factory. Her family needed her wages more than her education. The girls didn’t share a language—just a few Turkish words here, Arabic there, lots of sign language and laughter.
Ruha sat on a bench with her sister Alaa one day, waiting for her friends to arrive. She discreetly pointed to a Syrian woman, in a long, belted overcoat and a face veil, pushing a child on a swing. “Look at my clothes and look at the Syrians here, look how they’re dressed,” she said. Ruha was in skinny jeans, a long sweater, and a hijab, common attire for a Muslim Syrian girl, but she expected to have to dress like the woman in the park if she went back to Saraqeb. She had heard her relatives talking about how it was more conservative now. “I have a lot of freedom here,” she said. “If I go to Syria, that freedom will be imprisoned. I’ll have to wear a coat down to my ankles like that woman. I can’t do that.”
She was growing up. She didn’t want to burden her parents with her concerns. “The family used to sit together at mealtime, talk about our day, but now I feel like everybody is in a different universe,” she said. “Now, whatever happens to me, I don’t have the courage to tell Baba, to ask him anything. I know he has other things to worry about. I don’t tell Mama, either. I prefer to speak to others my age. That’s why I come here. We haven’t seen Baba in more than seven months. That’s wrong. When we were in Syria, in the war, Baba wasn’t with us much, but we used to see him occasionally. Even if I saw him for an hour, I felt like that hour was worth the entire world and everything in it. Now . . .” She couldn’t finish her sentence.
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