His experience with Nusra, said Mohammad, was like “when a person sees an island from afar, you imagine it’s an island of your dreams, but when you get to it, you see that it’s all mud, and it has many ugly things. You try to improve it, but when you reach the point where you feel it cannot be reformed, you move away from it. That’s what happened.”
Al-Qaeda’s most evolved franchise was in deep turmoil and had been for years. Its leader, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, once publicly acknowledged that if it weren’t for the Syrian uprising, “Syria would not have been ready for us.” The revolution, he said, “removed many of the obstacles and paved the way for us to enter this blessed land.” That Jabhat al-Nusra managed to establish a foothold in a country where even the Muslim Brotherhood had been extinguished was no easy feat. The group’s success rejuvenated its parent organization in Iraq, enabling it to march into Mosul and declare a caliphate. But Nusra 2016 was not Nusra 2012. Some of its senior members advocated cutting ties to Al-Qaeda, while others considered the affiliation their identity. Nusra was a US- and UN-sanctioned terrorist group in need of money. Losing the Al-Qaeda label, if only publicly, could boost funding by removing legal obstacles to supporting it, as well as unifying the Syrian jihad by enabling groups who recoiled from the Al-Qaeda brand to merge with it. Nusra had turned to kidnapping foreigners, aid workers, and journalists, to raise money. Abu Othman, Mohammad’s onetime cellmate, was involved in the case of two young female Italian aid workers seized near Aleppo in the summer of 2014. Nusra demanded $20 million for their release. It got $12 million. The women were freed in January 2015. Nusra also had a Japanese man in its custody, captured in mid-2015. Abu Othman, like other Nusra members, was scouting for foreigners—they were walking ATMs. He asked me once if I wouldn’t mind being Nusra’s “guest” until an embassy paid my ransom. “We won’t harm you, there won’t be any violence,” he said. I convinced him it wasn’t a good idea and that nobody would pay for me. “We must kidnap journalists. We need money,” he said.
“You are part of a global organization, doesn’t it finance you?” I asked.
“We have moved from an organization to a mindset, and we need money,” he replied.
Mohammad thought kidnapping for ransom was a mistake, one of many Nusra was making. “You’re losing your reputation, even if you can justify it on religious grounds,” he said. “Al-Qaeda’s leadership has said before that its strikes and attacks against civilians lose it popular support, so why make a citizen pay like this, and in so doing, lose popular support again? It’s a mistake. We’re repeating the same mistakes of the old Al-Qaeda. We’ve gone backward.”
Abu Othman didn’t share Mohammad’s qualms about Nusra’s trajectory. He remained on the Syrian battlefield, fighting with Nusra in his home base of Aleppo.
In late July, Jabhat al-Nusra severed its ties to Al-Qaeda and rebranded itself under a new name, Jabhat Fatih al-Sham. The change was cosmetic. Only its name and flag differed. Mohammad didn’t care what it was called, or whether it was formally affiliated with Al-Qaeda. “Al-Qaeda is not an organization, it’s bigger than that, it’s an idea,” he said, “and the goal is the key, not what you call yourself to get there.”
By August, Mohammad had returned to living in Idlib and ferrying muhajireen into Syria in greater numbers than earlier in the year. Most of the new recruits he brought in were from Central Asia, from places like Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. He remained a loyal but disappointed Al-Qaeda soldier. He considered himself part of the global movement, even if its local branch was in shambles. He wasn’t fighting for Syria. He didn’t believe in it.
“I am proud of the work I’ve done,” he said. Mohammad, who as a young boy in Jisr al-Shughour watched the mukhabarat humiliate his neighbor Abu Ammar and others in the late 1970s and ’80s, had become a man who did the same thing—and worse—to other children’s fathers, to sons and brothers and husbands. What of the Syria in which he grew up, the mixed Alawite–Christian neighborhood in Latakia? What would he tell his son about the Syria he was trying to destroy? “The Alawites tied their fate to Bashar’s, so there is no retreat—no turning back—for them or for us,” he said. “It’s impossible. I’m not saying we won’t kill Sunnis as well—we will and do kill Sunnis who are with them. I will tell my son, beware the Alawites, the Shiites, the Christians, regardless of how well they treat you or speak to you, in his heart he hates you. I cannot convince my son that there should be coexistence, I don’t believe it.”
And what of the hate he was sowing in the hearts of those he’d harmed? Did he wonder whether a little boy today viewed him the way he once feared the mukhabarat as a little boy? He didn’t need to think about the answer: “I know that they have suffered, but they are the oppressors. This bill is going to be paid by both sides. The high death toll on our side is the price for forty years of silence against their oppression, and the high death toll on their side is the price of killing and humiliating us for forty years. One of us has to be broken by the other, one of us has to submit. There is no other way.”
TALAL
The ambulance was smeared with mud to make it harder for warplanes to see. It bounced along potholed Idlib roads rendered almost impassable by shelling. Dr. Rami Habib was in the front seat, scanning the skies through a bullet-fractured windshield. His field clinic in Salma, Latakia Province, had been destroyed in Russian air strikes that had helped the regime win back most of the province. Entire villages in Latakia were displaced and reconstituted in clusters near the Turkish border. The temporary towns were a patchwork of thousands of tents, some canvas, others simply sheets of plastic or burlap bags sewn together, their occupants hoping the air strikes that drove them from home wouldn’t hunt them so close to Turkey’s blast walls. Dr. Rami had evacuated as much medical equipment as he could carry. He was personally financing the building of two hangars to serve as a new hospital as well as a hundred adjacent greenhouse-shaped homes, each seven meters by four meters, to shelter some of the displaced. Until the hospital was functional, his team of fifteen (down from twenty-six) spent their days moving from camp to camp in the three ambulances they still had, treating patients as best they could. Dr. Rami’s new hospital, however, would never open. On November 8, 2016, when it was almost ready, its two operating rooms fully tiled, a regime air strike destroyed it all, including the homes he was building. Cockpit-view footage of the strike was broadcast on Syrian state television, lauding the destruction of “a terrorist military camp belonging to the Turkistan Islamic Party.”
But on April 25, 2016, as the mud-caked ambulance climbed higher into Idlib’s green hills, that was yet to pass. Dull thuds, several per minute, rumbled like distant thunder. The sound of shelling elsewhere. The ambulance turned into the narrow streets of the once-majority-Christian village of Ghassaniyeh, an area draped in the black flags of the Turkistan Islamic Party. Non-Arabic-speaking Uighurs manned checkpoints, aimlessly waving people through. The destination was a village church, its crosses removed by the foreign Islamists. The building now served as a prison for the fifty-four remaining Alawite detainees, including Talal’s daughter Hanin, almost three years into their ordeal.
Dr. Rami periodically checked on the women and children. He was embarrassed by their continued detention. “This is a nightmare. I have nightmares about this,” he said. “It’s a stain on the revolution, a catastrophe. This crisis is a deep wound, but what I know is that even deep wounds heal.”
A Western-vetted unit of the Free Syrian Army called the First Coastal Division, a recipient of TOW missiles, guarded the hostages. The group was not involved in their kidnapping, which had been the work of Mohammad’s muhajireen friends and other conservative Islamist battalions.
A pair of armed guards sat in the church’s courtyard, drinking yerba mate from a blackened teapot. They worked twenty-four-hour shifts and were frustrated with their “babysitting” duty. Jabhat al-Nusra and its allies were the decision makers. “Their expenses, their security, nobody is helping us,” o
ne of the guards said. “Our job isn’t to stand here over hostages. We are supposed to be on a front line fighting the enemy, not having guys occupied with this.” His partner complained that the captives didn’t seem to be as valuable as had been hoped. “They’re not asking about them,” he said, referring to the regime. “They won’t negotiate for them. We are surprised.”
The women and children had been moved at least six times to escape shelling and other rebel militias trying to steal them. “There are hundreds who want to harm them, but we won’t let them,” one of the guards said. “We will be judged by the Almighty for how we treat them. This duty was imposed on us, but we must protect them. They must stay in our hands. We can’t just release them without anything in return. There are thousands of our women in Assad’s prisons, and I assure you they are not treated the way these women are. Nobody has touched the Alawites, we don’t even look at them. Our women are raped in prison. We want an exchange, women for women, that’s it.”
The heavy, black-metal gate at the entrance to the church hall was newly installed—the detainees had been there less than a week. The padlock clicked open. The men stayed outside. The captives sat silently on thin mattresses around the perimeter of the room, twenty women and thirty-four children. They were dressed not in the casual skin-baring fashion of Alawites but in conservative Muslim garb—long robes, headscarves, and niqabs. They hadn’t been permitted calls to their families since September 19, seven months earlier. Their captors no longer saw the usefulness of communications meant to pressure the regime to seek their release. “We are of no value, it seems,” said a detainee named Shaza al-Hatab, who served as the group’s spokeswoman. “That was the last we heard, that nobody is responding because we are dogs to the regime.” Behind the padlocked door, the women and children were free to move around in a number of rooms, to cook and use the bathrooms at will. They spent their days sewing, teaching the children, and reading the Quran in a bid to impress their captors.
Hanin was wearing a pink dress and gray hijab. She was now twelve and a half, almost the same age as Ruha. She sat near her thirteen-year-old cousin Sally—quiet, scared, fidgeting, staring at her hands but wanting to talk. She recounted the night three years earlier when she woke to gunfire and strangers in her home in Blouta, the moment a bullet burned her left buttock while she hid under her parents’ bed. The wound had left a puckered scar. She remembered what the strangers said when they made her mother and eldest sister Lojayn stay behind: “They said our army massacred people in Baniyas and that this was in response to that.”
She had heard from those two girls, fellow detainees, who went back into the house that her mother and sister were dead, but Hanin wasn’t sure. In every one of the five calls she’d been allowed to make in almost three years, she asked Baba where her mother was. “He kept telling me she was with him,” she said. Hanin was relieved that her two siblings were free, and she wondered when she’d join them. She wasn’t the only child hostage alone without immediate family. There were eleven others, all adopted by women who vowed to care for them until their fate was decided, one way or the other.
“I think about my house, my school, about my siblings,” Hanin said. “I think about my future, which has been completely destroyed. I wanted to be a doctor, but it’s impossible now that I’ll be a doctor.”
“Nothing is impossible,” one of the women told her.
Hanin had a message for her father, Talal, one she struggled to articulate through tears, pausing often: “Baba, I miss you and my siblings. When are we going to be released? Baba, I miss my school. I miss my freedom.” Her voice broke in her throat. “I can’t speak. I’m not able to speak.”
HANIN’S FATHER, Talal, lived in Mezzeh 86, an overcrowded Alawite slum on a hill in southwest Damascus not far from the presidential palace. Its dilapidated, thin-walled cinderblock towers searched for sunlight, buildings so cramped their outer walls kissed. Posters of Assad adorned every surface, alongside images of the regime’s martyrs, the men frozen in youth. The noise of too many people, too many cars, in too small a space. Checkpoints at the foot of the hill, checkpoints within it, armed men and soldiers roaming two-way streets barely wide enough for traffic in one direction. Overhead, a spiderweb of tangled electricity cables stretched between the warrens. It was considered a regime stronghold. I entered unnoticed, just another woman in a taxi. I had slipped away from a government-sponsored conference in Damascus that I was permitted to attend despite the arrest warrants against me.
Talal locked his tiny perfume store, as he did every afternoon for a few hours, crossed the street, and walked up a darkened stairwell to his first-floor apartment. There was no electricity, as usual. He tried to be home before his daughter Jawa and his son arrived from school, but they were already inside when he turned the key. Jawa sat on a mattress in the small lounge, one of four rooms in the house, trying to do her English homework by the dim light of an overcast November day.
Talal hadn’t heard Hanin’s voice in more than a year. He wept as he listened to his daughter’s brief taped message. Jawa, dry-eyed and steely, handed her father a tissue. He had knocked on so many doors, he said, heard so many promises from officials who “all sold us pretty words” but seemed to do nothing to free the detainees. Back in 2013, a senior presidential adviser had even publicly claimed that the captured Alawites were all dead, the real victims of an August 21, 2013, chemical attack against the rebel town of Ghouta, an attack the adviser insisted was perpetrated by rebels, not the regime. Talal had followed the news of Christian nuns held hostage by Nusra and exchanged for Nusra prisoners, of Russians and Iranians swapped for hundreds of opposition fighters. “What about our children from the Latakian countryside?” he said. “Why is it just our case that is in the shadows, that nobody wants to talk about?” Some of the Alawite families had discussed kidnapping Sunni women and children from Salma and Doreen to force a swap. Talal rejected the idea. “I won’t make another family cry,” he said, “and I won’t seek revenge for my murdered wife and daughter.”
If only the men holding his daughter wanted money, he said, he’d try to raise it, but they were asking for something he couldn’t do. “Why should our women and children pay the price for their victims? We are not responsible for whatever happened to them. We are victims, too. We’re not living in paradise over here because we’re Alawites,” he said. “Our villages are poor. I was in eighth grade before my village got electricity. Municipal water came only in 2010. I’m not saying things were great before, I am neither with the regime nor the opposition, but there had to be a thousand solutions instead of arms, to kill a fellow human just because he’s with the regime or opposition.”
If he could sell his house in his hometown of Blouta, he would, he said. He hated going to the village, seeing where his wife and eldest daughter were killed. He felt helpless. A widower struggling with the loss of his wife and daughter while trying to raise traumatized children who woke at night screaming. He kept Hanin’s clothes in her closet, her school report cards within easy reach. Hanin’s purple slippers were by the door with everyone else’s. “Sometimes he just sits and stares at Hanin’s slippers for hours,” Jawa whispered to me. She had turned back to her English homework. The assignment was to recall a special day. She wondered what to write about, then decided on a family trip to the Latakian coast in 2009. A picnic lunch, shells from the shore, sand in her shoes, games in the water. “We were all together. My parents, siblings, cousins. That’s what made it a special day.”
“We need to forgive each other,” Talal said. “That’s the only solution to end this. I forgive because nothing will bring back my wife and my daughter Lojayn. Let them know I forgive them, maybe it will help the killers and criminals remember their humanity. Are they able to wash the hate that they have for me out of their hearts? We were neighbors. I used to go to Doreen and Salma whenever I wanted. I have friends from there. How did they suddenly become killers and kidnappers?”
ON FEBRUARY 8,
2017, Hanin was freed. The fifty-four Alawite detainees were exchanged for fifty-five Sunni women held by the regime. The next day, Hanin and the other women and children met President Assad and his wife, Asma. For the first time in years, Talal’s daughter allowed her brown hair to flow to her waist. She listened, dressed in gray pants and a sky-blue sweatshirt, as Assad welcomed them home, kissed and greeted every person. “There wasn’t a day that passed when people weren’t looking for you,” he told them. Assad said he knew what the women and children had suffered in captivity: “You lived in a warped society, without any humanity whatsoever. For three years you lived with people who know nothing of decency, of education, of civilization.”
Days later, Talal posted photos on Facebook of Hanin playing with her siblings in a park, and penned these words:
Good morning
You have returned Hanin and language betrays me
The letters celebrate a wild ibex accosting its hunter
I cannot write anything except I am born again seeing you
Good morning to friends and enemies, you are my brothers
Good morning, Hanin
There was no morning before you or after you.
ABU AZZAM
Spring 2016. Abu Azzam had become a father. He doted on his baby son, wanted to capture and share every moment of his first six months. He would wake him to play. He and his wife, Alaa, were expecting another baby in the summer. The young family still lived in a Turkish border town but changed streets and apartments often, downsizing for financial reasons as much as for security. Reyhanlı, near Bab al-Hawa, was a dangerous place, a back office for rebels, gunrunners, smugglers, and, increasingly, assassins. Personal wars crossed the border, grievances settled with sticky bombs and silenced pistols in Turkey (as well as in Syria). Several of Abu Azzam’s friends, former Farouq men, had been targeted. One survived a shot in the back of the neck in broad daylight outside a busy chicken restaurant on Reyhanlı’s main street. The culprit was never identified.
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