I knew Syria before 2011, before the period Syrians now refer to by many names: the revolution, the war, the foreign conspiracy, the crisis, the ahdass (events). I knew it as a reporter for Western media and as a traveler to the cobbled streets of old Damascus, just an hour-and-a-half drive from my home base of Beirut. After the start of the uprising, I entered Syria clandestinely so many times I lost count. For years, I was either inside Syria or on its periphery, interviewing Syrians before reentering their country, spending no more than a week to ten days a month at home in Lebanon. This book is the product of that intensive on-the-ground reporting. It is born of events I witnessed, some of which I chronicled for news outlets, including Time, Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, Politico, Al Jazeera America, and The New Yorker, and others based on extensive interviews and watching many hours of amateur video, both published and unpublished. I visited most of the locations described in this book to verify information, as well as other towns, villages, and cities across the country I didn’t have space to include. I spoke to many more people than I could possibly reference without crowding the narrative, but every minute of those experiences informs these pages. I make no claim to presenting a comprehensive story of Syria, or even of rebel-held Syria or my reporting within it. In fact, most of my published Syria work, more than 150,000 words of it, is not in this book. This account is but a fraction of the story. After this book was written, I cut a book out of it—about sixty thousand words.
One of my biggest challenges in writing this account was deciding whose stories to tell. Over the years, I’d come to know many Syrians well enough to profile them intimately, but the handful I chose were selected because some played a pivotal role in the revolution’s trajectory, were in important places at key times, had proven themselves exceptionally reliable sources, and/or their paths intersected with others in the book, whether they knew it or not. I interviewed and reinterviewed the main characters over years, as well as people close to them, including their families, members of their communities, their colleagues, friends, and enemies. I am certain some must have thought me dimwitted by the end of it, given my tendency to push repeatedly for details and to return to certain events over and over again. I am grateful for their patience. Where I describe somebody’s thoughts, the person to whom I ascribe the thoughts relayed those sentiments to me.
Some readers may object to my presenting the stories of men like Mohammad, Abu Othman, and Saleh the same way I tell the tale of other characters, such as Ruha and her family. My goal is not to judge, and not to turn characters into caricatures, but to present information about an individual’s motivations, worldview, and actions to help readers understand him or her and arrive at their own conclusions.
Readers may naturally question how I know what I know. The simple answer is, I was there. I speak Arabic and can physically blend in; there was no filter, no buffer, no translation problem—linguistic or cultural—between my sources and me. I spent so much time in northern Syria that fighters who moved from battle to battle often recognized me on various fronts, a fact that helped me gain the access—and trust—of a number of armed groups. Witnessing, however, is one thing—trusting a person’s testimony is another. I believe nothing until I have what I deem a critical mass of information to consider something true. It’s an unemotional skepticism that is central to my work.
Regarding the details of Suleiman’s story, I met Suleiman and his family in Rastan in the summer of 2011 and stayed in contact with him until early 2012, before he disappeared. I spoke to dozens of people in his hometown and in the diaspora who were at the same protests he attended and to others who stayed off the streets, as well as protesters from Talbiseh. I watched countless hours of video (Suleiman’s and others’) from those demonstrations, the taped speeches of mourners after the violence at the Military Security branch, as well as the Orient TV footage from March 15, 2011, that Suleiman viewed in that café in Homs. I met the parents of Hajar al-Khatib, the little girl described by the opposition as the first female child martyr, at their home in Rastan soon after their daughter was killed on her eleventh birthday. The figure for gun ownership in Syria comes from a 2007 study by the Geneva-based Small Arms Survey, and that for broadband Internet subscribers from the International Telecommunication Union, referenced in a 2012 Freedom House fact sheet, Freedom on the Net.
I spent time with all of the members of Rastan’s early tansiqiya. I was on one of those three motorbikes as they swerved through Rastan’s alleyways toward the safe house hiding the defectors, including First Lieutenant Abdel-Razzak Tlass. I stayed in contact with some of the defectors for years afterward. I knew the young protest singer Mohammad Darwish, stood beside him on the balcony of the State Security building as he led chants. I attended Fady Kism’s funeral and visited his mother. The account of Merhi Merhi’s death comes from Suleiman and survivors I interviewed, including Maamoun, as well as the published work of the Violations Documentation Center in Syria (VDC), which noted the killings.
The saga of Suleiman’s arrest and his cycling through the various detention centers is based on his testimony, his prison diaries, and court documents, which he generously shared with me, plus interviews with former detainees (including his cousin, the lawyer Samer Tlass) who were held in the same facilities and/or nabbed by the same intelligence agencies in different parts of the country. That is to say, I spoke to men detained by Air Force Intelligence in Aleppo as well as others captured by Air Force Intelligence in Idlib and Latakia, places Suleiman was not held. Their accounts were remarkably similar across geography and were also consistent with testimony provided to rights groups and documented in reports, including Amnesty International’s Deadly Reprisals (June 14, 2012), Human Rights Watch’s Torture Archipelago (July 3, 2012), and If the Dead Could Speak (December 16, 2015), to name a few. I independently tracked down some of the men Suleiman said were in prison with him, or their families if they were still detained, to corroborate parts of his account. I chose Suleiman in large part because he was a meticulous details man with a knack for remembering dates. I had copies of his prison IDs, his aunt’s video footage of his first moments of freedom, as well as the photos and private video clips he made for his family, detailing his escape to Germany.
Ruha and her extended family generously opened their homes and their hearts to me, allowing me to witness their highs and lows over six tumultuous years. I wasn’t with them during those first raids when Ruha opened the door to security forces, accounts re-created by interviewing every member of her family who was in the house on those two days, but I was present or in direct contact with them for just about every other event thereafter. The figures for homes burned and destroyed during the army’s March 2012 incursion come from a May 2, 2012, Human Rights Watch report called They Burned My Heart. The account of the unexploded canister and the chemical attack on Saraqeb was based on interviews with local activists (including unpublished footage privately shared with me showing one activist hiding the canister) and a December 13, 2013, report by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) entitled United Nations Mission to Investigate Allegations of the Use of Chemical Weapons in the Syrian Arab Republic.
The stories of Abu Azzam, Bandar, and the Free Syrian Army stream of this book are based on extensive time inside Syria, from Homs to Bab al-Hawa, Tal Abyad, Idlib, Aleppo, and Raqqa, plus Turkey, and (in Bandar’s case) Germany. Abu Azzam has been described in previous media interviews as older than is stated in this book, because he was using a fake ID at the time. I have corrected his age in these pages.
I was briefly in Baba Amr in the summer of 2011 but did not meet Abu Azzam until 2012, after he’d become a senior commander in the Farouq Battalions. Over the years, I tracked down dozens of members of the Farouq who were in Baba Amr in those early days (and also spoke to Abdel-Razzak Tlass about that period). I interviewed Abu Azzam’s family members, including his mother, wife, siblings, aunts, and uncles in their homes in eastern Syria, and later in the
diaspora, after many of them fled, as well as Bandar and his family in Raqqa and its surroundings. I saw footage of Bandar’s brother Bassem in Baba Amr, listened to Bassem’s taped recitations of his poetry, spoke to civilians in Baba Amr who knew the pair of poets and others who didn’t, watched many videos from the neighborhood, including images of the visiting Arab League delegation and the women who approached them. I interviewed two of the Farouq’s three founding leaders—Abu Sayyeh and Abu Hashem—as well as a number of their aides. The third founder—the Sheikh Amjad Bitar—declined an interview request.
Saad Hariri’s Future Movement has repeatedly denied Okab Sakr’s role in arming the uprising through the so-called Istanbul Room, claiming Sakr spent 2012 on leave from the political party in Belgium. Back in 2012, I was the first journalist to detail the Istanbul Room’s workings, and frankly could have written an entire book solely about the arming of the uprising (and another about its Islamization). At different times over the past six years, I interviewed three of the four distributors inside the room (the fourth—the SNN cofounder Abulhassan Abazeed—was detained by Syrian security forces in 2012, and his fate is unknown), as well as many of the lower-level middlemen who cycled in and out of the program from different parts of Syria, and several who attended Sakr’s meetings in Turkish hotels whose accounts all matched.
The temperament and plans of the Islamist Firas al-Absi, the man who was ISIS before ISIS, are based on video footage of Absi at Bab al-Hawa, as well as men who knew him, including Abu Azzam, Mohammad, and Saleh, and another Free Syrian Army commander stationed near Bab al-Hawa who also tried to convince Absi to take down the black flag. I visited Abu Azzam in Tal Abyad several times and was with him the day Jabhat al-Nusra tried to assassinate him, as well as in the hotel during that first meeting between the Saudis and the FSA’s Supreme Military Council in May 2013.
I knew the heads of many of the Free Syrian Army’s military councils in northern Syria, as well as senior defectors and civilian revolutionary leaders operating in the area. I am one of the few journalists to have sneaked into the officers’ camp housing the defectors in Apaydın, Turkey, in February 2012. I visited the Joint Command’s General Mithqal Ibtaysh in his headquarters less than a week after the body’s formation, and I spoke to him several times after its disintegration. I had a number of meetings between 2012 and 2016, both in Syria and in Turkey, with the FSA’s General Salim Idris. I interacted with weapons smugglers in various parts of northern Syria, visited IED factories, sat in on meetings with Libyans who traveled to Turkey seeking to arm their Syrian brothers, watched weapons deals being negotiated, battles planned—all of which I’d published in various news outlets but didn’t have space to recount in this book. It all informed my understanding of the arming of the uprising and the challenges faced by the FSA.
Regarding Hazm, I interviewed its leader, Abu Hashem, and a number of its fighters, as well as men from other factions inside the MOM, and mined Hazm’s statements. Although in the book I detail the account of one Hazm intelligence operative, I interviewed two. The Hazm operative I referenced shared copies of his reports with me, information I carefully independently cross-referenced with jihadi contacts on the ground during trips to Syria, without either group’s knowing how I got the information.
Mohammad’s storyline, detailing the role of Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State, was, to put it mildly, difficult to report. The account of Mohammad’s early life, including his incarcerations, was based on his testimony as well as that of his parents, siblings, wife, and in-laws. I visited the village outside Jisr al-Shughour where a young Mohammad watched Abu Ammar being beaten by the mukhabarat. Abu Ammar still lives there. (I also interviewed Abu Ammar’s brother, Abu Hassan, in Antakya, southern Turkey.)
For information about the Islamist-versus-Baath altercations in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I’m indebted to a number of books, principally Raphaël Lefèvre’s Ashes of Hama: The Muslim Brotherhood in Syria (Oxford University Press, 2013) and Lina Khatib’s Islamic Revivalism in Syria: The Rise and Fall of Ba‘thist Secularism (Routledge, 2011). I also sneaked into Hama in mid-2011, interviewed survivors from that period, and was taken to the locations of the alleged decades-old mass graves.
In 2014, I met one of the Salafis from Latakia who served as a facilitator to funnel mujahideen into post-2003 Iraq. He was a friend and contemporary of Mohammad’s mentor, Abu Barra al-Haddad. When I saw the facilitator, he was still fighting in the Latakian countryside. Regarding Sednaya Prison, in addition to the testimonies of Abu Othman and Saleh detailed in this book, I also spoke to other Islamists who had been behind the prison’s “black door” who verified the accounts of the other two men. The various presidential amnesties were posted on the Syrian Arab News Agency’s website. The young man from Daraa accused of writing graffiti on a school wall who walked into Abu Othman’s cell in Palestine Branch now lives in a Gulf state with his family.
The truth about Jisr al-Shughour and the moqadam Hussein Harmoush’s role was revealed to me many years after my reporting of the event. I spoke to Basil al-Masry’s brother back in 2011. Later I hunted—and that’s what it felt like—men who were in the public garden that day to tell me what really happened. I noted Fouad’s account in these pages, but others also admitted the same to me. Some showed me private videos and photos of Syrian government forces killed that day. In 2016, I sneaked into Jisr al-Shughour to see where it all unfolded.
Saleh was one of several of my high-placed contacts within Jabhat al-Nusra, including members of the group’s small governing (or Shura) council who verified some of Saleh’s account. “How on earth did you get that information?” a Shura council member once asked me when I sought him out to confirm a detail. “People are going to start thinking you work for the CIA.” It was a common accusation, sometimes accompanied by (nonviolent) rebel interrogations inside Syria.
I focused on Saleh not only because he was in the inner circle but also because he was fastidious about details. He’d admit what he didn’t know, and his information always panned out. I’d often ask him in real time about news burning up the Twittersphere, such as reports of Jolani’s assassination. Saleh would insist the news was false, and he was always proven correct. Some of his information also jibed with an anonymous Twitter account in Arabic called @wikibaghdady, which purported to reveal some of the Islamic State’s inner workings.
I knew what Camp Bucca looked like because I walked through it in March 2009 and saw where the US military told me it detained “the worst of the worst.” Osama bin Laden’s views about Al-Qaeda’s mistakes and the group’s troubled relationship with its Iraqi affiliate were detailed in the so-called Abbottabad Papers, hundreds of pages of letters recovered from bin Laden’s Abbottabad hideaway in Pakistan after his killing in 2011, and published online in Arabic and English by West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center.
I was the first journalist to interview both a foot soldier in Jabhat al-Nusra (in July 2012) and later an official (in December 2012), and I had vast dealings with many of the group’s members, as well as Islamic State fighters, all of which infused my account of Nusra’s role in the uprising, even if those meetings were not individually recounted here.
I met Talal, the Alawite man whose family was kidnapped from their home in the Latakian countryside, in Beirut, weeks after they were taken. I remained in contact with him as well as with others whose families were in rebel captivity. Their plight was also detailed in an October 10, 2013, Human Rights Watch report titled You Can Still See Their Blood. I knew the Nusra emirs in charge of the detainees’ fate, the FSA unit babysitting them, and I spoke to some of the women and children in detention as well as those who were freed earlier than others. Assad’s comments in 2017 were filmed and uploaded to the Internet. I knew some of the many changing interlocutors on both sides of an issue I had followed closely since the raid in August 2013. Like most things in this book, my access came from being there, and sticking with the story.
I
t is a privilege and a responsibility to be entrusted with another person’s testimony and to verify its truth. The Syrian war, like every war, is about many things, but at its core, it’s about people. The terrible things they see and do or have done to them, bonds forged and broken, the attempts to cling to the normalcy of their old lives and what they think about their new ones. It is dehumanizing, but it is still about three-dimensional human beings. If nothing else, I hope that, in telling these stories, I have at least conveyed that.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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I am deeply indebted to the people whose stories I tell in these pages, as well as the hundreds of other Syrians who shared with me their time, testimony, and experiences, often during some of the worst moments of their lives. I never for a second took any of that for granted. I am forever humbled by the generosity of Syrians who hosted me in their homes, their tents, and their military bases with a hospitality that is as boundless as it is typically Syrian.
How to thank the Syrians who warned me of kidnapping threats? The ones who kept me safe? The many, some now dead, who helped me navigate borders and understand the social, military, and political terrain I entered? I wish I could publicly name and thank you all, but it’s still not safe to do so without endangering some of you. Shukran jazilan, and inshallah your worst days, and Syria’s, are behind you.
I could not have written this book without the generous support of the New America Fellows Program, particularly Director Peter Bergen, and Board Member William Gerrity. The wonderful people at the Carey Institute in upstate New York offered me a residency in a setting so serene and beautiful it mitigated the pain of reopening my notebooks and reliving the story, as I first attempted to write it. Elaina Richardson kindly invited me to the heaven of Yaddo, gifting me a writer’s residency in Truman Capote’s majestic former workspace in the Tower. My friend and agent at Sterling Lord Literistic, Robert Guinsler, believed I had a Syria book in me before I did, and had my back at every crisis. Editor Tom Mayer at Norton is a writer’s dream. He understood and respected my vision for this book and helped make it better. Thank you Tom, Sarah Bolling, Emma Hitchcock, and all the behind-the-scenes staff at Norton, including sharp-eyed copyeditor Kathleen Brandes.
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